BORIS PASTERNAK (1890-1960) won the Nobel prize in literature in 1958. He is best known in the West for his novel Doctor Zhivago. MARK RUDMAN is an adjunct professor at NYU. His books include Rider (Wesleyan, 1994), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry for 1994; Realm of Unknowing: Meditations on Art, Suicide, and Other Transformations (Wesleyan, 1995), and The Couple (2001). Rudman also received the Max Hayward Award from the Translation Center at Columbia University for My Sister - Life. BOHDAN BOYCHUK is a prominent Ukranian poet who critiqued and guided Rudman's version of Pasternak.