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Part 15: The Ending
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 summer of 1943 finds Gordon and Dudorov together again, this time as Red Army officers on leave together following a major breakthrough against the Germans. As the two friends talk, Dudorov explains how his fiancée sacrificed herself to blow up a fortified German position, allowing the other Soviet soldiers to retake the town. Their units are both under the command of Evgraf Zhivago, now a general. They reflect on their respective experiences in the camps; Gordon too was sentenced to hard labor, but because of the war was offered his freedom in exchange for being sent to the front. The war, they both agree, is perversely liberating, having restored to Russia a sense of collective purpose. They observe how another woman in town, an uneducated peasant named Tanya, greatly resembles the late Yuri Zhivago.
The narrative skips ahead at least 10 years, bypassing the beginning of World War II and moving straight to 1943, when the tide of the war finally turned and the Red Army began to push back against Nazi Germany. World War II was even more of a total war than World War I and the civil war, with practically every element of Soviet society mobilized to fight the Germans, including the drafting of millions of non-soldiers like Gordon and Dudorov. The war abruptly ended most of the Stalinist purges, as the state was forced to ease its repression and concentrate its resources on defending the country and its people against the German invasion. Volunteering for the front literally freed numerous penal soldiers like Gordon.
Themes
Gordon and Dudorov find Tanya in a crowd talking about her conversation with General Evgraf Zhivago, who asked her to tell the story of her own life and quietly listened before telling her she was his niece and promising to enroll her in a school of her choice. Gordon and Dudorov ask her to repeat her story for them. Tanya explains that her mother, Raissa Komarova, was the wife of an exiled White politician named Komarov, though Komarov was not her father. When the Red Army invaded the holdout White government the Far East and Tanya’s mother was forced to flee, she left Tanya with a railroad signalman’s wife at Komarov’s insistence. The family that raised Tanya were cruel and neglectful, resenting her good health because their own son had withered legs.
How Evgraf has survived the numerous purges and power struggles up to now is as mysterious as ever, but he continues to use his power and influence to help the people around him, and his family in particular. As Tanya narrates her story it becomes clear that she is in fact Lara and Yuri’s daughter, that Komarov is none other than Komarovsky, and that Raissa Komarova is in fact Lara Antipova. The exact circumstances of her abandonment, and to what extent Komarovsky was trying to save Lara or manipulate her is also unclear, as is the story of how Lara escaped the Far East only to return to Moscow years later.
Themes
One night, the signalman’s wife was awoken by a bandit who claimed to have killed her husband already and demanded her money. The wife told him it was in the basement; to avoid being locked in, the bandit took their disabled son down as a hostage—though the wife first tried to get him to take Tanya instead. The wife managed to lock them in, and Tanya ran to a nearby train for help, finding Red Army soldiers who summarily executed the bandit and, at her insistence, took her onboard the train, beginning a life of travel that eventually brought her here.
Tanya’s story is horrific in itself, but it is also representative of the chaos and violence that took place across Russia during and after the civil war as the Bolsheviks struggled to restore order to society. This trauma, however, also freed Tanya and allowed her to leave home to begin a new life of self-discovery.
Themes
Gordon and Dudorov reflect on the incredible twists of fate that have come to pass, and what they see as a sad degeneration from Yuri’s refined background to Tanya’s brutal and difficult upbringing. But this transformation, they say to each other, is simply the law of history, a change equally evident in Russia itself.
Gordon and Dudorov’s elitist judgement of Tanya, while sympathetic, reveals how much they too are still shaped by their privileged prerevolutionary backgrounds despite their coming to terms with the new Soviet way of life. Their experiences since the revolution have disillusioned them, however, and they increasingly share the late Yuri’s philosophy of history as a force beyond their control.
Themes
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Back in Moscow many years later, Gordon and Dudorov sit together and read through Yuri’s notebooks. Though the end of the war did not ultimately bring freedom to Russia, the two friends find in themselves a freedom of the soul. They feel at peace with themselves, the city, the country, and history itself, a sense of peace they find concentrated and perfected in the book they are reading together.
After the war ended, Stalinist repression returned, though not at the same level of intensity as before, and it continued until Stalin’s death in 1953. Only after this novel was published did the new leader Nikita Khrushchev initiate a period of relative cultural and political openness, a possibility still far away for Gordon and Dudorov. Instead, the two friends look inward. At last, they see Yuri’s work not as a rejection of the world, but as a way to remain true to themselves—and to history—when the world around them does not allow them to otherwise.
Themes
