Boris Pasternak

The son of a painter and a concert pianist, Pasternak was already established as Russia's foremost living poet when he began Doctor Zhivago in his sixties, deliberately choosing a form more dangerous than verse. He survived the purges partly on Stalin's own unpredictable interest (colleagues who signed denunciations vanished; Pasternak, who mostly refused, did not), but the novel itself proved uncrossable.

Rejected by Soviet publishers, the manuscript was smuggled to Italy and published there in 1957; the Nobel committee's prize the following year triggered a state campaign that forced him to decline it and expelled him from the Writers' Union. He died of lung cancer in 1960, and the unannounced crowds that filled his funeral procession were, for many attendees, a quiet act of protest against the state that had hounded him.