Word: yurii
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1958-1958
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Peredelkino, in his fir-and birch-engirdled, two-story dacha 15 miles southwest of Moscow, Boris Pasternak was mute but not inglorious. Against the sky he could see silhouetted the blue, oniontop cupolas of the village Orthodox Church, symbol of the Christian faith that enables his hero, Dr. Yurii Zhivago, to endure the torment, humiliations, sins and tragedy of war and revolution. On the walls of his study glow the illustrations that his artist-father drew for Resurrection by the great Tolstoy, whom Boris Pasternak has called "the territory of conscience." On that territory he consecrated Doctor Zhivago...
...this scene it is actually the boy Yurii Andreievich Zhivago's mother who is being buried. His millionaire father has committed suicide, and Yurii is being brought up as a ward of the well-to-do Gromeko family in a gracious world of chamber-music concerts, fancy-dress balls and lofty ideals. His teen-age partner, prim and proper Antonina (Tonia) Gromeko, is destined to be his bride...
...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...
...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...
...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 of Red partisans, and for the next couple of years he is their captive medic in the White-Red struggle in Siberia...