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Part 10: On the High Road
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
Yuri remains with the partisans for nearly two years. He is not kept prisoner within their camp, but they recapture him each time he tries to leave. Liberius takes a liking to him and invites the doctor to share his tent. Yuri finds Liberius grating, especially when the commander takes cocaine. The partisans march east, sometimes on the offensive and sometimes in retreat. The towns along the highway continually change hands. In one such town, Yuri is surprised to meet Pelageya Tyagunova, who tells him that she and Vasya made it back to his village only for the neighbors to force them out. She attempted to reach her sister Galuzina in Krestovozdvizhensk, but Galuzina’s husband Vlas has already been executed, and her property has been confiscated. She has also heard that Vasya’s village has since been burnt down.
The narrative moves around in time significantly in this period, telling the tale of Yuri’s time with the partisans in the form of images and anecdotes throughout the two years—from 1919 to 1921, approximately, or the latter half of the civil war—rather than in one continuous story arc. This fragmented narrative mirrors the course of the war itself, as the partisans advance and retreat, crisscrossing Siberia to fight the Whites. The cocaine Liberius abuses was still commonly used as medicine at the time, though recreational consumption was also popular. Pelageya and Galuzina turn out to be sisters in another coincidence visible only to the reader, while the mention of Vasya foreshadows his future reappearance too.
Themes
The partisans keep Yuri busy, as they are alternately sick or wounded all year round. Their army continues to grow, however, bolstered by deserters from the Whites. The White Army ambush the partisans. After the solider next to him is killed by the Whites, Yuri finds himself forced to participate in the firefight. Yuri struggles to shoot at the Whites, whom he feels he has more in common with than his fellow partisans.
Yuri is functionally the partisans’ prisoner, but he also feels some sense of mission or obligation not to the Bolshevik cause, but as a doctor tasked with caring for the people around him. Still, for Yuri this extends to the battlefield itself, where his ability to sympathize with and humanize the Whites makes him doubt whether he is on the right side.
Themes
Instead of shooting the enemy, Yuri deliberately shoots a nearby tree—only to accidentally kill one of the White officers who walks in front of it. Examining the dead partisan whose rifle he took, Yuri finds an amulet containing garbled excerpts from the 91st Psalm. To his surprise, the White officer has the very same kind psalm in his own amulet—an amulet which caught the bullet and in fact saved his life. Yuri switches the dead partisan and White officer’s uniforms and nurses the latter back to health, even though the grateful wounded soldier tells the doctor that he will return to the White Army to continue fighting them once he recovers.
The arbitrary, happenstance nature of war and combat turns Yuri’s attempts to avoid killing someone into what he thinks is the first time he has killed a man. The 91st Psalm is a popular prayer about taking shelter with God, an idea with deep roots in Russian culture which clearly gave equal comfort to both the partisan and the White officer, despite their social and political differences. By secretly healing the White officer, Yuri again demonstrates that he is more loyal to an abstract idea of humane neutrality and medical practice than to the revolution or the partisans around him.
Themes
The partisans set up camp deep in the woods. Liberius chatters ceaselessly, making it impossible for Yuri to sleep. As the commander tries to goad him into a debate Yuri becomes impatient and advises Liberius to stop taking cocaine. Yuri explains his skepticism of the revolution as the result of his doubt that life can be so radically remade. Liberius refuses to take Yuri’s arguments seriously, however, and insists both that the revolution will triumph and that the doctor will come around to it. Yuri asks Liberius if the rumors of an attack on Varykino are true. When Liberius squarely denies it, Yuri asks to be released, or at least to be allowed to sleep in peace. Then, enraged, he turns his face to his pillow.
Liberius and Yuri have nearly opposite characters and dispositions, but while the commander appreciates the doctor’s company, Yuri finds little of interest in Liberius’s revolutionary theories. Far away from the cities, the partisans rely on rumors to know what has happened to their friends and family, especially at this point in the war when the Whites have retaken many key cities. Whether Liberius is telling the truth about Varykino or lying or withholding information to keep Yuri cooperative is left unclear.
Themes
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Fall arrives once again. The partisans discuss what to do with a handful of arrested moonshiners. The camp is uneasy, as many of the partisans refuse to march forward until their families—fleeing the Whites behind them—catch up with them. Amidst this disorder, Vdovichenko is contesting Liberius’s leadership. Yuri is also tasked with examining a partisan named Pamphil Palykh, who has apparently gone mad. Exhausted, Yuri decides to first take a nap in the woods. Lying under a tree, his intermittent napping and absent-minded philosophizing are interrupted by nearby voices. Listening carefully, Yuri identifies the voices as moonshiners, their friend Teresha Galuzin, and one of Liberius’s guards. They’re speaking with a White Army scout—and plotting to betray and murder Liberius. Yuri is outraged, but the conspiracy is uncovered before he can inform the Liberius—it turns out that the guard was a double agent the whole time.
Alcohol was banned by the Bolsheviks, but they struggled to curb a vibrant illegal trade in liquor, especially between soldiers. The partisans also face a particular dilemma as a guerilla army: their homes and families offer the Whites easy targets for reprisal, but traveling with their families will slow them down and make them a less effective fighting force. Vdovichenko’s power struggle with Liberius mirrors the internal divisions within the revolution, as the anarchists eventually become outright enemies of the Bolsheviks. Yuri’s accidental discovery of the conspiracy against Liberius reveals more complicated feelings toward the partisans than the doctor would like to admit. He has developed sympathy and even loyalty toward them, as skeptical of their goals and upset by their methods as he may be.
Themes
Yuri examines Pamphil Palykh, who is making his tent more comfortable for his family, despite strict Red Army rules separating soldiers and civilians. Yuri asks Pamphil to explain his melancholy as he understands it. The partisan narrates his experience of the war and the revolution and his discovery that the ruling class is his true enemy, not the German soldiers. Pamphil sees the situation as increasingly hopeless, however, and is morbidly obsessed with the cruel fate that will befall his family once the partisans are defeated.
Pamphil Palykh offers an example of a person for whom the revolution is utterly transformative, with the Bolsheviks giving him the language to make sense of the world around him in a way he was unable to before. But this newfound power stands in contrast to the starkness of their situation, and Pamphil’s enthusiasm for the communist cause has soured into violence and fear.
Themes
Pamphil then tells Yuri about the one killing he feels guilty about because he still does not understand why he did it: he shot an officer who fell into a barrel, much to Pamphil’s amusement. Yuri is convinced Pamphil is referring to Gintz, but Pamphil no longer remembers the time or place of the murder.
Pamphil’s story is unmistakably that of Gintz’s death—the fact that the partisan does not remember is likely due to his own mental instability and the constant killing that has desensitized him to violence. The strange circumstances and inexplicability of this particular murder, however, make it impossible even for the inarticulate Pamphil to forget about.
Themes
