Yuri Zhivago, doctor and poet, lives and loves during the first three decades of 20th-century Russia.

Traces the life of surgeon-poet Yury Zhivago before and during the Russian Revolution. Married to an upper-class girl who is devoted to him, yet he finds himself in love with an unfortunate woman who becomes his muse. Zhivago becomes torn between fidelity and passion. Sympathetic with the Bolshevik revolution, but shaken by the wars and purges, he struggles to retain his individualism as a humanist amid the spirit of collectivism.