The book narrates the adventurous life of a doctor and poet, Yuri Andreevich Zhivago, set against the backdrop of the civil war fought between the Whites and the Reds following the October Revolution. Zhivago is torn between his love for two women: he is married to his cousin Tonya and consumed by passion for the Red Cross nurse Lara Antipov. Meetings, bitter separations, and reunions follow until the tragic conclusion. In the Soviet Union at the time, the novel, which contradicted the heroic facade promoted by the communist regime, was initially rejected in early 1956 by the Moscow magazine Novy Mir for ideological reasons. The censorship's hostility towards the author, deemed "out of line," a reactionary, persisted, and the work was only published in the Soviet Union in 1988. The work had its world premiere in Italy on November 15, 1957, by Feltrinelli, which secured it by beating competition from American and French publishers, and it immediately became a global success (31 editions were released in just one year). The only novel written by Pasternak earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, a few years before his death. He couldn't accept it due to Khrushchev's opposition, and he had to send a plea for clemency, as he was accused of treason, excluded from the Union of Writers, threatened with expulsion from the USSR, and stripped of his citizenship. In 1965, a film adaptation of the same name was made, winning 5 Oscars. "Zhivago" is the scientific transliteration of the Russian name, as it also appears on the book's cover. In written Italian, the approximate phonetic transcription "Zivago" is usually used, which is also the form that appears on some movie posters' titles.
