Владимир Савостьянов / ТАСС · Public domain

One of Russia's great twentieth-century poets, who wrote Doctor Zhivago knowing it could not be published at home and let it go abroad anyway. Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, he was forced by the Soviet state to refuse it under threat of permanent exile — the only laureate ever compelled to decline. Born to a Jewish painter and a concert pianist in Moscow, he survived Stalin's terror partly because Stalin, for reasons never explained, personally struck his name from a list.