Doctor Zhivago

Dr. Yury Zhivago is a poet, philosopher, and physician whose life is disrupted by the war and by his love for Lara, the wife of a revolutionary. 

 

This epic tale about the effects of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath on a bourgeois family was not published in the Soviet Union until 1987. One of the results of its publication in the West was Pasternak's complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 he was compelled to decline it. The book quickly became an international best-seller.