and then in Italian translation. In 1958 Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was forced to renounce the award after intense pressure from the Soviet Union. His last book of poetry was called When the Weather Clears and was published in 1960 while written throughout the 1950's.
             In 1921, Boris Pasternak's family migrated to Germany. Pasternak married Evgeniia Vladimirovna Lourie in 1922 and had a son with her but the marriage ended. In 1934, he remarried to a woman named Zinaida Nikolaevna Neigauz. Pasternak loved his country even though he saw its faults. What he did not like was the bloody regime of Stalin. He even campaigned to the Russian government to be able to stay in Russia. While his friend and fellow poet Mandelstam was sent to die in the Far East Gulag he received a phone call from Stalin who asked him what kind of poet he was. Stalin ordered that Pasternak should be left alone because he was no threat. He lived out the remainder of his life in a writer's colony that was about twenty miles from Moscow. In May of 1960 he died of lung cancer. In 1989 Pasternak's son accepted his father's Nobel Prize in a ceremony in Stockholm.
             Boris Pasternak's novel is about a man named Yurii Zhivago and his life's struggle through love life and war. It begins with Yurii, being called Yura, as a small boy in 1901. His father is dead and his mother has just died. He is at his mother's funeral and weeps upon her grave. His uncle, called Kolya, comes to take him away. Yura recalls a time when the name Zhivago was on everything and if you said the name Zhivago it was as if you had said magic words. But that had all changed and now his family was poor.
             Misha Gordon, who will become one of Zhivago's friends, is on a train traveling to Moscow when the train is delayed because a man has commit suicide. Misha is rather disturbed by this because the man...