In this personal memoir of his father, the author draws extensively on previously unpublished correspondence from Pasternak to his sisters in England and other friends inside Russia. It also includes a number of unpublished poems and early drafts. The author lives in Moscow. Describing the early years when Pasternak was forced to attend the 1934 Paris writers' conference, his refusal to sign a denunciation of Marshal Tukhachevsky in 1937, the incarceration of his mistress, Olga Ivinskaya, the book covers the protracted negotiations over the publication of Doctor Zhivago and concludes with an evocative account of the writer's last three years of life.