Yuri Zhivago, doctor and poet, lives through revolution and civil war, loving Lara while history tears everything apart. Pasternak wrote this across decades, could not publish it in the Soviet Union, and smuggled the manuscript to the West. The novel won the Nobel Prize; the Soviets forced Pasternak to decline. The prose is lyrical, the history overwhelming, the poetry Zhivago writes woven through the narrative. The novel was published in Russia only after the fall of Communism. The poems survive. The lovers do not. Russia keeps making Zhivagos.