Previous
Part 14: In Varykino Again
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
The last decade or so of Yuri’s life proceeds under the shadow of his experiences in the Urals as he gradually loses both his physical health and mental acuity. He returns to Moscow at the beginning of the NEP, arriving in an even more disheveled state than he was upon his return to Yuriatin, accompanied by a young companion he picked up along the way. Yuri makes most of his journey back to Moscow on foot, travelling all summer through villages devasted by the civil war, fields full of rotting, unharvested crops, and forests in full bloom without people around to hunt the animals or log the trees. In one burnt-down village he meets a young man who recognizes him: Vasya Brykin, the escaped labor conscript.
This chapter proceeds quickly through the 1920s and the postwar reconstruction of the Soviet Union. After the war and during the NEP, the Soviet Union returned to a state of normalcy that, while it stabilized society and the economy, disappointed many committed Bolsheviks who saw the country backsliding toward capitalism again. Though the Red terror ended—for a time—Yuri is still an odd man out in this society, unable to fit in with both party loyalists and the savvy businessmen rebuilding a war-ravaged Russia.
Themes
Vasya explains to Yuri that shortly after the other villagers chased out Pelageya Tyagunova, a murder threw the village into chaos. The villagers were unable to resolve the crime themselves and so the Red Army set up a military court, which soon turned to punishing the villagers for hoarding crops. One night a fire broke out and the drunken soldiers were burned alive in the house they had commandeered, prompting the other villagers to flee for fear of further punishment, leaving Vasya all alone.
Vasya continues to represent the naïve, innocent, and apolitical peasants who felt unrepresented by any side in the civil war. His fellow villagers were neither supporters nor opponents of the Red Army. Regardless, they were forced to go into hiding out of fear of reprisals for their lack of loyalty, as the Bolshevik authorities would not believe their story that the soldiers’ house burned down by accident.
Themes
Yuri and Vasya follow the spirit of the NEP and set up a small business: Vasya, who enrolls in art school, uses his equipment to print small books of Yuri’s poems, stories, and philosophy which they then sell. Yuri also finds some part-time work as a doctor. As Vasya embraces the revolution more and more their relationship frays; Yuri remains trapped in the past and focused on petitioning for his family’s return to Russia. Eventually they split up and Yuri moves in with his old porter Markel, who has become the superintendent of the Sventitskys’ former estate. Markel treats his now-pitiful former master with a mixture of benevolence and scorn, but Markel’s daughter Marina defends Yuri .
Despite his difficult experience of the civil war, the younger and more impressionable Vasya, unlike Yuri, manages to adapt to the new society. Yuri enjoys the benefits of the cultural renaissance that took place in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, when the state broadly encouraged and supported artistic experimentation, but he is unable transform himself into a Soviet citizen. Yuri’s petitions are not necessarily hopeless, as many emigres did return in the 1920s, but whether his family even wants to come back is unclear. Markel’s new position of power demonstrates the major changes in society, as estates are officially converted into public housing and former servants are empowered as the new managers of socialist Moscow.
Themes
Marina and Yuri grow close and soon move in together, although they cannot marry, as the doctor is still legally married to Tonya. They have two daughters together. Yuri maintains his old friendships with Gordon and Dudorov, but he remains disappointed by the ways that his friends have changed. He finds their vocabulary bland and unoriginal, their ideas recycled, their minds incurious about the world. He respects their passion but finds himself thinking that the only thing that truly makes them special is their connection to him. All of these thoughts the doctor keeps to himself, however, and instead he listens quietly to Dudorov explain his newfound embrace of Bolshevism after his return from exile in a labor camp. Yuri gets up to leave, explaining that his friends’ smoking habit irritates his increasingly frail heart.
Yuri’s relationship with Marina is tender and loving but lacks the passion of his very different love affairs with both Lara and Tonya. The doctor has become so passive and detached that it is not clear he is even capable of such powerful feelings anymore. Yuri’s fraying friendship with Gordon and Dudorov also reveals how he has cut himself off from the world; while the doctor observes something genuine in the way his friends compromise themselves to adapt to the new way of life, in his deep arrogance and self-importance he fails to see that this is a necessary part of life and is not mutually exclusive with profundity and insight into the world. Yuri’s weakened mental state is matched by his increasingly poor health, as the same heart issues that killed his mother and possibly caused his past fainting episodes worsen.
Themes
Get the entire Doctor Zhivago LitChart as a printable PDF.
Dudorov and Gordon chastise Yuri for his listless, aimless attitude toward life, telling him that he should want more for himself and his new family. He gently concedes the point. Before he leaves, Yuri tells his friends that Tonya, who is in Paris, has finally started answering his letters.
Dudorov and Gordon have Yuri’s best interests at heart and try to reignite their friend’s desire to live and experience the world, but Yuri remains unmoved by anything except his past joy, sorrow, and guilt.
Themes
The next day Marina visits Gordon and tells him she cannot find Yuri . Gordon and Dudorov search for the doctor for days before receiving a letter from him explaining his desire to be left alone to sort through his affairs and set his life in order; he leaves his considerable savings to Marina, in care of Gordon. Yuri is only a few streets away, set up in a new apartment on Kamergersky Lane thanks to Evgraf, who has also found him a proper job at a hospital due to start soon, leaving Yuri time to write first.
Yuri’s disappearance at first has all the hallmarks of a suicide, as he abruptly vanishes from his friends’ lives after making careful preparations. The fresh Evgraf has provided him is not mutually exclusive with a desire to die, as Yuri first attends to his legacy. Evgraf’s mysterious role in Yuri’s life allows him to give the doctor advice that Yuri would not accept from anyone else, as he considers his half-brother to be a kind of guardian angel.
Themes
Yuri busies himself writing and editing his old pieces, focusing in particular on the theme of the city—Moscow as he remembers it, and Moscow as it is today. One day, late in August, the doctor sets out to visit the hospital for the first time. He takes the tram, but his tram car breaks down continuously, blocking all the traffic behind it. Yuri sits patiently and looks out the window, watching an old woman walking alongside and keeping pace with the slow tram. Suddenly he feels violently ill and tries to open the window, which is fixed shut. He staggers off the tram and collapses. A crowd gathers around him, including the old woman—who is in fact Mademoiselle Fleury, in Moscow to arrange her return to France. She leaves, not realizing her connection to the now-dead man in front of her.
Moscow in the 1920s was a rapidly developing and transforming city that became increasingly unrecognizable to those who grew up in the prewar, prerevolutionary city. For Yuri, the city is a microcosm of the world around him, and living there allows him to take stock of the unfathomable transformations in his life. Yuri dies of an apparent heart attack, likely caused by the same condition that killed his mother. Whether he knew how serious his health problems were or if he had any genuine intention of really remaking his life remains unclear. The anonymous presence of Mademoiselle Fleury provides one last uncanny twist of fate.
Themes
Yuri’s body is laid out in his rented room on Kamergersky; Marina chooses not to have a church funeral in order to avoid compromising herself at work. Yuri’s friends are all present, but they leave the room when two strangers enter: Evgraf and Lara. Evgraf makes all the arrangements for the doctor’s funeral and begs Lara not to leave afterward, as he wants her help preparing Yuri’s manuscripts for publication. He offers to put her up in another room in the same building. Lara reflects on the impossible coincidence that this apartment is the very same one where Pasha Antipov (Strelnikov) lived before their marriage. She still believes he was executed, but Evgraf corrects her, explaining how Yuri was there for the final hours of Antipov’s life.
While the Soviet government did not ban churches and religious people continued to worship, the atheist Soviet government strongly discouraged Christianity. Worshippers could face unofficial sanctions and punishments and were thus forced to distance themselves from the church. How Lara comes to be at Yuri’s funeral and what has happened to her over the last decade is left unclear, though it’s likely that the equally mysterious Evgraf brought her there. Not only is the apartment Yuri was living in Antipov’s, but it was also the very same apartment where Yuri saw the candle burning in the window on Christmas many years ago. By telling Lara what Yuri told him about Strelnikov’s suicide, Evgraf closes the circle of their intertwined lives.
Themes
Lara agrees to stay. Katenka, who has become a talented actor and musician, is enrolling in the Moscow Conservatory. Left alone, Lara reflects on her life, marveling at the injustice of the fact that Yuri and Pasha Antipov (Strelnikov) are both dead while Komarovsky remains alive and free somewhere in East Asia. She then reminisces about her conversation with Pasha before her attempted murder of Komarovsky. Lara wonders if the candle in the windowsill set Yuri’s destiny in motion. Lara is filled with grief as she reflects on the total, complete nature of her and Yuri’s love and the darkly ironic nature of their reunion before the coffin is taken away. Afterward, Lara begins to help Evgraf sort through the manuscripts, but one day she disappears and is never seen again, most likely arrested and sent to her death in an unknown prison or labor camp.
Katenka also enjoys the benefits of Moscow’s vibrant cultural life in the early Soviet period, as many people who would never have had the opportunity before received training and careers in the arts. The revelation that Komarovsky survived highlights the deeply unfair nature of the world and of the civil war in particular—after so much death and devastation, some of the worst prerevolutionary oppressors are still alive and free. Lara’s abrupt disappearance is sadly typical of this era. As the NEP ended and Stalin took power, the government carried out a series of vicious purges in which a paranoid and robust secret police system imprisoned, exiled, or killed millions of people. So many people were arrested that the fate of many, like Lara, is lost to history.
Themes
