Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (1957)

A candle burns in a frosted window on a Moscow street, and a young man passing in the snow carries the image away without knowing it will one day become a poem. Boris Pasternak was a poet first, and he wrote his only novel in secret over a decade, certain the Soviet state would never let it be printed; smuggled to Italy, it reached the world he could not. Yuri Zhivago, doctor and poet, is swept through revolution and civil war and forced labor, drawn again and again across the frozen Urals to Lara, in reunions that are always also farewells. What makes the book unbearable is not the history but its refusal to let history erase the private heart: the candle, the snow, the kerosene light, all the small radiances a century meant to extinguish. At the end Zhivago's poems remain, the only thing the cold could not take.