Overview: First published in Italy in 1957 amidst international controversy, Doctor Zhivago is the story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Here is a masterful chronicle of its outbreak and the consequences: army revolts, irrational killings, starvation, epidemics, Communist Party inquisitions. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself...

A tale inspired by the life of twentieth-century Russian poet Osip Mandelstam recounts his criticism of the Stalin regime, the verbal distribution of his famous "Stalin Epigram" that led to his arrest, and his exile and death in a Siberian transit camp.