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^fantasyfan,
I am sorry but i cannot help you with Dr Zhivago. When it was first published, in Italy actually, there was much non-literary attached to Boris Pasternak and his Nobel Prize. All the posh mothers, cousins and oldest sisters of my school chums kept chirping away ... My rebel nature refused to read it. And that's it.
A truly great, grandissimo, Russian book, but so great that:
Argentine author and essayist Jorge Luis Borges once wrote of it,
The music of its style contrasts with the almost ineffable brutality of certain scenes. One of the stories, -- "Salt" -- enjoys a glory seemingly reserved for poems and rarely attained by prose: many people know it by heart.
It is Red Cavallery by Isaak Babel. That is one of the most powerful books that I ever read.
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