Heroes of Doctor Zhivago. Pasternak's novel "Doctor Zhivago": analysis of the work

"Doctor Zhivago" is a novel by Boris Pasternak. "Doctor Zhivago" was created over ten years, from 1955 to 1955, and is the pinnacle of his work as a prose writer. The novel is accompanied by poems by the protagonist - Yuri Andreevich Zhivago.

Drawing a wide canvas of the life of the Russian intelligentsia against the backdrop of a dramatic period from the beginning of the century to the Great Patriotic War, through the prism of the biography of the doctor-poet, the book touches on the mystery of life and death, the problems of Russian history, the intelligentsia and the revolution, Christianity, and Jewry.

The book was sharply negatively received by the Soviet official literary environment and rejected from publication due to the author's ambiguous position in relation to the October Revolution of 1917 and the subsequent life of the country.

Main characters

• Yuri Andreevich Zhivago - doctor, protagonist of the novel
• Antonina Alexandrovna Zhivago (Gromeko) - Yuri's wife
• Larisa Fyodorovna Antipova (Guichard) - Antipov's wife
• Pavel Pavlovich Antipov (Strelnikov) - Lara's husband, revolutionary commissar
• Alexander Alexandrovich and Anna Ivanovna Gromeko - Antonina's parents
• Evgraf Andreevich Zhivago - major general, half-brother of Yuri
• Nikolai Nikolaevich Vedenyapin - uncle of Yuri Andreevich
• Victor Ippolitovich Komarovsky - Moscow lawyer
• Katenka Antipova - daughter of Larisa
• Mikhail Gordon and Innokenty Dudorov - Yuri's classmates at the gymnasium
• Osip Gimazetdinovich Galliulin - white general
• Anfim Efimovich Samdevyatov - lawyer, Bolshevik
• Livery Averkievich Mikulitsyn (Comrade Lesnykh) - Leader of the Forest Brothers
• Marina - third common-law wife of Yuri
• Kipriyan Savelyevich Tiverzin and Pavel Ferapontovich Antipov - workers of the Brest railway, political prisoners
• Maria Nikolaevna Zhivago (Vedenyapina) - Yuri's mother
• Prov Afanasyevich Sokolov - acolyte
• Shura Schlesinger - friend of Antonina Alexandrovna
• Marfa Gavrilovna Tiverzina - savely's wife

Plot

The protagonist of the novel, Yuri Zhivago, appears to the reader as a little boy on the first pages of the work describing the funeral of his mother: “We walked and walked and sang“ Eternal Memory ”...”. Yura is the descendant of a wealthy family who made a fortune in industrial, commercial and banking operations. The marriage of the parents was not happy: the father left the family before the death of the mother.

Orphaned Yura will be given shelter for a while by his uncle who lives in the south of Russia. Then numerous relatives and friends will send him to Moscow, where he will be adopted as a native into the family of Alexander and Anna Gromeko.

The exclusivity of Yuri becomes apparent quite early - even as a young man, he manifests himself as a talented poet. But at the same time, he decides to follow in the footsteps of his foster father Alexander Gromeko and enters the medical department of the university, where he also proves himself as a talented doctor. The first love, and later the wife of Yuri Zhivago, is the daughter of his benefactors - Tonya Gromeko.

Yuri and Tony had two children, but then fate separated them forever, and the doctor never saw his youngest daughter, who was born after the separation.

At the beginning of the novel, new faces constantly appear before the reader. All of them will be connected into a single ball by the further course of the story. One of them is Larisa, the slave of the elderly lawyer Komarovsky, who is trying with all her might and cannot escape from the captivity of his "protection". Lara has a childhood friend - Pavel Antipov, who will later become her husband, and Lara will see her salvation in him. Having married, he and Antipov cannot find their happiness, Pavel will leave his family and go to the front of the First World War. Subsequently, he would become a formidable revolutionary commissar, changing his last name to Strelnikov. At the end of the Civil War, he plans to reunite with his family, but this wish will never come true.

Fate will bring Yuri Zhivago and Lara together in different ways in the provincial Yuryatin-on-Rynva (a fictional city in the Urals, the prototype of which was Perm), where they vainly seek refuge from the revolution that destroys everything and everything. Yuri and Larisa will meet and fall in love with each other. But soon poverty, hunger and repression will separate both the family of Doctor Zhivago and Larina's family. For more than two years, Zhivago would disappear in Siberia, serving as a military doctor as a prisoner of the Red partisans. Having escaped, he will walk back to the Urals - to Yuriatin, where he will meet Lara again. His wife Tonya, together with the children and Yuri's father-in-law, while in Moscow, writes about the imminent forced expulsion abroad. Hoping to wait out the winter and the horrors of the Yuryatinsky Revolutionary Military Council, Yuri and Lara take refuge in the abandoned estate of Varykino. Soon an unexpected guest arrives - Komarovsky, who received an invitation to head the Ministry of Justice in the Far Eastern Republic, proclaimed on the territory of Transbaikalia and the Russian Far East. He persuades Yuri Andreevich to let Lara and her daughter go east with him, promising to send them abroad. Yuri Andreevich agrees, realizing that he will never see them again.

Gradually, he begins to go crazy with loneliness. Soon Lara's husband, Pavel Antipov (Strelnikov), comes to Varykino. Degraded and wandering across the expanses of Siberia, he tells Yuri Andreyevich about his participation in the revolution, about Lenin, about the ideals of Soviet power, but, having learned from Yuri Andreyevich that Lara has loved and loves him all this time, he understands how bitterly he was mistaken. Strelnikov commits suicide with a shot from a rifle. After Strelnikov's suicide, the doctor returns to Moscow in the hope of fighting for his future life. There he meets his last woman - Marina, the daughter of the former (still under Tsarist Russia) Zhivagovsky janitor Markel. In a civil marriage with Marina, they have two girls. Yuri gradually descends, abandons his scientific and literary activities, and, even realizing his fall, cannot do anything about it. One morning, on his way to work, he becomes ill on the tram and dies of a heart attack in the center of Moscow. His half-brother Evgraf and Lara come to say goodbye to his coffin, who will go missing soon after.

The beginning of work on the novel coincided with Pasternak's completion of the translation of Shakespeare's Hamlet. (February 1946 dates from the first version of the poem "Hamlet", which opens the "Notebook of Yuri Zhivago").

Prototype of Doctor Zhivago

Olga Ivinskaya testifies that the very name "Zhivago" arose from Pasternak, when he accidentally "stumbled upon a round cast-iron tile with the" autograph "of the manufacturer -" Zhivago "... and decided that let him be like this, unknown, not that from a merchant, not that from a semi-intellectual milieu; this man will be his literary hero."

About the prototype of Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak himself reports the following:

“I am currently writing a long novel in prose about a man who constitutes a kind of resultant between Blok and me (and Mayakovsky and Yesenin, perhaps). He will die in 1929. What remains of him is a book of poems, which forms one of the chapters of the second part. The time embraced by the novel is 1903-1945. In spirit, this is something between the Karamazovs and Wilhelm Meister.

Publication history

In the spring of 1956, B. L. Pasternak offered the manuscript of the newly completed novel Doctor Zhivago to two leading literary and artistic magazines Novy Mir and Znamya and the almanac Literaturnaya Moskva.

In the summer of 1956, Pasternak, not hoping for an early publication of the novel in the USSR, gave a copy of the manuscript to the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli through the journalist Sergio D'Angelo.

In September 1956, Pasternak received a reply from Novy Mir magazine:

In August 1957, Pasternak told the Italian Slavist Vittorio Strada how he had recently been forced to sign a telegram under pressure from government officials to stop the Italian publication. He asked to convey to D. Feltrinelli a request not to take into account new "bans" on his part on the publication of the novel, "so that the book comes out at all costs".

On November 23, 1957, the novel was published in Milan by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli. According to Ivan Tolstoy, the publication was published with the assistance of the US CIA.

On October 25, 1958, the editors of the journal Novy Mir asked Literaturnaya Gazeta to publish a letter sent in September 1956 by members of the then editorial board of the journal personally to B. L. Pasternak regarding the manuscript of his novel Doctor Zhivago:

In February 1977, Konstantin Simonov, in an open letter to the German writer A. Andersch, wrote that in connection with the political controversy that had arisen:

In the USSR, the novel was distributed in samizdat for three decades and was published only during the “perestroika” period.

Nobel Prize

On October 23, 1958, Boris Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize with the wording "for significant achievements in modern lyric poetry, as well as for continuing the traditions of the great Russian epic novel." The authorities of the USSR, headed by N. S. Khrushchev, perceived this event with indignation, since they considered the novel to be anti-Soviet. Due to the persecution that unfolded in the USSR, Pasternak was forced to refuse to receive the award. Only on December 9, 1989, the Nobel diploma and medal were awarded in Stockholm to the son of the writer Yevgeny Pasternak.

Because this man overcame what all the other writers in the Soviet Union could not overcome. For example, Andrei Sinyavsky sent his manuscripts to the West under the pseudonym Abram Tertz. In the USSR in 1958 there was only one person who, raising his visor, said: “I am Boris Pasternak, I am the author of the novel Doctor Zhivago. And I want it to come out in the form in which it was created. And this man was awarded the Nobel Prize. I believe that this highest award was given to the most correct person at that time on Earth.

Bullying

The persecution of Pasternak because of the novel "Doctor Zhivago" became one of the reasons for his serious illness and premature death in. The persecution began immediately after the Nobel Prize was awarded to the novel at the end of October 1958. The tone was set by Nikita Khrushchev, who, in the circle of party and state officials, said very rudely about Pasternak: “Even a pig does not shit where it eats.” Soon, "pig" analogies, at the direction of Khrushchev, were used in a report dedicated to the 40th anniversary of the Komsomol, the first secretary of the Komsomol Central Committee Vladimir Semichastny. In a TASS statement dated November 2, 1958, it was stated that in "his anti-Soviet essay, Pasternak slandered the social system and the people." The head of the department of culture of the Central Committee of the party D. A. Polikarpov became the direct coordinator of public and newspaper persecution. The fact that the book was published abroad was presented by the authorities as a betrayal and anti-Soviet, while the condemnation of the book by the “working people” was presented as a manifestation of universal solidarity with the authorities. In a resolution of the Union of Writers of October 28, 1958, Pasternak was called a narcissistic aesthete and decadent, a slanderer and a traitor. Lev Oshanin accused Pasternak of cosmopolitanism, Boris Polevoy called him "literary Vlasov", Vera Inber persuaded the joint venture to apply to the government with a request to deprive Pasternak of Soviet citizenship. Then Pasternak was “exposed” for several months in a row in major newspapers such as Pravda and Izvestia, magazines, on radio and television, forcing him to refuse the Nobel Prize awarded to him. His novel, which no one read in the USSR, was condemned at rallies organized by the authorities during the working day in institutes, ministries, factories, factories, and collective farms. Speakers called Pasternak - a slanderer, a traitor, a renegade of society; offered to judge and expel from the country. Collective letters were published in newspapers, read on the radio. Both people who had nothing to do with literature (they were weavers, collective farmers, workers) and professional writers were involved as accusers. So, Sergei Mikhalkov wrote a fable about "a certain cereal, which was called parsnips." Later, the campaign to defame Pasternak received the capacious sarcastic title “I didn’t read it, but I condemn it! ". These words often figured in the speeches of public prosecutors, many of whom did not take books at all. The persecution, which had declined at one time, intensified again after the publication on February 11, 1959 in the British Daily Mail newspaper of Pasternak's poem "The Nobel Prize" with a commentary by correspondent Anthony Brown about the ostracism of the Nobel laureate in his homeland.

The publication of the novel and the awarding of the Nobel Prize to the author led, in addition to persecution, to the exclusion of Pasternak from the Writers' Union of the USSR (posthumously reinstated in). The Moscow organization of the Union of Writers of the USSR, following the Board of the Union of Writers, demanded the expulsion of Pasternak from the Soviet Union and the deprivation of his Soviet citizenship. In 1960, Alexander Galich wrote a poem on the death of Pasternak, which contains the following lines:

We will not forget this laughter, And this boredom! We will remember by name everyone who raised their hand!

Among the writers who demanded the expulsion of Pasternak from the USSR were L. I. Oshanin, A. I. Bezymensky, B. A. Slutsky, S. A. Baruzdin, B. N. Polevoy, K. M. Simonov and many others. Publicly no one raised his voice in defense of Pasternak at that moment. However, they refused to participate in the persecution and sympathized with the disgraced poet from the writers of the older generation - Veniamin Kaverin and Vsevolod Ivanov, from the young writers - Andrei Voznesensky, Evgeny Yevtushenko, Bella Akhmadulina, Bulat Okudzhava.

• It is widely believed that the prototype of the city of Yuriatin from " Doctor Zhivago» is Perm.

  “Fifty years ago, at the end of 1957, the first edition of Doctor Zhivago came out in Milan. In Perm, on this occasion, the Yuryatin Foundation even issued a wall calendar “Zhivago Time”, and in it there is an annual list of anniversary events.” (see Conversation about life and death. To the 50th anniversary of "Doctor Zhivago").

Pasternak spent the winter of 1916 in the Urals, in the village of Vsevolodo-Vilva, Perm province, accepting an invitation to work in the office of the manager of the Vsevolodo-Vilvensky chemical plants B. I. Zbarsky as an assistant for business correspondence and trade and financial reporting. In the same year, the poet visited the Berezniki soda plant on the Kama. In a letter to S.P. Bobrov dated June 24, 1916, Boris calls the soda plant "Lubimov, Solvay and K" and the European-style settlement attached to it "a small industrial Belgium."

• E. G. Kazakevich, after reading the manuscript, stated: “It turns out, judging by the novel, the October Revolution is a misunderstanding and it was better not to do it”, K. M. Simonov, editor-in-chief of Novy Mir, also reacted by refusing to publish the novel: "You can't give a tribune to Pasternak!"

• The French edition of the novel (Gallimard,) was illustrated by the Russian artist and animator Alexander Alekseev (-) using the “needle screen” technique he developed.

Screen adaptations

dramatizations

B. Pasternak's novel "Doctor Zhivago" is often called one of the most complex works in the writer's work. This concerns the features of displaying real events (the first and October revolutions, the world and civil wars), understanding his ideas, the characteristics of the characters, the name of the main of which is Doctor Zhivago.

About the role of the Russian intelligentsia in the events of the beginning of the 20th century, however, is as difficult as its fate.

creative history

The first concept of the novel dates back to the 17-18 years, but Pasternak began serious work only after almost two decades. 1955 marks the end of the novel, followed by publication in Italy and the award of the Nobel Prize, which the Soviet authorities forced the disgraced writer to refuse. And only in 1988 - the novel was first published in the homeland.

The name of the novel changed several times: "The candle burned" - the name of one of the poems of the protagonist, "There will be no death", "Innokenty Dudorov". As a reflection of one of the aspects of the author's intention - "Boys and Girls". They appear on the first pages of the novel, grow up, pass through themselves those events, witnesses and participants of which they are. The teenage perception of the world is preserved in adult life, which is proved by the thoughts, actions of the characters and their analysis.

Doctor Zhivago - Pasternak was attentive to the choice of name - that is the name of the main character. First there was Patrick Zhivult. Yuri - most likely, George the victorious. The surname Zhivago is most often associated with the image of Christ: "You are the son of the living God (a form of the genitive case in the Old Russian language)." In this regard, the idea of ​​sacrifice and resurrection arises in the novel, a red thread running through the entire work.

Image of Zhivago

The writer focuses on the historical events of the first and second decades of the 20th century and their analysis. Doctor Zhivago - Pasternak depicts his whole life - in 1903 loses his mother and finds himself under the care of his uncle. While they are going to Moscow, the boy's father, who left his family even earlier, dies. Yura lives next to his uncle in an atmosphere of freedom and the absence of any prejudices. He studies, grows up, marries a girl whom he has known since childhood, receives and begins to do his favorite job. And he also awakens an interest in poetry - he begins to write poetry - and philosophy. And suddenly the usual and well-established life collapses. The year is 1914, and even more terrible events follow it. The reader sees them through the prism of the views of the protagonist and their analysis.

Doctor Zhivago, just like his comrades, reacts vividly to everything that happens. He goes to the front, where much seems to him meaningless and unnecessary. Returning, he becomes a witness of how power passes to the Bolsheviks. At first, the hero perceives everything with delight: in his view, the revolution is a "magnificent surgery", which symbolizes life itself, unpredictable and spontaneous. However, over time comes a rethinking of what happened. It is impossible to make people happy apart from their desire, it is criminal and, at least, absurd - Dr. Zhivago comes to such conclusions. Analysis of the work leads to the idea that a person, whether he wants it or not, is drawn into Pasternak's Hero in this case, he practically goes with the flow, not openly protesting, but not unconditionally accepting the new power. This is what the author most often reproached.

During the civil war, Yuri Zhivago ends up in a partisan detachment, from where he escapes, returns to Moscow, and tries to live under the new government. But he cannot work as before - this would mean adapting to the conditions that have arisen, and this is contrary to his nature. What remains is creativity, in which the main thing is the proclamation of the eternity of life. This will be shown by the hero's poems and their analysis.

Doctor Zhivago, thus, expresses the position of that part of the intelligentsia, which was apprehensive about the coup that took place in 1917 as a way to artificially and establish new orders that were initially alien to any humanistic idea.

Death of a hero

Suffocating in new conditions, which his essence does not accept, Zhivago gradually loses interest in life and spiritual strength, in the opinion of many, even degrades. Death overtakes him unexpectedly: in a stuffy tram, there is no way for Yuri, who feels unwell, to get out of it. But the hero does not disappear from the pages of the novel: he continues to live in his poems, as evidenced by their analysis. Doctor Zhivago and his soul become immortal thanks to the great power of art.

Symbols in the novel

The work has a circular composition: it begins with a scene describing the mother's funeral, and ends with his death. Thus, the pages tell about the fate of a whole generation, represented mainly by Yuri Zhivago, and emphasize the uniqueness of human life in general. The appearance of a candle is symbolic (for example, a young hero sees it in the window), personifying life. Or blizzards and snowfall as a harbinger of adversity and death.

There are symbolic images in the poetic diary of the hero, for example, in the poem "Fairy Tale". Here, the "corpse of a dragon" - a snake injured in a duel with a rider - personifies a fabulous dream that has turned into eternity, as imperishable as the soul of the author himself.

Poetry collection

"Poems of Yuri Zhivago" - 25 in total - were written by Pasternak during the period of work on the novel and form one whole with him. At the center of them is a person who has fallen into the wheel of history and faces a difficult moral choice.

The cycle opens with Hamlet. Doctor Zhivago - analysis shows that the poem is a reflection of his inner world - appeals to the Almighty with a request to alleviate the fate assigned to him. But not because he is afraid - the hero is ready to fight for freedom in the kingdom of cruelty and violence that surrounds him. This work is about the famous hero of Shakespeare, who is facing a difficult one, and about the cruel fate of Jesus. But the main thing is a poem about a person who does not tolerate evil and violence and perceives what is happening around as a tragedy.

The poetic entries in the diary correlate with various stages of life and emotional experiences of Zhivago. For example, an analysis of Dr. Zhivago's poem "Winter Night". The antithesis on which the work is built helps to show the confusion and mental anguish of the lyrical hero, who is trying to determine what is good and evil. The hostile world in his mind is destroyed thanks to the warmth and light of a burning candle, symbolizing the quivering fire of love and home comfort.

Meaning of the novel

Once "... waking up, we ... will not return the lost memory" - this thought of B. Pasternak, expressed on the pages of the novel, sounds like a warning and a prophecy. The coup, accompanied by bloodshed and cruelty, caused the loss of the commandments of humanism. This is confirmed by subsequent events in the country and their analysis. Doctor Zhivago is different in that Boris Pasternak gives his own understanding of history without imposing it on the reader. As a result, everyone gets the opportunity to see events in their own way and, as it were, becomes its co-author.

The meaning of the epilogue

Description of the death of the protagonist - this is not the end. The action of the novel briefly shifts to the early forties, when half-brother Zhivago meets Tatyana, the daughter of Yuri and Lara, who works as a nurse, in the war. She, unfortunately, does not possess any of those spiritual qualities that were characteristic of her parents, which is shown by the analysis of the episode. "Doctor Zhivago", thus, denotes the problem of the spiritual and moral impoverishment of society as a result of the changes that have taken place in the country, which is opposed by the hero's immortality in his poetic diary - the final part of the work.

After the death of his mother, Maria Nikolaevna, the fate of ten-year-old Yura Zhivago is dealt with by his uncle, Nikolai Nikolaevich Vedenyapin. The boy's father, having squandered the family's millionth fortune, left them before his mother's death, and subsequently committed suicide by jumping off the train. An eyewitness to his suicide is 11-year-old Misha Gordon, who was traveling with his father on the same train. Yura is extremely sensitive to the death of his mother; his uncle, a priest robbed of his own free will, comforts him with conversations about God.

Yura spends the first time at the Kologrivov estate. Here he meets 14-year-old Nika (Innokenty) Dudorov, the son of a terrorist convict and an eccentric Georgian beauty.

The widow of a Belgian engineer, Amalia Karlovna Guichard, who came from the Urals, is settling in Moscow. She has two children - the eldest daughter Larisa and son Rodion, Rodya. Amalia becomes the mistress of the lawyer Komarovsky, a friend of her late husband. Soon the lawyer begins to show unambiguous signs of attention to pretty Lara, and later seduces her. Unexpectedly for himself, he discovers that he has a real feeling for the girl and seeks to arrange her life. Lara is also courted by Nika Dudorov, a friend of her classmate Nadya Kologrivova, but he does not arouse her interest due to the similarity of characters.

On the Brest railway, passing near Guichard's house, a strike, organized by the workers' committee, begins. One of the organizers, road foreman Pavel Ferapontovich Antipov, is arrested. His son Pasha, a student of a real school, is taken in by the family of the machinist Kipriyan Tiverzin. Pasha, through his neighbor Olga Demina, meets Lara, falls in love with her and literally idolizes the girl. Lara, on the other hand, feels much older than him psychologically and does not have reciprocal feelings for him.

Thanks to his uncle, Yura Zhivago settled in Moscow, in the family of his uncle's friend, Professor Alexander Alexandrovich Gromeko. Yura became very close friends with the professor's daughter, Tonya, and classmate Misha Gordon. Music lovers, Gromeko often arranged evenings with guest musicians. On one of these evenings, the cellist Tyszkiewicz is urgently summoned to the Montenegrin Hotel, where the Guichard family, frightened by the unrest in the city, has moved for a while. Alexander Alexandrovich, Yura and Misha, who went with him, find Amalia Karlovna trying to poison herself and Komarovsky helping her. In the room, Yura sees Lara for the first time - he is struck by the beauty of a sixteen-year-old girl at first sight. Misha tells his friend that Komarovsky is the same person who pushed his father to commit suicide.

Lara, seeking to end her dependence on Komarovsky, settles with the Kologrivovs, becoming the tutor of their youngest daughter, Lipa. She repays the card debt of her younger brother thanks to the money borrowed from the owners, but she suffers because of the inability to give them the money. The girl decides to ask Komarovsky for money, but just in case she takes with her the revolver taken from Rody.

In the autumn of 1911, Anna Ivanovna Gromeko, Tony's mother, falls seriously ill. The grown-up triumvirate of friends graduates from the university: Tonya - the faculty of law, Misha - philological, and Yura - medical. Yuri Zhivago is fond of writing poetry, although he does not perceive writing as a profession. He also learns about the existence of a half-brother Evgraf living in Omsk and refuses part of the inheritance in his favor.

Yura impromptu reads a speech about the resurrection of the soul to Anna Ivanovna, who feels worse and worse. Under his calm story, the woman falls asleep, and after waking up she feels better. She convinces Yura and Tonya to go to the Sventitsky Christmas tree, and before they leave, she unexpectedly blesses them, saying that they are destined for each other and should get married in the event of her death. Going to the Christmas tree, young people drive along Kamergersky Lane. When looking at one of the windows, in which one can see the light of a candle, Yuri comes up with the lines: “The candle was burning on the table, the candle was burning.” Outside this window, Larisa Guichard and Pavel Antipov are talking tensely at this time - the girl tells Pasha that if he loves her, they should immediately get married.

After the conversation, Lara goes to the Sventitskys, where she shoots Komarovsky, who was playing cards, but, having missed, hits another person. Returning home, Yura and Tonya learn about the death of Anna Ivanovna. Through the efforts of Komarovsky, Lara avoids trial, but because of the shock she experienced, the girl came down with a nervous fever. After recovering, Lara, having married Pavel, leaves with him to the Urals, to Yuryatin. Immediately after the wedding, the young people talked until dawn, and Lara told her husband about her difficult relationship with Komarovsky. In Yuryatin, Larisa teaches at the gymnasium and enjoys her three-year-old daughter Katenka, while Pavel teaches history and Latin. However, doubting his wife's love, Pavel, after completing officer courses, goes to the front, where he is captured in one of the battles. Larisa leaves her little daughter in the care of Lipa, and herself, having settled down as a sister in an ambulance train, goes to the front in search of her husband.

Yura and Tonya are getting married, their son Alexander is born. In the autumn of 1915, Yuri was mobilized to the front as a doctor. There, the doctor witnesses a horrific picture of the decay of the army, mass desertion, anarchy. In the Melyuzeev hospital, fate brings the wounded Yuri to the sister of mercy Lara, who works there. He confesses his feelings to her.

Returning to Moscow in the summer of 1917, Zhivago finds ruin here as well; he feels loneliness, and what he sees makes him change his attitude to the surrounding reality. He works in a hospital, writes a diary, but suddenly falls ill with typhus. Poverty and devastation force Yuri and Tonya to leave for the Urals, where not far from Yuriatin was the former estate of the manufacturer Kruger, Tony's grandfather. In Varykino, they are slowly getting used to the new place, equipping their lives in anticipation of a second child. Visiting Yuriatin for work, Zhivago accidentally meets Lara, Larisa Fyodorovna Antipova. From her, he learns that the red commander Strelnikov, who terrifies all the surroundings, is her husband, Pavel Antipov. He managed to escape from captivity, changed his surname, but does not maintain any relationship with his family. For several months, Yuri secretly meets with Lara, torn between love for Tonya and passion for Lara. He decides to confess his deception to his wife and not to meet with Lara anymore. However, on the way home, he was captured by partisans from the detachment of Livery Mikulitsyn. Not sharing their views, the doctor provides medical care to the wounded and sick. Two years later, Yuri managed to escape.

Having reached Yuryatin, captured by the Reds, the hungry and weakened Yuri collapsed from the hardships he had endured. Larisa takes care of him throughout his illness. After the amendment, Zhivago got a job in his specialty, but his position was very precarious: he was criticized for his intuition in diagnosing diseases and was considered a socially alien element. Yuri receives a letter from Tony, which came to him five months after it was sent. His wife informs him that her father, Professor Gromeko, and her, together with two children (she gave birth to a daughter, Masha), are being sent abroad.

Komarovsky, unexpectedly appearing in the city, promises his patronage to Lara and Yuri, offering to go with him to the Far East. However, Zhivago resolutely rejects this proposal. Lara and Yuri take refuge in Varykino, abandoned by the inhabitants. One day, Komarovsky comes to them with disturbing news that Strelnikov has been shot, and they are in mortal danger. Zhivago sends the pregnant Lara and Katya with Komarovsky, while he himself remains in Varykino.

Left alone in a completely deserted village, Yuri Andreevich simply went crazy, drank, splashed out his feelings for Lara on paper. One evening, on the threshold of his house, he saw a man. It was Strelnikov. The men talked all night long - about the revolution and about Lara. In the morning, while the doctor was still sleeping, Strelnikov shot himself.
After burying him, Zhivago heads for Moscow, covering most of the way on foot. Thin, wild and overgrown Zhivago settles in a fenced-off corner in the apartment of the Sventitskys. The daughter of the former janitor Markel Marina helps him with the housework. Over time, they have two daughters - Capa and Klava, sometimes Tonya sends them letters.

The doctor is gradually losing his professional skills, but sometimes he writes thin books. Unexpectedly, on one of the summer evenings, Yuri Andreevich does not appear at home - he sends Marina a letter in which he says that he wants to live alone for some time and asks not to look for him.

Without knowing it himself, Yuri Andreevich rents the same room in Kamergersky Lane, in the window of which he saw a burning candle many years ago. Again, brother Evgraf, who has arisen from nowhere, helps Yuri with money, gets him a job at the Botkin hospital.

On the way to work on a stuffy August day in 1929, Yuri Andreevich has a heart attack. Leaving the tram car, he dies. Many people gather to say goodbye to him. Among them was Larisa Feodorovna, who accidentally entered the apartment of her first husband. A few days later, the woman disappeared without a trace: she left the house, and no one else saw her. She may have been arrested.

Many years later, in 1943, Major General Evgraf Zhivago recognizes the linenist Tanya Bezcheredova as the daughter of Yuri and Larisa. It turned out that before fleeing to Mongolia, Lara left the baby at one of the railway sidings. The girl lived first with Martha, who guarded the junction, and then wandered around the country. Evgraf collects all his brother's poems.

In accordance with the ideological and thematic content, a system of images of the novel is built, in the center of which is the main character - Yuri Andreevich Zhivago. Often it is called the alter ego of the author, compared with the lyrical hero of poems. On the other hand, they see in him a continuation of that type of hero of Russian literature of the 19th century, who is usually called "an extra person." Both of these positions have their justifications. Pasternak himself, according to the memoirs of his close friend Olga Ivinskaya, said that in the image of Yuri Andreevich he combined the personality traits of Blok, Yesenin, Mayakovsky and himself. It is also indicative that he trusts the hero not only to express his views, thoughts, reflections on the most important problems, but even "gives" him the true masterpieces of his lyrics. Nevertheless, Zhivago is a novel hero, in which the author embodied the features of a certain personality of that era. This is a typical intellectual, a smart, educated person, endowed with a sensitive soul and a creative gift. Caught in the maelstrom of historical events, he seems to be "standing above the fight", he cannot fully join any camp - neither the whites nor the reds. Zhivago wants to shout to both the White, a schoolboy, still almost a boy, and the Reds, the Bolsheviks, "that salvation lies not in fidelity to forms, but in liberation from them." The scene of the battle of the partisan detachment, in which Yuri Andreevich found himself against his will, is striking in its strength. He finds the texts of the 90th Psalm sewn into the clothes of both the killed partisan and the high school student who fought against the partisans. They fired at each other, but called for help and protection from the one Savior.

Later, Zhivago discovers that it is becoming more and more difficult to maintain his isolation, separation from the "herd". “What prevents me from serving, healing and writing?” - he thinks and comes to a striking conclusion: "... not deprivation and wandering, not instability and frequent changes, but the spirit of crackling phrase that prevails in our days." Sometimes it seems that he is really "superfluous", a weak-willed person who has not been able to find his place in a new life, unlike the friends of his youth Dudorov and Gordon. Everything he does is emphatically everyday, prosaic, and his hesitations, doubts, indecision are sometimes annoying. But this is only an external cut, behind which one can see what makes Zhivago the hero of the novel: in the conditions of general impersonality, he remains a person, in the midst of the extreme cruelty that the revolution and civil war bring with him, he retains kindness and humanity. He is able to sympathize with the people's troubles, and realize the inevitability of what is happening. In the general historical and philosophical concept of Pasternak, it is precisely such a person who is able to comprehend the essence of events, and being a creative person, he can express it in his poems, helping others to understand the world around them. At the same time, he himself becomes a victim of time - it is not for nothing that he dies in 1929, which is called the year of the “great turning point”. Once A. Blok said that Pushkin "was killed by the lack of air", and Pasternak literally realizes this metaphor. In that atmosphere of complete lack of freedom, the triumph of mediocrity, the rupture of cultural and spiritual ties, a person like Yuri Zhivago cannot live. But many years later, his friends remember him. Bending over Zhivago's shabby notebook of poems, they suddenly feel "happy tenderness and calmness", "freedom of the soul", which did not come even after the Great Patriotic War, although everyone expected it, but which the long-dead Yuri Zhivago carried through his life and managed to convey in his poetry. These final lines are an affirmation of the originality of the hero of the novel, the fruitfulness of his existence and the indestructibility and immortality of a great culture, eternal truths and moral values ​​that formed the basis of his personality.

The antipode of Zhivago in the novel is Antipov-Strelnikov. He is the embodiment of the type of "iron fighters" of the revolution. On the one hand, he is characterized by great willpower, activity, readiness for self-sacrifice in the name of a great idea, asceticism, purity of thoughts. WITH

on the other hand, he is characterized by unjustified cruelty, straightforwardness, the ability to dictate to everyone what he perceives as a “revolutionary necessity”, and by force “drive” into a new life even those who do not at all strive to fit into it. His fate is tragic. Pavel Antipov, having turned from a timid, romantic young man in love with Lara and professing humanistic ideas of freedom, equality and fraternity, into a cruel fighter, punisher Strelnikov, turns out to be a victim of a false, deadly revolutionary idea, which, according to the author, contradicts the natural course of history and itself. life. Understanding well the inner motivation of her husband’s actions, Lara notes: “With some kind of youthful, falsely directed pride, he became offended by something in life that is not offended. He began to pout at the course of events, at history. … He still settles scores with her to this day. … He is going to certain death because of this stupid ambition.”

As a result, Antipov, in the name of fighting for the revolution, renounces his wife and daughter, everything that, in his mind, interferes with the "work of life." He even takes another name - Strelnikov - and becomes the embodiment of the brutal force of the revolution. But it turns out that in fact he is weak-willed and powerless in his desire to control the course of history. "Change of life! - Yuri Zhivago exclaims. - This is how people can reason, ... who have never known life, who have not felt its spirit, its soul. …And material, substance, life never exists. She ... herself is forever reworking and transforming, she herself is much higher than our stupid theories with you. As a result, Antipov-Strelnikov comes to complete hopelessness and commits suicide. Thus, the author shows that fanatical service to the revolution can only lead to death and, in essence, is opposed to life.

The embodiment of life, love, Russia is in the novel Lara - Zhivago's beloved. She is between two antipodes - Zhivago and Antipov-Strelnikov. Pasternak wrote about the prototype of Lara in a letter to R. Schweitzer in 1958, noting that Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya "is the Lara of my work", "the personification of cheerfulness and self-sacrifice." In an interview with an English journalist in 1959, the writer claimed: “In my youth there was not one, only Lara ... But the Lara of my old age is inscribed in my heart with her (Iva) blood and her prison.” As in the fate of the author, so in the fate of the hero, there are two beloved, necessary for him, women who determine his life. His wife Tonya is the personification of the unshakable foundations: home, family. Lara is the embodiment of the elements of love, life, creativity. This image continues the tradition of the best heroines of Russian classical literature (Tatyana Larina, Natasha Rostova, Olga Ilyinskaya, "Turgenev girls", etc.). But her fate also turns out to be inextricably linked with the fate of Russia. D.S. Likhachev claims that in the novel Lara is a symbol of Russia and life itself. At the same time, this is a very specific image, with its own fate, which is one of the main storylines. It is significant that she is a sister of mercy who helps the wounded during the First World War. It organically combines the elemental, natural beginning and a subtle sense of culture, the best poems of Zhivago are dedicated to it. Her love for Yuri Andreyevich was gained through suffering and gained through severe trials of sin, a humiliating relationship with Komarovsky, an influential lawyer who embodies the complete unscrupulousness, cynicism, dirt and vulgarity of bourgeois society. Lara goes without love to marry Antipov in order to free herself from Komarovsky. With Yuri, she is initially connected by love, which is the embodiment of the joy of life, its personification. They are united by a sense of freedom, which is the key to immortality. Although their love is forbidden from the point of view of generally accepted norms (Zhivago is married to Tonya, and Lara is married to Antipov, although relations with Zhivago develop at the moment when Lara considers her husband dead), she is sanctified for the heroes by the whole universe. Here, for example, is how Lara at Zhivago's coffin speaks of their love: “They loved each other not out of inevitability, not “scorched by passion,” as it is falsely portrayed. They loved each other because everything around them wanted so much: the earth under them, the sky above their heads, clouds and trees. In the finale, Lara, who accidentally came to the funeral of Yuri Zhivago, mourns him, but this scene shocks not only with the depth of feeling expressed in folk poetic traditions, but also with the fact that the heroine addresses the deceased as if she were alive (“Here we are together again, Yurochka. ... What a horror, think! … Think!”). It turns out that love is life itself, it is stronger than death, more important than the “perestroika of the globe”, which, in comparison with the “mystery of life, the mystery of death”, human genius is just “petty world squabbles”. So once again in the finale, the main ideological core of the novel is emphasized: the opposition of the living and the dead and the assertion of the victory of life over death. The artistic features and genre and compositional originality of the novel from the moment of its first publication to this day are the subject of heated discussions and disputes. After the publication of the novel in 1988 in Novy Mir, a lively controversy unfolded on the pages of the Literary Gazette, one of the key issues of which was the definition of the genre nature of this work. It was argued that in this case "to define a genre means to find the key to the novel, its laws." Several points of view were expressed, which continue to be discussed at the present time: “this is not a novel, but a kind of autobiography”, “a novel is a lyrical poem” (D.S. Likhachev); "novel-life" (G. Gachev); “not only a poetic and political, but also a philosophical novel” (A. Gulyga); "symbolic novel (in the broad, Pasternakian sense)", "novel-myth" (S. Piskunova, V. Piskunov); “modernist, sharply subjective work” that only superficially preserves “the structure of a traditional realistic novel” (Vyach. Vozdvizhensky); "poetic novel", "metaphorical autobiography" (A. Voznesensky); "novel-symphony", "novel-sermon", "novel-parable" (R. Gul).

The compositional structure of the work is also the subject of lively discussions. Many critics consider the novel too "made", schematic, constructive knots clearly sticking out. Others, without denying this, see in such a construction a special artistic device that allows the author to convey the main idea of ​​the novel about the conjugation of everything that exists in the world, not only through words, images, descriptions and dialogues, but also with the help of the very composition of the work. This technique is often used in poetry, especially the modernist poetry of the 20th century, and is somewhat akin to musical forms. This also applies to cross-cutting figurative-thematic motifs (the above-mentioned image of a blizzard, blizzard, memory motif, etc.), plot-figurative parallels of the natural and human world, history and eternity, etc. So in a scene on the battlefield of the First World War, five characters collide: “The deceased, mutilated, was an ordinary reserve Gimazetdin, an officer shouting in the forest - his son, Lieutenant Galiullin, his sister was Lara, Gordon and Zhivago - witnesses, they were all together, they were all side by side, and some did not recognize each other, others never knew, and one remained forever unidentified, the other began to wait for discovery until the next case, until a new meeting. “Waiting to be discovered” and unintentional, but fateful meetings of the main characters in Moscow. It is in the room in which the burning candle so struck Yuri, without knowing it, he settles in the last days of his life, and accidentally enters

Lara, discovering the coffin with the body of her lover, whom she had long ago lost at the crossroads of life. In the epilogue of the novel, there is the last compositional knot: in the summer of 1943, on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War, Gordon and Dudorov meet, remembering Yuri Zhivago, and accidentally discover the underwear maker Tanya Bezcheredeva, brought up in an orphanage, who turns out to be the daughter of the late Yuri Andreevich and who was accidentally spotted a little earlier by his brother Major General Zhivago.

Critic N. Ivanova argues that the composition of the novel, built according to the musical-symphonic principle, is based on the core leitmotif of the railway, which branches into many separate motifs, lines, sub-themes. Thus, the first “knot” is tied near the railway: the episode of Yuri’s father’s suicide, around which several characters are grouped at once, participating to a greater or lesser extent in the subsequent action (Komarovsky, Misha Gordon, the future revolutionary Tiverzin; from a distance they see a stopped train, not yet knowing about the terrible event that caused it, Yura Zhivago himself, his uncle Nikolai Nikolayevich Vedenyapin, who came to visit Duplyanka, where Nika Dudorov was at that time). In the armored car, the most important meeting of Yuri Andreevich and Strelnikov takes place for the further plot. Near the railway there is a booth in which the former servant of Lara Martha lives. It was she who turned out to have the daughter of Zhivago and Lara Tanya, who, many years later, tells Dudorov and Gordon the terrible story of the murder of Martha's son Petenka. It is indicative that the death of Yuri Zhivago also takes place near the rails - at a tram stop. Thus, through the meta-image of the railway, which embodies the inexorability of time and the deadening force, the main ideological and compositional Axis of the novel is realized: the opposition of the living and the dead.

Such a construction of the work gives the impression of some theatricality, but understood not straightforwardly, but as the embodiment of the Universal drama of being. Hence such artistic features of the novel as the diversity of linguistic forms, including the entire richest palette: from biblical and philosophical vocabulary, literary and poetic tradition to colloquial colloquial forms, street language, village dialect. “One of the artistic forces ... of the novel is the power of details,” R.B. Ghoul. “On them, on this figurativeness, on this Russian word, the whole novel stands.” As other critics note, the theatricality of the novel is also correlated with the extensive use of detailed comparisons, metaphors, and personifications in it. According to Pasternak himself, metaphor is "a natural consequence of the fragility of a person and the long-term conceived enormity of his tasks, his spirit." That is why the writer's favorite poetic device so organically enters his novel and allows him to realize his main idea at the stylistic level: to bring together the disparate poles of being and overcome the forces of destruction, defeat death and gain immortality.