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Part 16: Epilogue
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’s collected poems, presented in this final chapter, reflect many of the same themes that interested him throughout his life. Tragedies foretold and the inescapability of fate are contrasted to the rich, simple, and embodied pleasures of the earth: the smells of springtime, the sights and sounds of the white nights. Images of other characters, Lara especially, flash by, as does the great thunderstorm in Meliuzeevo and the empty, isolated house in Varykino. Some poems also draw from Russian folk epics depicting knights and dragons. Other poems refer to the Bible and Christian mysticism. One poem directly recalls the candle burning on Kamergersky Lane on a frigid, snowy night; another Yuri’s lonely time in Varykino after Lara’s departure. The penultimate poems reconsider the story of Mary Magdalene, while the final poem describes Jesus’s last night on earth, comparing the judgment of God to the unstoppable progress of history.
Yuri’s poems condense the themes and ideas that interested and motivated him throughout his life. Vivid images, memories, and literary references concentrate and reimagine people, feelings, and happenings he experienced or encountered throughout his life. Yuri draws on the Bible at length, more as a kind of universal reference than out of strict religious devotion. The most charged moments of his life reappear as the settings of or inspirations for his poems: his childhood, his mother’s funeral, the fateful Christmas party at the Sventitskys’, the summer of 1917 in Meliuzeevo, his time spent living with Lara in Yuriatin and Varykino. In his poems as in his diaries and philosophical writings, the influence of Nikolai Nikolaevich’s prerevolutionary mystic humanism continues to shine through as Yuri attempts to make sense of the world through philosophical systems that no longer make sense in an utterly transformed society, systems which may in fact be that much more powerful because of their strangely anachronistic nature.
Themes
