Based on Boris Pasternak's Nobel Prize-winning novel about the Russian Revolution, the film is both a vast panorama of a nation convulsed by war and the intimate drama of one man's struggle to survive. That man is Zhivago - poet and surgeon, husband and lover - whose war-disrupted life touches and alters the lives of many, including Tonya, the gentle woman he marries, and Lara, the woman he cannot forget.