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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Doctor Zhivago, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
History and Agency
Destiny
Social Differences and Social Change
Love and Responsibility
Russian Culture and Christianity
Summary
Analysis
A funeral procession winds its way toward a monastery through winter weather. Passersby ask who is being buried and are told the funeral procession is for Marya Nikolaevna Zhivago. After the service, her coffin is lowered into the grave, causing her 10-year-old son to burst into tears. The boy, Yuri Andreevich Zhivago, is comforted by his uncle, Nikolai Nikolaevich Vedenyapin, the only other family member present. Nikolai Nikolaevich and Yuri stay overnight in the monastery, waiting out a powerful blizzard. The next day they will head south, where Nikolai Nikolaevich works for a progressive newspaper. Yuri’s father, a millionaire, has long since abandoned his family and wasted his fortune, and Marya Nikolaevna’s illness thrust them into poverty.
The novel begins not with Yuri Zhivago’s birth, but the defining event of his childhood: the loss of his mother. For the young Yuri, this is an unprecedented, mysterious loss, and the religious rituals that surround it only reinforce the unpredictable nature of destiny. This opening passage immediately establishes Yuri’s—and the novel’s—heterodox, mystical relationship to Christianity.
Themes
Sometime later, in the summer, Yuri and Nikolai Nikolaevich are riding in a carriage through a field, on their way to visit the prominent intellectual Voskoboinikov on the Duplyanka estate. Nikolai Nikolaevich is working on a book on the land question, and eagerly asks the coach driver about civil unrest in the area. Despite his uncle’s rising fame as a progressive thinker, Yuri is more concerned with the natural beauty of Duplyanka. Voskoboinikov convinces Nikolai Nikolaevich to stay for tea. They engage in a spirited debate about the meaning of history and independent thinking—Nikolai Nikolaevich, a former priest, was defrocked for his unusual beliefs. Their conversation is interrupted suddenly when they observe the usual five o’clock express come to a stop as it passes by on the other side of the river—it seems to have had some kind of accident.
The description of Nikolai Nikolaevich’s professional and intellectual pursuits contextualize Yuri’s uncle as part of the progressive, prerevolutionary intelligentsia. Late 19th-century Russia was an underdeveloped country with no political freedom. The land question, or the debate over how to transition from the post-serfdom peasant economy to a modern property system, whether capitalist or socialist, was one of the most urgent political debates of the era. Nikolai Nikolaevich’s past in the priesthood hints at his diverse influences and views.
Themes
Left to his own devices, Yuri explores the house and estate alone, having failed to find the only other adolescent boy there, Nika Dudorov. He prays for his mother but declines to pray for his father too.
The degree to which Yuri is comfortable alone suggests that he has had a lonely childhood since losing his mother, while his prayers reveal his father’s continued absence in his life—and Yuri’s complicated feelings about it.
Themes
Meanwhile, on the train, an 11-year-old boy named Misha Gordon is travelling with his father Grigory Osipovich Gordon, a lawyer—they are both moving to Moscow. Misha is immersed in his own thoughts when suddenly the train erupts in chaos as a man tries to take his own life by throwing himself from the train. Misha’s father tries to prevent the suicide, pulling the emergency brake, but he’s too late: the man who threw himself out of the train is already dead, and the passengers discuss the cause, a case of delirium tremens. Misha is disturbed, recalling the dead man’s long discussions with his father, who attempted to reassure the increasingly erratic man—only for the man to be taken away and encouraged to drink more by his own lawyer, who also traveling on the train
Misha is too young to grasp the entirety of what is happening, but he realizes that the man who kills himself—a professional acquaintance of Misha’s father—is deeply mentally unwell. Misha’s father’s attempts to calm the man are frustrated, however, by the man’s own lawyer, who clearly has his own reasons for encouraging the man’s increasingly self-destructive behavior.
Themes
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Back at the estate the teenage ward Nika, not wishing to speak to the guests, hides until Yuri goes off on his own. Nika, whose father is an imprisoned terrorist, is wounded and resentful and daydreams of revolution. Walking down to the pond, Nika runs into Nadya, the daughter of Kologrivov, the owner of Duplyanka. They take a boat out onto the pond and start to argue, falling over into the water. Nika apologizes, quietly pleased by his closeness to Nadya.
The slightly older Nika offers a sharp contrast to Yuri, despite their biographical similarities. Nika is preoccupied with politics and worldly affairs and eagerly looks forward to participating in politics—in revolutionary violence, specifically. Nika struggles to admit his feelings to himself or others, as he suppresses his affection for Nadya and covers it up with crude and aggressive rhetoric.
Themes
