Doctor Zhivago

“Lara looked at them as a big girl looks at little boys.”

Komarovsky has taken away Lara's innocence. Now, she cannot relate to boys her own age, as they have not experienced the trauma she has experienced. The alienating effect of this trauma will remain with Lara for the rest of her life. Even after she marries Pasha, she will never be able to be truly close to him as he will always seem like a little boy to her.

“Her impotent indignation gave her no peace.”

Lara is a proud person whose financial situation forces her to compromise her ideals. Whether she is liaising with Komarovsky to support her mother or incurring large debts to save her brother, Lara is not able to achieve the independence she craves. Her indignation is impotent because she knows that she cannot refuse to help her family, meaning that she will compromise her ideals for their benefit no matter how much pain it brings her.

“Everything in the world, all things were words of his vocabulary.”

As Yuri matures as a person and a writer, his conception of the world solidifies. He comes to view the world as a language, one that he can speak and write. His life and his world, in this sense, become poems that he is yet to write. Yuri may be a doctor and a pragmatist, but poetry is also fundamental to his character, shaping his view of the world.

“The fear that she might suspect him of some unjustly offensive absurdity introduced an artificiality into their life.”

Lara and Pasha are desperate to love one another, but their deep-rooted pains and traumas prevent them from being honest with each other. Lara feels a sense of self-loathing and shame regarding her past, while Pasha is determined to prove that he is not concerned about this but terrified of offending or patronizing his wife. As a result, their marriage is pleasant, polite, and completely hollow. Their love seems artificial, as neither partner is able to love themselves enough to love anyone else.

“It seems to me that socialism is a sea into which all these personal, separate revolutions should flow, the sea of life, the sea of originality.”

Yuri is stubbornly apolitical. Even as a Bolshevik uprising sweeps through his country, altering the course of history, he cannot comprehend an ideology like socialism as anything other than personal. His apolitical poeticism impels him to project his emotions and experiences onto the ideology. He tries to reject the political and focus on the personal, but the events of the revolution continue to elude his comprehension. As ever, Yuri is caught between two spheres—the personal and political—and feels only the tension between them, rather than any synthesis.

“There were, essentially speaking, two persistent balls, which kept winding up and then unwinding.”

Riding the train from the rural area to the urban area, sharing a carriage with a man who talks but cannot hear, Yuri reflects on the dialectical nature of the world. Yuri is perpetually caught between two spheres, torn between whether he should look to the past or the future, the Mensheviks or the Bolsheviks, the Reds or the Whites, Lara or Tonya, or the political or the personal. Yuri rarely makes choices. Instead, he hurtles through the liminal space of indecision, unable to make a deliberate, definitive choice as to how to approach the future. As such, his world remains unfixed, chaotic, and undefined.

“Everything personal is over.”

Returning to Moscow, Yuri discovers that the city of his youth has been completely changed by the revolution. He struggles to reacquaint himself with his friends, his family, his house, and his city, all of which have undergone radical physical and emotional changes. The radical upheaval prompts Yuri to try to align his personal world view, believing that the personal world of his past “is over” (145). Yuri wants to believe that he is looking to the future, but this announcement is premature. Yuri can never leave the personal world behind, just as he can never embrace the political world. His speech is an attempt at self-delusion that will not last long.

“You've got to see this. It's history. It happens once in a lifetime.”

Misha comes to Yuri to tell him that the revolutionary fighting has reached the streets of Moscow. He urges Yuri to bear witness to the fighting as a once in a lifetime event. The irony of this claim is that Yuri's life is littered with supposedly once in a lifetime events, all of which alter the course of his life. Misha describes the fighting as “once in a lifetime,” but Yuri has already seen a great deal of fighting and will see much more. Yuri has the questionable privilege of existing during a period when history arrives in a deluge.

“The gray-haired revolutionary cooperator Kostoed-Amursky, who had been in all the forced labor camps of the old times and had opened a new series of them in the new time.”

Kostoed-Amursky was imprisoned in the Tsarist regime and forced to labor in work camps. Now that the revolution is underway, he has helped to set up the labor camps for the new regime. The cycle of violence continues; despite the progressive promise of the revolutionaries, the brutality of the labor camps continues. The positions are now switched, and the former imprisoned laborers have become the guards. Rather than eliminate the camps entirely, the revolution simply changes their dynamic.

“Why is this honor bestowed precisely on us and not on somebody else.”

When Yuri and his family arrive at the estate that once belonged to Tonya's grandfather, they face resentment from the current inhabitants. The threat of war has not quite reached the provinces, and it is considered a Muscovite problem, something which occupies the thoughts of city people. A division exists between urban and rural life, and those in the rural areas question why their lives should be thrown into disarray because of a quarrel in the city.

“He is my half brother. He has the same last name. And yet, strictly speaking, I know him least of all.”

Yuri is slightly bemused that he knows nothing about Evgraf. The relative mystery surrounding Yuri's half-brother illustrates the fickle, complicated nature of family ties. Yuri is far closer to many friends and non-blood relations than he will ever be to Evgraf, yet it is his half-brother who functions as his savior on more than one occasion. Evgraf's motivation, like much of family existence, is inscrutable to Yuri, especially during times when he is separated from his family.

“They kept their own counsel. They had caused a lot of trouble in their day.”

For the older generation of revolutionaries, the success of the 1917 Russian Revolution is a blessing and a curse. They are more advanced toward throwing off the shackles of the tsarist regime, but they have lost control of the ideological battle. For aged non-Bolshevik revolutionaries, the period has an excitement laced with regret and trepidation, a perpetual reminder that “their day” (240) has passed.

“He and his comrades were being shot at. It was necessary to shoot back.”

Though Yuri does not agree with the political ideology of the Forest Brotherhood, he feels a sense of loyalty to the men anyway. As ever with Yuri, this loyalty is conflicted and caught between two worlds. He cannot allow himself to succumb to inaction, but he cannot deliberately aid the Brotherhood's cause. Yuri's comprise is hollow. He shoots at a dead tree to assure himself he is doing something, while actually achieving nothing. Furthermore, he mistakenly shoots several people. Yuri's misguided attempt to square his personal loyalty and his political disagreement does more damage than the inaction he rejected.

“At the beginning of the revolution, when, after the example of the year 1905, it was feared that this time, too, the revolution would be a brief event in the history of the educated upper classes, and would not touch the lowest classes or strike root in them, everything possible was done to propagandize the people, to revolutionize them, alarm them, arouse and infuriate them.”

The contrast between the 1905 and the 1917 revolutions reveals the apparent complacency of the ruling class. The issues that sparked the first revolution were not addressed, leaving the political issue to fester. The revolutionaries learned from the failed revolution; the ruling classes did not. The irony of the White Army's supporters is that the ruling class they ostensibly fight for has already failed them. Each working-class person who sides with the Bolsheviks or the Red Army is evidence of the ruling class's inaction.

“The abolished making of moonshine was set going anew for medical purposes.”

Amid the general clamor and upheaval of the revolution, a new state and a new society are being created. As such, even minor rules and laws are in a state of flux. The making of alcohol in the camp is an analogy for this confused, complicated moment. Making alcohol is banned until it becomes useful to the cause. In the tumultuous environment of the revolution, all rules and laws exist in this provisional state.

“I shall see you, my beauty, my princess, my dearest rowan tree, my own heart's blood.”

Yuri's romantic conflict is revealed in emotional moments. For years, he has worried about his family. Tonya was his main focus and he oriented his life around returning to her. As soon as he is leaving the Forest Brotherhood, however, his thoughts immediately switch to Lara. In moments of emotional sincerity, Lara springs more readily to Yuri's mind than his actual wife, suggesting that Lara is the woman he truly loves.

“The dominion of the ready-made phrase began to grow – first monarchist, then revolutionary.”

The Bolsheviks present their revolution as a radical departure from the old social order. Everything, they claim, will change in the aftermath of the uprising. For Lara, however, this belief in radical change is a delusion. The revolution is not built on anything new, but on a pattern of ideas similar to those that came before. She sees the same violence and desire for control in the revolutionaries as she did in the tsarist regime. Rather than something new, Lara sees the revolution as a repackaging of old ideas.

“The whole trouble is that I love you and you do not love me.”

In her letter, Tonya is able to succinctly and specifically identify a key problem in their marriage which Yuri has refused to acknowledge. He insists that he loves Tonya, even as he spends his life with Lara. Despite his proclamations of love for Tonya and his family, he allows himself to settle into a romantic partnership with Lara. Yuri does love Tonya, but not in the passionate way he loves Lara. Tonya, unlike Yuri, is brave enough to admit this.

“You won't understand it. You grew up differently.”

Yuri has spent so long trying to avoid any reflection on the politics of the revolution that Pasha's words carry extra weight. Yuri comes from a wealthy background; even though his father lost the family fortune, Yuri was taken in by a rich family and—in a material sense—he wanted for nothing. Pasha was not so fortunate. For the millions of working-class Russians, the revolution is a political necessity. Yuri will never be able to understand the intricacies and the importance of the revolution because, to him, the revolution is an imposition rather than a necessary rebalancing of the social order.

“He had shot himself.”

The contrast between Yuri and Pasha is most evident in the final moments of Pasha's life. Yuri, whose life is shaped by indecision and inaction, is still stumbling through the world, unsure how to resolve the tension between his two loves. Pasha is not faced with such indecision. He shoots himself after learning that Lara truly loved him. This action is decisive in a negative way, rejecting the possibility of a future without Lara. In this way, it suggests that Yuri’s indecisiveness may in some ways be a strength, allowing him to survive circumstances that others might not.

“Yuri Andreevich was in too much of a hurry to establish ahead of time the failure of the efforts he made, announcing too confidently and almost with satisfaction the uselessness of any further attempts.”

Having returned to Moscow, Yuri makes a perfunctory effort to be reunited with his family. He has grown so distant from Tonya that he seems to want to fail at finding her. The learned futility of Yuri's actions annoys Vasya, who comes to view Yuri as a pathetic hypocrite who is too indecisive and dishonest to admit to himself that he is deliberately undermining his own hollow actions.

“They loved each other because everything around them wanted it so.”

Yuri's death grants Lara has a clarity of thought. She understands the complicated nature of their love, how the universe seemed to conspire to throw them together despite their commitments to others. Amid one of the largest social upheavals in human history, Yuri and Lara were repeatedly joined together. To them, their love seemed to be approved by a universe that threw them together as often as it tore them apart. This fated love makes Yuri's death even more painful for Lara, as she understands that the forces that continually drew them together will never do so again.

“But now all that was metaphorical has become literal.”

In the aftermath of Yuri's death, his romantic idealism cannot endure. The man who preferred to deal with the metaphorical and figurative had no place in the post-revolution society, a society in which his metaphors have become literal. The reality of post-revolutionary society is one in which Yuri could not survive, but his works live on and provide validation to his life.