Word: lara
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...meantime, the girl who is to become the great love of Yurii Zhivago's life, Larisa (Lara) Feodorovna Guishar, is being schooled in a very different way. In her mid-teens, she is seduced by a middle-aged lawyer lecher named Komarovsky. The characters are easily seen as symbols. Komarovsky plainly stands for the corruption of the old Czarist regime, while Lara may be Mary Magdalene or Russia herself. And what of Yurii Zhivago? He too stands for Russia. He also stands for martyrdom (Critic Edmund Wilson notes that Yurii means George and perhaps suggests St. George, martyred under...
Sacrifice begins for Zhivago when World War I wrenches him from his wife Tonia and his infant son. He is wounded, and cared for by Lara, who has become a nurse, while her husband has seemingly perished at the front. Their grand love affair begins, but Pasternak treats it with a circumspection that Russians have dubbed "the Turgenev approach" after the Russian Victorian novelist. Though they spend years intermittently living together in adultery, Yurii and Lara never even kiss in the pages of Doctor Zhivago...
During the journey, Zhivago meets Lara's husband Antipov, now called Strelnikov, "The Shooter." His task is to destroy recalcitrant peasant villages for the Bolsheviks in the civil war that has broken out between the Whites and Reds. Emphasizing yet again Zhivago's inner quest for the truth of his own being, Pasternak settles the doctor in a town that is his symbolic namesake, Yuriatin. Inevitably, Lara is there; and despite his remorse, Yurii is once more unfaithful to his wife. On a horseback ride back from Lara's. Physician Zhivago is kidnaped by a band...
While his family is forced to escape to western Europe, Zhivago escapes from the partisans for one last reunion with Lara. It is a weird, snowbound, dreamlike idyl on the edge of disaster, rapturous with love but also with an almost Chekhovian paralysis of the will. Eventually Lara is swept away to temporary safety by her old traducer, Komarovsky...
...life, with a profound sense of its Christian sanctity, who is caught in the life-crushing and soul-destroying nightmare of revolution, civil war and tyranny. The poet-doctor is driven across the face of Russia, is loved by people who lose him, and greatly loves a woman named Lara whom he loses. A broken man, he finally dies of a heart attack after he steps off a Moscow streetcar...