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Part 3: The Christmas Party at the Sventitskys’
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 night of the shooting, a delirious Lara stays at the Sventitskys’, where she requires more medical attention than her victim. Komarovsky also stays behind, agitated and unsure of how to rectify the situation; he is torn between his anger at Lara and the renewed power of his desire for her. Komarovsky prevents the police from arresting Lara and is determined to hush up the affair—to protect both Lara and his own reputation. He has Lara moved to a rented room, and he economically supports her while keeping his distance. Kologrivov visits Lara and offers to find her a new apartment, which she moves to after recovering. Pasha Antipov continues to pine for Lara, though she refuses to fully explain the circumstances that led to her attempted murder of Komarovsky.
Lara’s decision to shoot Komarovsky was not premediated but made in the heat of the moment, which explains the nervous she experiences afterward. Komarovsky is motivated by his affection for Lara, his guilt for how he has treated her, and his concern for his reputation; if he were to spurn Lara entirely, she might go public about their past affair. Komarovsky has given up winning Lara back, and he is now determined to keep her—and himself—out of trouble. Lara, for her part, is willing to let go of her desire for independence, at least for the time being, and so she accepts the help Komarovsky and Kologrivov offer her.
Themes
Lara attempts to rebuff Pasha’s advances, as she feels unworthy of his love, but he sees through her worries and insecurities, and they eventually marry. The couple have a traditional church wedding followed by a party at their new apartment. That night they do not sleep as Lara finally explains her past to Pasha, a story which leaves him a changed man the next day. Ten days later the Antipovs host a going-away party as they prepare to move to the Urals to work as teachers. Their things already packed up for the train trip the next morning, they drink and carouse all night—even Komarovsky is invited. Early in the morning, Lara wakes up to a thief in the apartment. Her shouting wakes the guests, and they chase the thief out before departing for the station and leaving Moscow.
Pasha correctly diagnoses Lara’s quest for independence to a kind of trauma response, one that cannot fix her problems or make her happy, a realization that slowly dawns on Lara herself as well. Pasha is stunned by Lara’s confession, having learned after years of knowing her the secret source of her pain and unhappiness. Pasha agrees to move to the Urals both because of his own limited options as someone from a working-class background, and because he wants to help Lara escape the past. Still, they try to leave Moscow without bad blood, as Lara’s courteous invitation to Komarovsky suggests.
Themes
Fall 1915 finds Russia mired in war, its armies in retreat after several military setbacks. Yuri is now a doctor and will soon be a father, but he cannot stay at the maternity ward with Tonya—there are too many wounded soldiers to care for at his own hospital. When Tonya goes into labor, Yuri is not allowed into the operating room. Instead, he waits outside and listens to her screams as he watches the rain. Tonya gives birth to a son, but Yuri is more relieved by the end of his wife’s suffering than he is pleased to become a father: parenthood is a new condition of his life, and he struggles to understand it. Yuri returns to work, where he is congratulated not on the birth of his son but on a successful diagnosis, before being told the bad news—he is being sent to the front.
The narrative skips ahead several years, bypassing the start of World War I. In 1914, Russia entered the war and immediately suffered several major defeats; the medical system was particularly ill-prepared, and hospitals were overwhelmed with wounded soldiers. The war also turned regular life upside down, as Yuri’s inability to be there for his son’s birth would suggest. Yuri’s experience at the hospital is also representative of his life, however, as his poetic nature keeps him distant from the people around him, even as fate throws him into increasingly extreme situations.
Themes
The Antipovs settle in Yuriatin, a provincial city in the Urals. Lara teaches at a girls’ school and cares for their daughter, Katenka, while Pasha teaches Latin and history. Pasha struggles to adjust, however, as he finds the citizens of Yuriatin backwards and ignorant. He dreams of a transfer to Petersburg. Pasha becomes disillusioned with his marriage too, but he struggles to imagine a different life for himself. He feels hopelessly inferior to Lara and belittled by her maternal feelings towards him. One night, unable to sleep, Pasha is struck by inspiration upon seeing a passing military train. Over Lara’s protestations, he volunteers to join the war, though she soon realizes his desire to get away from domestic life has motivated his decision to leave. Pasha quickly becomes an officer, is sent to the front, and stops writing letters home. Lara, hoping to find him, enlists herself as a nurse and leaves for the front as well.
By 1915 several large cities had developed in the Urals, but they had a reputation as cultural backwaters far, far away from the capital and the spirited intellectual and political debates that took place there. Pasha, the son of a revolutionary and a precocious intellectual, is understimulated by this environment. He also increasingly resents Lara’s generous and kind but also cool and distant nature; Pasha knows that this is Lara’s response to her traumatic upbringing, but he is unable to shake his own feelings all the same. The war, for Pasha, is an opportunity to radically remake and prove himself.
Themes
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Misha Gordon arrives at the front too, intending to visit his childhood friend Zhivago. A chaotic journey from the train station to the village where Zhivago is stationed impresses upon Gordon the total destruction of the war. Successful Russian attacks are surrounded and cut off by Austrian counterattacks. Soldiers claim that in one of these attacks, Lieutenant Antipov was taken prisoner, but Lieutenant Galliulin disputes this rumor, claiming that he saw German artillery kill Antipov.
Gordon, like many other privileged Russians, is not called up to fight in the war, and is unprepared for the total devastation of the frontlines. The eastern front of World War I (where the Russian army fought the Austrian and German armies in what is now Poland and Ukraine) was not characterized by the same trench warfare as the western front, and the frontlines changed significantly at rapid, unpredictable intervals.
Themes
Galliulin is in fact Yusupka Gimazetdin (the former engine master’s apprentice at the railroad depot); initially stationed far to the rear, Galliulin found himself in command of his old master, Khudoleev. Unable to restrain himself from enacting his revenge of the old man, Galliulin instead volunteered for the front, where he quickly found success in battle. Galliulin is struck by the change in his childhood acquaintance Antipov, who has grown into an imperious and demanding leader. After Antipov’s disappearance, Galliulin receives Lara’s letters, but he continually delays answering them, as he neither knows what to say to her nor where to reach her.
Galliulin, who is Tatar, changes his last name to a less obviously racialized name to avoid discrimination in the Russian army. Made up of soldiers from across the vast and diverse empire, the Russian army included numerous minorities from central Asia. Galliulin is torn between his natural, human desire for revenge and his own powerful sense of honor, though the latter ultimately wins out. The change in Antipov that Galliulin witnesses suggests that Antipov’s plan is working and that the extraordinary circumstances of war do offer people the opportunity to reinvent themselves.
Themes
Gordon reaches the village where Yuri Zhivago’s hospital is located. Reunited, the two friends talk late into the hot autumn night, their conversations disturbed by the sounds and flashes of artillery in the distance. Traveling with Zhivago, Gordon sees more and more of the war, including a gruesome scene at a field hospital, where Zhivago treats soldiers wounded by enemy artillery. At the field hospital one day, Gordon sees an angry officer ride off toward the fighting, a beautiful nurse caring for the wounded, and a horribly disfigured older soldier die of his wounds. These people are none other than Galliulin, Lara, and the elder Gimazetdin, respectively, though none of them recognize one another, nor do they register the circumstances that bind them together.
Even as the war upends life completely, some measure of normalcy always settles in, as Yuri and Gordon’s conversations demonstrate. The encounter at the field hospital reveals the mysterious nature of fate. Here, circumstance brings together characters who have met before yet fail to recognize each other. Galliulin does not even notice his own father, who has been so badly wounded that his face is unrecognizable.
Themes
One day, Gordon and Zhivago observe a Cossack tormenting an elderly Jewish villager. After ordering him to stop, Zhivago condemns the antisemitism of their own troops. Later, Zhivago tells Gordon about his encounter with the Tsar, who visited their unit earlier in the war. Surprisingly, Zhivago found him a pitiable figure—the Tsar seemed embarrassed, far too weak and human to possess the oppressive power that he does. Gordon then returns to the subject of antisemitism, explaining his theory: for Gordon, Christianity offers an opportunity at new, individual redemption and rebirth. Judaism, by contrast, is stuck in the past, clinging to tradition and refusing the opportunity to remake itself anew—and, in doing so, Jewish people leave themselves open to persecution. The frontline quickly advances on their position. Gordon escapes with the first retreating unit, but Zhivago is wounded by artillery.
Much of the eastern front of World War I was fought in territory previously allotted to the Russian Empire’s Jewish population, which faced discrimination and whose movement elsewhere was heavily restricted. The antisemitic attacks that were already common before the war continued throughout, as Yuri and Gordon witness. Gordon’s theory of antisemitism reflects common sentiments at the time which, though sympathetic to the plight of Jewish people, are themselves antisemitic, blaming Jewish people for their own persecution. Yuri’s recollection of the Tsar indicates the deepening crisis of faith in the monarchy, even for unpolitical people like him.
Themes
Weeks later, Yuri finds himself recovering in a hospital in a provincial town much farther from the front. With him are Galliulin, also wounded, and Lara, who is working there as a nurse. Galliulin cannot bring himself to tell her the truth and confirms the rumors that Antipov was captured, but Lara is skeptical. Yuri , for his part, withholds the fact that he has met Lara before and rebuffs her medical attention, opting to treat himself instead. Lara longs to return home to Katenka; Yuri similarly wishes to be with his family. Yuri learns that Dudorov and Gordon published a book of his poetry to very favorable reviews, but growing unrest overshadows that happy news. One night, as Lara and Galliulin talk and realize their past connection from the 1905 Revolution, word reaches the hospital that revolution has broken out again, this time in Petersburg.
Fate brings Yuri, Lara, and Galliulin together once again, though they all keep secret from each other their past connections. The war continues to shape their lives, separating them from their friends and family. The publication of Yuri’s book is a bittersweet occasion for him: during the war, the Russian cultural renaissance in avant-garde poetry and art continued unabated. By this time, however, Russia was in social crisis, as the continued defeats and economic costs of the war had dramatically lowered living standards. In February 1917, while the characters are in the hospital together, a general uprising in Petersburg forced the Tsar to hand over power to the new Provisional Government.
Themes
