Shakespeare's works and personality were of special interest to the Pasternak family, in particular to Boris Pasternak's father Leonid Osipovich. As Pasternak began writing articles on Shakespeare in 1916, he sent first drafts to his parents, who did not approve of them (the texts have not been preserved). Later, when he took on a reconstruction of Shakespeare's biography for his ‘Notes on Translations from Shakespeare' (1946), Pasternak consciously or unconsciously imparted some traits of his father and his early artistic steps to Shakespeare’s personality and early career.