Doctor Zhivago

Doctor Zhivago is a novel by Russian poet, author and composer Boris Pasternak, first published in 1957 in Italy. The novel is named after its protagonist, Yuri Zhivago, a physician and poet, and takes place between the Russian Revolution of 1905 and World War II. Owing to the author's critical stance on the October Revolution, the novel was refused publication in the USSR; at the instigation of Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, the manuscript was smuggled to Milan and published in 1957. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature the following year, an event that embarrassed and enraged the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.