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Back in 1958, Boris Pasternak became only the second author (later Jean-Paul Sartre) to ever refuse the Nobel Prize for Literature. The thing is that while Sartre turned down the prize for philosophical reasons, Pasternak turned it down because the Soviet government would have given him a severe trouble if he'd dared to accept it.

Wait, why?

It was only one year before, in 1957, that Pasternak published his masterpiece Doctor Zhivago. He wrote the book in Russian, but since the book criticized Communism, the Soviets banned it from publication. It was only after Pasternak smuggled a copy from the nation that he was able to publish the book in Italian. When he was awarded the Nobel Prize the next year, he both humiliated and enraged the rulers of his home country.

Now to be fair, there's a lot more to Doctor Zhivago compared to a critique of Communism. Much like George Orwell's Animal Farm, Pasternak's book admits that the capitalist system that existed before Communism was totally awful and almost equally as bad as Communism turned out to be.

But the thing about Communism that never sits well with Pasternak's main character, Yuri Zhivago, is the manner that this manner of thinking completely dismisses and condemns the power of the individual human being to think for him- or herself. And to get a great writer like Pasternak, anything that condemns the power of the individual mind is the enemy of all that is good and beautiful in the world.

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