This wonderful novel is set on both sides of the Iron Curtain in the 1950's. The American half of the story is about the very bright young women who typed for the CIA at a time when, regardless of education, that was what women did. One actually makes it out of the typing pool to become a courier and eventually, a foreign agent. The more interesting half of the story is set in Russia and features Boris Pasternak, and Olga Ivinskaya, his inspiration for Lara. Pasternak's privileged life as a poet was always on the edge of disaster because it was generally known that he didn't really toe the communist line. Indeed at one point, they sent Olga to the Gulag as a warning to him. His affair with Olga ran for decades and she was an integral partner in the long term writing of Dr. Zhivago. The CIA tie in is that after the novel was published, the CIA was instrumental in getting Russian copies of the book into the USSR. Pasternak was awarded the Nobel, but suffered from a vicious counterattack by the Soviet establishment. The book was not released in the USSR until 1988.
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