In the novel “Doctor Zhivago” Boris Pasternak “conveys his worldview, his vision of the events that shook our country at the beginning of the 20th century” Gorelov P. Reflections on the novel. // Questions of Literature, 1988, No. 9, P. 58. It is known that Pasternak’s attitude towards the revolution was contradictory. He accepted the ideas of updating social life, but the writer could not help but see how they turned into their opposite. Likewise, the main character of the work, Yuri Zhivago, does not find an answer to the question of how he should live further: what to accept and what not to accept in his new life. In describing the spiritual life of his hero, Boris Pasternak expressed the doubts and intense internal struggle of his generation.
In the novel "Doctor Zhivago" Pasternak revives the "idea of the intrinsic value of the human personality" Manevich G.I. "Doctor Zhivago" as a novel about creativity. // Justifications of creativity, 1990. P. 68.. The personal predominates in the narrative. All artistic means are subordinated to the genre of this novel, which can be conventionally defined as prose of lyrical self-expression. There are, as it were, two planes in the novel: an external one, telling about the life story of Doctor Zhivago, and an internal one, reflecting the spiritual life of the hero. It is more important for the author to convey not the events of Yuri Zhivago’s life, but his spiritual experience. Therefore, the main semantic load in the novel is transferred from the events and dialogues of the characters to their monologues.
The novel is a kind of autobiography of Boris Pasternak, but not in a physical sense (that is, the novel does not reflect the events happening to the author in real life), but in a spiritual sense (the work reflects what happened in the writer’s soul). The spiritual path that Yuri Andreevich Zhivago went through is, as it were, a reflection of Boris Leonidovich Pasternak’s own spiritual path.
Being shaped by the influence of life is Yuri's main trait. Throughout the novel, Yuri Andreevich Zhivago is shown as a person who makes almost no decisions. But he does not object to the decisions of other people, especially those dear and close to him. Yuri Andreevich accepts other people's decisions like a child who does not argue with his parents, he accepts their gifts along with instructions. Yuri does not object to the wedding with Tonya when Anna Ivanovna “conspired” them. He does not object to conscription into the army or a trip to the Urals. “But why argue? You decided to go. “I’m joining,”1 says Yuri. Having found himself in a partisan detachment, without sharing the views of the partisans, he still remains there, without trying to object.
Yuri is a weak-willed person, but he has a strong mind and intuition. He sees everything, perceives everything, but does not interfere with anything and does what is required of him. He takes part in events, but just as weakly. The element captures him like a grain of sand and carries him as and where it pleases.
However, his complaisance is neither mental weakness nor cowardice. Yuri Andreevich simply follows, submits to what life requires of him. But “Doctor Zhivago is able to defend his position in the face of danger or in situations where his personal honor or beliefs are at stake” Buck D.P. "Doctor Zhivago". B.L. Pasternak: the functioning of the lyrical cycle in the novel as a whole. // Pasternak readings. Perm, 1990., P. 84.. Only outwardly Yuri submits to the elements and events, but they are unable to change his deep spiritual essence. He lives in his own world, in the world of thoughts and feelings. Many submitted to the elements and broke spiritually.
“My friends have become strangely dim and discolored. No one has their own world, their own opinion. They were much more vivid in his memories. ...How quickly everyone faded, how without regret they parted with an independent thought, which apparently no one had ever had!”2 - this is what Yuri thinks about his friends. But the hero himself resists everything that tries to destroy his inner world.
Yuri Andreevich is against violence. According to his observations, violence leads to nothing but violence. Therefore, being in the partisan camp, he does not participate in battles, and even when, due to circumstances, Doctor Zhivago has to take up arms, he tries not to hit people. Unable to endure life in the partisan detachment any longer, the doctor flees from there. Moreover, Yuri Zhivago is burdened not so much by a hard life full of dangers and hardships, but by the sight of a cruel, senseless massacre.
Yuri Andreevich refuses Komarovsky’s tempting offer, sacrificing his love for Lara. He cannot give up his beliefs, so he cannot go with her. The hero is ready to give up his happiness for the sake of the salvation and peace of mind of the woman he loves, and for this he even resorts to deception.
From this we can conclude that Yuri Andreevich Zhivago is only a seemingly submissive and weak-willed person; in the face of life’s difficulties, he is able to make his own decision, defend his convictions, and not break under the onslaught of the elements. Tonya feels his spiritual strength and lack of will. She writes to him: “And I love you. Oh how I love you, if only you could imagine. I love everything special about you, everything advantageous and disadvantageous, all your ordinary sides, dear in their extraordinary combination, a face ennobled by inner content, which without this, perhaps, would seem ugly, talent and intelligence, as if taking the place of a completely absent will. . All this is dear to me, and I don’t know a better person than you.” Antonina Aleksandrovna understands that the lack of will is more than compensated for by the inner strength, spirituality, and talent of Yuri Andreevich, and this is much more important for her.
2.2 Personality and history in the novel. Portrayal of the intelligentsia
G. Gachev’s view of Pasternak’s novel is interesting - he considers the problem and plot of the novel as the problem of a person in the whirlpool of history “In the 20th century, History revealed itself as the enemy of Life, All-Being. History has declared itself a treasure trove of meanings and immortalities. Many are confused, believe science and the newspaper and are sad. Another is a man of culture and Spirit: from history itself he knows that such eras when the whirlpools of historical processes strive to turn a person into a grain of sand have happened more than once (Rome, Napoleon). And he refuses to participate in history, personally begins to create his own space - time, creates an oasis where he lives in true values: in love, nature, freedom of spirit, culture. These are Yuri and Lara.
In the novel “Doctor Zhivago” Boris Pasternak conveys his worldview, his vision of the events that shook our country at the beginning of the 20th century. It is known that Pasternak’s attitude towards the revolution was contradictory. He accepted the ideas of updating social life, but the writer could not help but see how they turned into their opposite. Likewise, the main character of the work, Yuri Zhivago, does not find an answer to the question of how he should live further: what to accept and what not to accept in his new life. In describing the spiritual life of his hero, Boris Pasternak expressed the doubts and intense internal struggle of his generation.
The main question around which the narrative about the external and internal lives of the heroes moves is their attitude to the revolution, the influence of turning points in the country's history on their destinies. Yuri Zhivago was not an opponent of the revolution. He understood that history has its own course and cannot be disrupted. But Yuri Zhivago could not help but see the terrible consequences of such a turn in history: “The doctor remembered the recently past autumn, the execution of the rebels, the infanticide and femicide of Palykh, the bloody slaughter and slaughter of people, which had no end in sight. The fanaticism of the whites and reds competed in cruelty, alternately increasing one in response to the other, as if they were multiplied. The blood made me sick, it came up to my throat and rushed to my head, my eyes swam with it.” Yuri Zhivago did not take the revolution with hostility, but did not accept it either. It was somewhere between “for” and “against”.
History can afford to delay the arrival of truth and happiness. She has infinity in reserve, and people have a certain period - life. Amid the turmoil, a person is called upon to orient himself directly to the present, in unconditional values. They are simple: love, meaningful work, the beauty of nature, free thought.”
The main character of the novel, Yuri Zhivago, is a doctor and poet, perhaps even more of a poet than a doctor. For Pasternak, a poet is “a hostage to time in captivity for eternity.” In other words, Yuri Zhivago's view of historical events is a view from the point of view of eternity. He may be mistaken and mistake the temporary for the eternal. In October 17, Yuri accepted the revolution with enthusiasm, calling it “magnificent surgery.” But after he is arrested at night by Red Army soldiers, mistaking him for a spy, and then interrogated by military commissar Strelnikov, Yuri says: “I was very revolutionary, but now I think that violence won’t get you anywhere.” Yuri Zhivago “leaves the game,” refuses medicine, keeps silent about his medical specialty, does not take the side of any of the warring camps, in order to be a spiritually independent person, so that under the pressure of any circumstances he remains himself, “not to give up his face.” After spending more than a year in captivity with the partisans, Yuri directly tells the commander: “When I hear about the remaking of life, I lose power over myself and fall into despair, life itself is always remaking and transforming itself, it itself is much higher than our stupid theories.” By this, Yuri shows that life itself must resolve the historical dispute about who is right and who is wrong.
The hero strives away from the fight and, in the end, leaves the ranks of the combatants. The author does not condemn him. He regards this act as an attempt to evaluate and see the events of the revolution and civil war from a universal human point of view.
The fate of Doctor Zhivago and his loved ones is the story of people whose lives were thrown out of balance and destroyed by the elements of revolution. The Zhivago and Gromeko families leave their settled Moscow home for the Urals to seek refuge “on earth.” Yuri is captured by the Red partisans, and he is forced against his will to participate in the armed struggle. His relatives were expelled from Russia by the new government. Lara becomes completely dependent on successive authorities, and at the end of the story she goes missing. Apparently, she was arrested on the street or died “under some nameless number in one of the countless general or women’s concentration camps in the north.”
“Doctor Zhivago” is a textbook of freedom, starting with style and ending with the ability of an individual to assert his independence from the clutches of history, and Zhivago, in his independence is not an individualist, has not turned his back on people, he is a doctor, he treats people, he is addressed to people.
“... No one makes history, it is not visible, just as you cannot see how grass grows. Wars, revolutions, kings, Robespierres - these are its organic pathogens, its fermenting yeast. Revolutions are produced by effective people, one-sided fanatics, geniuses of self-restraint. They overthrow the old order in a few hours or days. Revolutions last weeks, many years, and then for decades, centuries, the spirit of limitation that led to the revolution is worshiped as a shrine.” - These reflections of Zhivago are important both for understanding Pasternak’s historical views and his attitude to the revolution, to its events, as a kind of absolute given, the legitimacy of the appearance of which is not subject to discussion.
Doctor Zhivago is a novel about the fate of man in history. The image of the road is central in it” Isupov K.G. “Doctor Zhivago” as a rhetorical epic (about the aesthetic philosophy of B.L. Pasternak). // Isupov K.G. Russian aesthetics of history. St. Petersburg, 1992., p. 10.. The plot of the novel is laid out like rails are laid... plot lines meander, the fates of the heroes rush into the distance and constantly intersect in unexpected places - like railroad tracks. "Doctor Zhivago" is a novel of the era of scientific, philosophical and aesthetic revolution, the era of religious searches and pluralization of scientific and artistic thinking; era of the destruction of norms that had previously seemed unshakable and universal, this is a novel of social catastrophes.
B. L. Pasternak wrote the novel “Doctor Zhivago” in prose, but he, a talented poet, could not help but pour out his soul on its pages in a way closer to his heart - in poetry. The book of poems by Yuri Zhivago, separated into a separate chapter, fits completely organically into the main text of the novel. She is a part of it, not a poetic insertion. In his poems, Yuri Zhivago talks about his time and himself - this is his spiritual biography. The book of poems opens with the theme of upcoming suffering and the awareness of its inevitability, and ends with the theme of its voluntary acceptance and atoning sacrifice. In the poem “The Garden of Gethsemane,” in the words of Jesus Christ addressed to the Apostle Peter: “The dispute cannot be resolved with iron. Put your sword in its place, man,” Yuri says that it is impossible to establish the truth with the help of weapons. People like B. L. Pasternak, disgraced, persecuted, “unprintable”, he remained for us a Man with a capital M.
Boris Leonidovich Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago has become one of the most controversial works of our time. The West admired them and categorically did not recognize the Soviet Union. It was published in all European languages, while the official publication in the original language came out only three decades after it was written. Abroad, it brought the author fame and the Nobel Prize, but at home - persecution, persecution, and exclusion from the Union of Soviet Writers.
Years passed, the system collapsed, the whole country fell. The Motherland is finally talking about its unrecognized genius and his work. Textbooks were rewritten, old newspapers were sent to the furnace, Pasternak’s good name was restored, and even the Nobel Prize was returned (as an exception!) to the laureate’s son. Doctor Zhivago sold millions of copies to all corners of the new country.
Yura Zhivago, Lara, the scoundrel Komarovsky, Yuryatin, the house in Varykino, “It’s shallow, it’s shallow all over the earth...” - any of these verbal nominations is for a modern person an easily recognizable allusion to Pasternak’s novel. The work boldly stepped beyond the tradition that existed in the twentieth century, turning into a literary myth about a bygone era, its inhabitants and the forces that controlled them.
History of creation: recognized by the world, rejected by the homeland
The novel Doctor Zhivago was created over ten years, from 1945 to 1955. The idea of writing great prose about the destinies of his generation appeared in Boris Pasternak back in 1918. However, for various reasons, it was not possible to bring it to life.
In the 1930s, “Zhivult’s Notes” appeared - a sort of test of the pen before the birth of a future masterpiece. In the surviving fragments of the Notes, a thematic, ideological and figurative similarity with the novel Doctor Zhivago can be traced. Thus, Patriky Zhivult became the prototype of Yuri Zhivago, Evgeny Istomin (Lyuvers) - Larisa Fedorovna (Lara).
In 1956, Pasternak sent the manuscript of “Doctor Zhivago” to leading literary publications – “New World”, “Znamya”, “Fiction”. They all refused to publish the novel, while behind the Iron Curtain the book was released in November 1957. It saw the light of day thanks to the interest of an Italian radio employee in Moscow, Sergio D’Angelo, and his compatriot, publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli.
In 1958, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize “For significant achievements in modern lyric poetry, as well as the continuation of the traditions of the great Russian epic novel.” Pasternak became the second Russian writer, after Ivan Bunin, to receive this honorary prize. European recognition had the effect of a bomb exploding in the domestic literary environment. From then on, large-scale persecution of the writer began, which did not subside until the end of his days.
Parsnip was called a “Judas,” “an anti-conscience bait on a rusty hook,” a “literary weed,” and a “black sheep” that got into a good herd. He was forced to refuse the prize, expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers, showered with caustic epigrams, and Pasternak’s “minutes of hatred” were organized at plants, factories and other government institutions. It is paradoxical that there was no talk of publishing the novel in the USSR, so most of the detractors did not see the work in person. Subsequently, the persecution of Pasternak entered literary history under the title “I haven’t read it, but I condemn it!”
Ideological meat grinder
Only in the late 60s, after the death of Boris Leonidovich, the persecution began to subside. In 1987, Pasternak was reinstated in the Union of Soviet Writers, and in 1988, the novel “Doctor Zhivago” was published on the pages of the magazine “New World”, which thirty years ago not only did not agree to publish Pasternak, but also published an accusatory letter addressed to him with a demand deprive Boris Leonidovich of Soviet citizenship.
Today, Doctor Zhivago remains one of the most widely read novels in the world. It spawned a number of other works of art - dramatizations and films. The novel has been filmed four times. The most famous version was filmed by a creative trio - USA, UK, Germany. The project was directed by Giacomo Campiotti, starring Hans Matheson (Yuri Zhivago), Keira Knightley (Lara), Sam Neill (Komarovsky). There is also a domestic version of Doctor Zhivago. It appeared on TV screens in 2005. The role of Zhivago was played by Oleg Menshikov, Lara by Chulpan Khamatova, Komarovsky was played by Oleg Yankovsky. The film project was led by director Alexander Proshkin.
The novel begins with a funeral. They say goodbye to Natalya Nikolaevna Vedepyanina, the mother of little Yura Zhivago. Now Yura is left an orphan. Their father left them with their mother long ago, happily squandering the family's million-dollar fortune somewhere in the vastness of Siberia. During one of these trips, having gotten drunk on the train, he jumped out of the train at full speed and fell to his death.
Little Yura was sheltered by relatives - the Gromeko professorial family. Alexander Alexandrovich and Anna Ivanovna accepted young Zhivago as their own. He grew up with their daughter Tonya, his main friend since childhood.
At the time when Yura Zhivago lost his old one and found a new family, the widow Amalia Karlovna Guichard came to Moscow with her children - Rodion and Larisa. A friend of her late husband, respected Moscow lawyer Viktor Ippolitovich Komarovsky, helped organize the move for Madame (the widow was a Russified Frenchwoman). The benefactor helped the family settle in a big city, got Rodka into the cadet corps and continued to visit Amalia Karlovna, a narrow-minded and amorous woman, from time to time.
However, interest in her mother quickly faded when Lara grew up. The girl developed quickly. At the age of 16 she already looked like a young beautiful woman. A graying womanizer bewitched an inexperienced girl - before she knew it, the young victim found herself in his net. Komarovsky lay at the feet of his young lover, swore his love and blasphemed himself, begged him to open up to his mother and have a wedding, as if Lara was arguing and did not agree. And he continued and continued to shamefully take her under a long veil to special rooms in expensive restaurants. “Is it possible that when people love, they humiliate?” – Lara wondered and could not find an answer, hating her tormentor with all her soul.
Several years after the vicious affair, Lara shoots Komarovsky. This happened during a Christmas celebration at the venerable Moscow Sventitsky family. Lara didn’t hit Komarovsky, and, by and large, she didn’t want to. But without suspecting it, she landed right in the heart of a young man named Zhivago, who was also among those invited.
Thanks to Komarovsky’s connections, the shooting incident was hushed up. Lara hastily married her childhood friend Patulya (Pasha) Antipov, a very modest young man who was selflessly in love with her. After the wedding, the newlyweds leave for the Urals, to the small town of Yuryatin. There their daughter Katenka is born. Lara, now Larisa Fedorovna Antipova, teaches at the gymnasium, and Patulya, Pavel Pavlovich, reads history and Latin.
At this time, changes also occur in the life of Yuri Andreevich. His named mother Anna Ivanovna dies. Soon Yura marries Tonya Gromeko, whose tender friendship has long turned into adult love.
The regular life of these two families was shaken up by the outbreak of war. Yuri Andreevich is mobilized to the front as a military doctor. He has to leave Tonya with his newborn son. In turn, Pavel Antipov leaves his family of his own free will. He has long been burdened by family life. Realizing that Lara is too good for him, that she does not love him, Patulya considers any options, including suicide. The war came in very handy - an ideal way to prove yourself as a hero, or to find a quick death.
Book two: the greatest love on earth
Having sipped on the sorrows of war, Yuri Andreevich returns to Moscow and finds his beloved city in terrible ruin. The reunited Zhivago family decides to leave the capital and go to the Urals, to Varykino, where the factories of Kruger, Antonina Alexandrovna’s grandfather, used to be located. Here, by coincidence, Zhivago meets Larisa Fedorovna. She works as a nurse in a hospital where Yuri Andreevich gets a job as a doctor.
Soon a connection begins between Yura and Lara. Tormented by remorse, Zhivago returns to Lara’s house again and again, unable to resist the feeling that this beautiful woman evokes in him. He admires Lara every minute: “She doesn’t want to be liked, to be beautiful, to be captivating. She despises this side of the feminine essence and, as it were, punishes herself for being so good... How good everything she does is. She reads it as if this is not the highest human activity, but something simpler, accessible to animals. It’s like she’s carrying water or peeling potatoes.”
The love dilemma is again solved by war. One day, on the road from Yuryatin to Varykino, Yuri Andreevich will be captured by the Red partisans. Only after a year and a half of wandering through the Siberian forests will Doctor Zhivago be able to escape. Yuryatin was captured by the Reds. Tonya, father-in-law, son and daughter, who was born after the doctor’s forced absence, left for Moscow. They manage to secure the opportunity to emigrate abroad. Antonina Pavlovna writes about this to her husband in a farewell letter. This letter is a cry into the void, when the writer does not know whether his message will reach the addressee. Tonya says that she knows about Lara, but does not condemn the still beloved Yura. “Let me cross you,” the letters scream hysterically, “For all the endless separation, trials, uncertainty, for all your long, long dark path.”
Having lost forever the hope of reuniting with his family, Yuri Andreevich again begins to live with Lara and Katenka. In order not to appear once again in a city that has raised red banners, Lara and Yura retire to the forest house of the deserted Varykino. Here they spend the happiest days of their quiet family happiness.
Oh, how good they were together. They loved to talk in low voices for a long time, with a candle burning comfortably on the table. They were united by a community of souls and a gulf between them and the rest of the world. “I am jealous of you for the items of your toilet,” Yura confessed to Lara, “for the drops of sweat on your skin, for the infectious diseases in the air... I love you madly, without memory, endlessly.” “They definitely taught us how to kiss in heaven,” Lara whispered, “And then they sent us as children to live at the same time, so that we could test this ability on each other.”
Komarovsky bursts into the Varykin happiness of Lara and Yura. He reports that all of them are in danger of reprisals and implores them to save themselves. Yuri Andreevich is a deserter, and the former revolutionary commissar Strelnikov (aka the supposedly deceased Pavel Antipov) has fallen out of favor. His loved ones will face inevitable death. Fortunately, one of these days a train will pass by. Komarovsky can arrange a safe departure. This is the last chance.
Zhivago flatly refuses to go, but in order to save Lara and Katenka he resorts to deception. At the instigation of Komarovsky, he says that he will follow them. He himself remains at the forest house, without really saying goodbye to his beloved.
Poems by Yuri Zhivago
Loneliness drives Yuri Andreevich crazy. He loses track of the days, and drowns out his frenzied, bestial longing for Lara with memories of her. During the days of Varykin's seclusion, Yura creates a cycle of twenty-five poems. They are appended at the end of the novel as “Poems by Yuri Zhivago”:
“Hamlet” (“The noise died down. I stepped onto the stage”);
"March";
“On Strastnaya”;
"White Night";
"Spring minx";
"Explanation";
"Summer in the City";
“Autumn” (“I let my family leave…”);
“Winter Night” (“The candle was burning on the table...”);
"Magdalene";
"Garden of Gethsemane" and others.
One day a stranger appears on the doorstep of the house. This is Pavel Pavlovich Antipov, aka Revolutionary Committee Strelnikov. The men talk all night. About life, about revolution, about disappointment, and about a woman who was loved and continues to be loved. In the morning, when Zhivago fell asleep, Antipov put a bullet in his forehead.
What happened next to the doctor is not clear; we only know that he returned to Moscow on foot in the spring of 1922. Yuri Andreevich settles with Markel (the former janitor of the Zhivago family) and becomes friends with his daughter Marina. Yuri and Marina have two daughters. But Yuri Andreevich no longer lives, he seems to be living out his life. He gives up his literary activities, falls into poverty, and accepts the submissive love of the faithful Marina.
One day Zhivago disappears. He sends his common-law wife a short letter in which he says that he wants to be alone for some time, to think about his future fate and life. However, he never returned to his family. Death overtook Yuri Andreevich unexpectedly - in a Moscow tram car. He died of a heart attack.
In addition to people from his inner circle in recent years, an unknown man and woman came to Zhivago’s funeral. This is Evgraf (Yuri's half-brother and his patron) and Lara. “Here we are together again, Yurochka. How God brought us to meet again... - Lara quietly whispers at the coffin, - Goodbye, my great and dear one, goodbye my pride, goodbye my fast little river, how I loved your all-day splash, how I loved to rush into your cold waves... Your departure, mine end".
We invite you to get acquainted with the poet, writer, translator, publicist - one of the most prominent representatives of Russian literature of the twentieth century. The novel “Doctor Zhivago” brought the writer the greatest fame.
Washerwoman Tanya
Years later, during the Second World War, Gordon and Dudorov meet the washerwoman Tanya, a narrow-minded, simple woman. She shamelessly tells the story of her life and her recent meeting with Major General Zhivago himself, who for some reason found her and invited her on a date. Gordon and Dudorov soon realize that Tanya is the illegitimate daughter of Yuri Andreevich and Larisa Fedorovna, born after leaving Varykino. Lara was forced to leave the girl at a railway crossing. So Tanya lived in the care of Aunt Marfusha’s caretaker, not knowing affection, care, not hearing the book word.
There is nothing left of her parents in her - Lara’s majestic beauty, her natural intelligence, Yura’s sharp mind, his poetry. It is bitter to look at the fruit of great love mercilessly beaten by life. “This has happened several times in history. What was conceived ideally, sublimely, became crude and materialized.” So Greece became Rome, Russian enlightenment became the Russian revolution, Tatiana Zhivago turned into the laundress Tanya.
A short essay-discussion on literature on the topic: Characteristics of Doctor Zhivago from Pasternak’s novel of the same name. Fate and love of Yuri Zhivago. Description of the hero in quotes
The novel "Doctor Zhivago" became a landmark event in the world of literature of the 20th century. Its author even won a Nobel Prize and gained worldwide fame. However, along with fame, Pasternak also received severe persecution. The authorities did not want to see the intellectual as a positive hero, because literature was used as a means of promoting the political course of the party, so only “proletarians of all countries” could be “good.” However, the writer considered it necessary to raise the topic of the intelligentsia and devote the novel to how they survived the hard times of the civil war. And it was for such a book that he was awarded a prestigious prize, which the party elite could not forgive Pasternak for. But the novel was fully appreciated by descendants, who were able to understand the complex and contradictory image of the central character of the novel - Yuri Zhivago.
The fate of Yuri Zhivago is the fate of a typical intellectual during the Civil War. His family was rich, and his prospects in peacetime were cloudless. But a revolution occurred, and then a civil war, and yesterday’s respectable citizens turned into bourgeois. Therefore, even though he received an excellent education, he still could not integrate into the new social reality. For his country, he became a renegade by birthright. Neither his creativity nor his spiritual wealth were in demand and understood.
Initially, the hero welcomed the revolution as a “magnificent surgery,” but he was one of the first to realize that “you can’t take anything with violence.” He does not like “the leap from serene, innocent regularity into blood and screams, general madness and savagery of everyday and hourly, legalized and praised murder.” Although he understands that he cannot stop the course of history, he still does not accept “bloody slaughter and slaughter.” And so, when “everything everyday has been overturned and destroyed,” all that remains is “naked, stripped to the bone soulfulness,” which the hero has no use for.
The characteristics of Doctor Zhivago, first of all, are revealed to those who carefully read his poems. In them, the hero appears before us as a sophisticated lyricist who thinks about eternal issues more than about pressing matters. He is always somewhat divorced from reality. Many reproach him for lack of will and absolute inertia, because Yuri Andreevich cannot even decide whose side he is on. At a time when people sacrifice themselves to defend their vision of the future of Russia, he tries to stay away from the makers of history. Doctor Zhivago’s love also reveals him as an indecisive and driven person: he had three women, but he could not make any of them happy. The hero sometimes gives the impression of a restless holy fool who lives parallel to reality and regardless of society. Unlike the brave and determined heroes of socialist realism, Zhivago, it would seem, cannot serve as an example for anyone to follow: he cheated on his wife, abandoned his children, etc.
Why did Pasternak portray such an unsightly hero? Yes, he could have been awarded for such a portrait of the intelligentsia. But that was not the case. Yuri Zhivago defends ideals much more important than class interests. He defends his right to individuality even in war. The hero abstracted himself from society with its eternal squabble for power and began to live in his own inner world, where the true spiritual values of love and freedom of thought and creativity reign. Yuri lives the way he wants, with quiet, creative activity for the good, and does not bother anyone: “Oh, how sweet it is to exist! How sweet it is to live in the world and love life!” He is not weak, it’s just that all his strength is directed inward and concentrated on spiritual work.
Yuri Zhivago reflects the inner world of Pasternak himself. The author wrote that in this image he combined the characters of Blok, Mayakovsky, Yesenin and himself. Therefore, listening to Yuri, we hear the voice of his creator, and by the number of monologues of the main character we understand that the writer is “boiled” and in this novel he is trying to throw out his experiences and impressions that are bursting him from the inside.
Pasternak in his novel “Doctor Zhivago” raises the question of the role of man in history and affirms the idea of the self-worth of the individual. A person, according to Pasternak, is valuable in himself, and without his contribution to common affairs, if he does not consider them as such. Despite everything, the hero retained his “I” and remained himself, without staining his inner world in the blood and dust of hard times.
Interesting? Save it on your wall!Zhivago Yuri Andreevich- the main character of the novel, a doctor and poet. The hero's surname associates him with the image of "God Zhivago", i.e. Christ (cf. the name of the character's mother - Maria Nikolaevna); the phrase “Doctor Zhivago” can be read as “healing all living things.” The name Yuri echoes both main toponyms of the novel - Moscow (cf. the mythopoetic connotations of the name Georgiy = Yuri) and Yuryatin. Wed. also the associative connection of the words “Yuri” - “holy fool”. The meaning of the patronymic is also significant: Andrey - “man”, Andreevich - “son of man”.
The novel begins with the death of the hero's parents: the mother dies, and the father, a bankrupt millionaire, commits suicide by jumping out of a courier train. The boy's uncle, Nikolai Nikolaevich Vedenyapin, brings him to Moscow and settles him in the family of Professor Gromeko. One day, after an interrupted musical evening, Zh., together with his friend Misha Gordon, accompany Alexander Alexandrovich Gromeko to the “Montenegro” rooms: here Zh. first sees Lara, a girl sleeping in a chair, then watches her silent explanation with Komarovsky. Almost 20 years later, J. will remember this scene: “I, a boy, who knew nothing about you, understood with all the torment of the strength that resonated with you: this puny, thin girl is charged, like electricity, to the limit, with all conceivable femininity in the world.” J. enters the university at the Faculty of Medicine. Starts to write poetry. After graduating from university, he wrote a paper on the physiology of vision. On Christmas evening 1911, Zh., together with Tonya Gromeko, goes to the Sventitsky Christmas tree: driving along Kamergersky Lane, he draws attention to the window behind which a candle is burning (this is the window of the room where Lara talks with Pasha Antipov, but Zh. about does not know this). A line of the poem appears: “The candle was burning on the table. The candle was burning...” (“The candle was burning on the table” is an unconscious quote from K. Romanov’s 1885 poem “It was getting dark: we were sitting in the garden...”). At the Sventitsky Christmas tree, Zh. sees Lara immediately after she shot the prosecutor and recognizes her, although he does not know her name. Returning from the Christmas tree, Zh. and Tonya learn that Tonya’s mother has died; before her death, she asked them to get married. During the funeral, J. feels the desire, as opposed to death, “to work on forms, to produce beauty. Now, more than ever, it was clear to him that art is always, without ceasing, occupied with two things. It constantly reflects on death and relentlessly creates life through this.” J. and Tonya get married; in the fall of 1915 their son Sashenka is born. J. is drafted into the army; he is wounded; lying in the hospital, he meets Lara. He is informed from Moscow that a book of his poems has been published without his permission and is being praised. Working in the town of Melyuzeev, Zh. lives in the same house with Antipova, but does not even know her room. They often collide at work. He “honestly tries not to love” her, but lets it slip and she leaves.
In the summer of 1917, Zh. left for Moscow from the disintegrating front. In Moscow, having met his family, he still feels lonely, foresees social cataclysms, “considers himself and his environment doomed.” He works in a hospital and also writes The People Game, a diary that includes poetry and prose. The days of the October battles in Moscow coincided with the serious illness of Sashenka’s son. A few days later, going out onto the street, Zh., in the entrance of a house on the corner of Serebryany Lane and Molchanovka, reads the first decree of Soviet power in the newspaper; in the same entrance he meets an unknown young man, not knowing that this is his half-brother Evgraf. J. accepts the revolution with enthusiasm, calling it “magnificent surgery.” In the winter of 1918 he suffered from typhus. When Zh. recovered, in April 1918, together with his wife, son and father-in-law, on the advice of Evgraf, they left for the Urals, to the former estate of Tony’s grandfather Varykino, not far from Yuryatin. They've been traveling for several weeks. Already at the entrance to Yuryatin at one of the Zh. stations at night, Red Army soldiers arrest him, mistaking him for a spy. He is interrogated by military commissar Strelnikov (Zh. does not know that it is Antipov, Lara’s husband) and after a conversation he is released. Zh. says to a random fellow traveler Samdevyatov: “I was very revolutionary, but now I think that you can’t get anything by violence.” ^K. he and his family safely reach Yuryatin, then they go to Varykino, where they settle, occupying two rooms in an old manor house. In winter, J. keeps notes - in particular, he writes down that he gave up medicine and keeps silent about his medical specialty so as not to bind his freedom. Periodically he visits the library in Yuryatin and one day sees Antipova in the library; doesn't approach her, but writes her address off her library card. Then he comes to her apartment; after some time they become closer. J. is burdened by the fact that he is deceiving his wife, and he decides to “cut the knot by force.” However, when he returns on horseback from the city to Varykino, he is stopped by the partisans of the red detachment and “forcibly mobilized as a medical worker.”
Zh. spends more than a year in captivity with the partisans, and directly tells the detachment commander Liveriy Mikulitsyn that he does not at all share the ideas of Bolshevism: “When I hear about the remaking of life, I lose power over myself and fall into despair.<...>life is never a material, a substance. She herself, if you want to know, is a constantly renewing, eternally reworking principle, she herself is forever remaking and transforming herself, she herself is much higher than our stupid theories.” Zh. knows nothing about Lara and his family - he doesn’t know how his wife’s birth went (when he was captured, Tonya was pregnant). In the end, Zh. manages to escape from the detachment, and, having walked dozens of miles, he returns to Yuryatin. He comes to Lara’s apartment, but she and Katenka, having heard about his appearance in the area, went to the empty Varykino to wait for him there. While waiting for Lara, Zh. falls ill, and when he comes to his senses, he sees her nearby. They live together. J. works in an outpatient clinic and at medical courses. Despite his outstanding abilities as a diagnostician, he is treated with distrust, criticized for his “intuitionism” and suspected of idealism. He receives a letter from Moscow from his wife, which was written five months ago: Tonya reported that their daughter Masha was born, and also that her father, uncle and she and her children were being sent abroad.
Komarovsky, who arrived in Yuryatin, tells Zh.: “There is a certain communist style. Few people fit this standard. But no one violates this manner of living and thinking as clearly as you<...>You are a mockery of this world, an insult to it.<...>Your destruction is next." Nevertheless, Zh. refuses Komarovsky’s offer to leave for the Far East, and he and Lara decide to wait out the danger in Barykino. There J. begins to write down previously composed poems at night, as well as work on new things: “he experienced the approach of what is called inspiration. The balance of forces that govern creativity seems to be on its head. Primacy is given not to the person and the state of his soul for which he seeks expression, but to the language with which he wants to express it. Language, the homeland and container of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for a person and becomes entirely music, not in relation to externally auditory sound, but in relation to the swiftness and power of its internal flow.” Komarovsky arrives in Varykino, who in a secret conversation with Zhivago reports that Strelnikov/Antipov, Lara’s husband, was shot and she and her daughter are in great danger. Z. agrees that Lara and Katenka leave with Komarovsky, telling her that he himself will join them later. Left alone in Barykino, Zh. drinks at night and writes poems dedicated to Lara, “but Lara of his poems and notes, as one word was erased and replaced by another, moved further and further from her true prototype.” One day, Strelnikov appears in the Varykino house, who turns out to be alive; he and J. talk all night, and in the morning, when!J. still sleeping, Strelnikov shoots himself in the temple at the porch of the house. After burying him, 2K. goes to Moscow, where he arrives in the spring of 1922, accompanied by the peasant youth Vasya Brykin (whom he met on the road from Moscow to Yuryatin). In Moscow, Zh. begins to write small books that “contained the philosophy of Yuri Andreevich, a presentation of his medical views, his definitions of health and illness, thoughts about transformism and evolution, about personality as the biological basis of the body, Yuri Andreevich’s thoughts on history and religion,<...>essays on the Pugachev places where the doctor visited, Yuri Andreevich’s poems and stories”; Vasya is engaged in their publication, but gradually their cooperation ceases. J. is trying to go abroad to visit his family, but without much energy. He settles in the Sventitskys’ former apartment, where he occupies a small room; he “abandoned medicine, turned into a slob, stopped meeting his acquaintances and began to live in poverty.” Then he meets Marina, the janitor’s daughter: “she became the third wife of Yuri Andreevich, not registered in the registry office, while the first was not divorced. They started having children”: “two girls, Kapka and Klashka.” One day Zh. disappears: on the street he meets Evgraf, and he rents him a room in Kamergersky Lane - the same one in which Antipov once lived as a student and in the window of which Zh. saw a candle burning on the table. J. begins to work on articles and poems, the subject of which is the city. He enters service at the Botkin Hospital; but when J. goes there for the first time by tram, he has a heart attack: he manages to get out of the car and dies on the street. J.'s poems collected by Evgraf constitute the final part of the novel.
Yuri Zhivago is the main character of Boris Leonidovich Pasternak’s novel “Doctor Zhivago”; a successful medic who served during the war; husband of Antonina Gromeko and half-brother of Major General Efgraf Zhivago. Yuri was orphaned early, losing first his mother, who died as a result of a long illness, and then his father, who, while intoxicated, jumped from a train moving at full speed. His life was not easy. As the author himself said, he came up with the hero’s surname from an expression taken from a prayer: “God Zhivago.” The phrase implied an association with Jesus Christ, “who heals all living things.” This is how Pasternak wanted to see his character.
It is believed that the prototype of the hero was the author himself, or rather his spiritual biography. He himself said that Doctor Zhivago should be associated not only with him, but rather with Blok, with Mayakovsky, perhaps even with Yesenin, that is, with those authors who passed away early, leaving behind a valuable volume of poetry. The novel covers the entire first half of the twentieth century, and the doctor passes away in the turning point year of 1929. It turns out that in some sense it is an autobiographical novel, but in another sense it is not. Yuri Andreevich witnessed the October Revolution and the First World War. At the front he was a practicing doctor, and at home he was a caring husband and father.
However, events developed in such a way that all life went contrary to the established order in society. At first he was left without parents, then he was raised in a family of distant relatives. He subsequently married the daughter of his benefactors, Tanya Gromeko, although he was more attracted to the mysterious Lara Guichard, whose tragedy he could not know then. Over time, life brought these two together, but they did not stay together for long. The homewrecker was the same ill-fated lawyer Komarovsky, after a conversation with whom Yuri’s father jumped out of the train.
In addition to healing, Zhivago was interested in literature and writing poetry. After his death, friends and family discovered notebooks in which he wrote down his poems. One of them began with the words: “The candle was burning on the table, the candle was burning...” It was born in his head that evening when he and Tonya were heading to the Christmas tree with friends and witnessed how Lara shot her mother’s lover. This incident remained forever in his memory. That same evening she explained herself to Pasha Antipov, who became her legal husband. Events developed in such a way that Lara and Pasha broke up, and Yura, after being wounded, ended up in the hospital where she worked as a nurse. There an explanation took place, during which Yura admitted that he loved her.
The doctor's wife and two children were expelled from the country and emigrated to France. Tonya knew about his relationship with Lara, but continued to love him. The turning point for him was the separation from Larisa, who was taken away by Komarovsky in a fraudulent manner. After this, Zhivago completely neglected himself, did not want to practice medicine and was not interested in anything. The only thing that fascinated him was poetry. At first he had a good attitude towards the revolution, but after being in captivity, where he had to shoot living people, he changed his enthusiasm to compassion for innocent people. He deliberately refused to participate in history.
Essentially, this character lived the life he wanted to live. Outwardly he looked weak-willed, but in fact he had a strong mind and good intuition. Zhivago died of a heart attack that happened to him on a crowded tram. Larisa Antipova (Guichard) was also at his funeral. As it turned out, she had a daughter from Yuri, whom she was forced to give up to be raised by a stranger. After his death, his half-brother Evgraf Zhivago took care of his niece and his brother’s work.