Phonetic transliteration of Russian Живаго ('Zhivago'):
日 (rì) for 'Zhi-',
瓦 (wǎ) for '-va-',
戈 (gē) for '-go'. Best known as the title character of Boris Pasternak's 1957 novel 《
日瓦戈医生》 (Doctor Zhivago), winner of the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, banned in the Soviet Union until 1988. The David Lean film adaptation (1965) was a similarly massive global hit.
