Word: zhivago
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Russia in Flames. When the Revolution breaks out, almost everyone Dr. Zhivago knows is enraptured by the profoundly Russian messianic dream: "There arose before the eyes of the world the vast figure of Russia bursting into flames like a light of redemption for all the sorrows and misfortunes of mankind." But Zhivago soon sickens of "the savagery of daily, hourly, legalized, rewarded slaughter." Moscow is like a looted city, its empty windowpanes stare blindly at Zhivago; it is another one of the living whom the Revolution has buried. Typhus and near-starvation force the doctor to pack himself and family...
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...
...other than Pasternak's Communist critics, have noted his unfeigned and unwavering sympathies for the educated middle class in which he was reared. In this section, Pasternak takes pains to make his protagonist's loyalties unmistakable. The partisan commander is a cocaine-sniffing hophead whom Dr. Zhivago loathes, as much for his boring platitudes as for his cruelty. By contrast, when a band of teen-age White soldiers storms the Red positions, the doctor admires their gallantry. He feels that he must shoot in self-defense, but he cannot bring himself to aim at the boys who "were...
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...
During the brief remainder of his life, Zhivago goes to seed...