Word: zhivago
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What raises Zhivago above technically better-made novels is that it is charged with moral passion. On the very first page, Pasternak evokes an old Russian ballad that sets the tone of the novel and suggests the elaborate symbolic substructure he has given his book. The ballad, dating from the period when being buried alive was a commonly felt terror, contains the line "Who are they burying? The living! Not him, but her." Thus in the second paragraph of Doctor Zhivago, a funeral procession is described: "Some joined in out of curiosity and asked: 'Who is being buried...
...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...
Life as Sacrifice. Zhivago's Uncle Kolia, a kind of fellow traveler of Christianity, enunciates one of the book's major themes: "What you don't understand is that . . . history as we know it now began with Christ, and that Christ's Gospel is its foundation. Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why they write symphonies . . . The two basic ideals of modern man -without them...
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...