Doctor Zhivago Summary

In the late 19th century, Yuri Zhivago attends his mother’s funeral during a raging blizzard. The son of an absentee father, he is adopted by his uncle, the radical philosopher Nikolai Nikolaevich Vedenyapin. Sometime later, Yuri’s father dies in a train accident, which Yuri’s friend Misha Gordon witnesses.

During the Russo-Japanese war the widowed Madame Guichard moves to Moscow with her children, Lara and Rodion, and soon falls under the sway of the charismatic lawyer Komarovsky. As the railway workers go on strike and the city rises up against the Tsar, Komarovsky begins an affair with the teenage Lara. Yuri, meanwhile, is sheltered from the revolution and grows up in comfort with the Gromeko family, whose daughter Tonya and Misha Gordon become his best friends. One night Yuri and Gordon are brought along on a house call to assist Madame Guichard, who attempted suicide after learning of Lara’s affair, and Yuri is struck by Lara’s visage.

Tonya’s mother, Anna Ivanovna, develops severe pneumonia. Yuri enters university to become a doctor, and Anna Ivanovna urges him and Tonya to marry each other. Lara ends her affair with Komarovsky. Lara moves in with the Kologrivovs, who employ her as a tutor, but she is consumed with guilt and resolves to ask Komarovsky for money to marry her young suitor, Pasha Antipov, so that she can live independently. Lara finds him at a Christmas party, which Yuri and Tonya also attend. She attempts to shoot Komarovsky but wounds another man by accident. Yuri is called away, however, by the news that Anna Ivanovna has died of her illness. A guilty-feeling Komarovsky keeps Lara out of legal trouble. She marries Antipov and the couple soon leave Moscow, taking positions as teachers in the city of Yuriatin in the Urals.

By 1915 Yuri is married to Tonya. He keeps busy as a doctor treating the many wounded soldiers who return from the frontlines of World War I. Tonya gives birth to a son. Not long after, Yuri is drafted and sent to the front. In Yuriatin, Antipov is depressed and unhappy. He escapes his marriage by volunteering for the front, where he soon goes missing—some people claim he was captured, while others claim he was killed. Hoping to find him, Lara volunteers herself as a nurse. Gordon visits Yuri on the front, crossing paths with Lara and Galliulin (another soldier and Antipov and Lara’s childhood neighbor).

Yuri is wounded in combat and finds himself in a hospital in the provincial town of Meliuzeevo with Galliulin and Lara, who cares for him as he recovers. Soon, the February Revolution overtakes the country. An officer named Gintz badly mishandles a soldiers’ revolt, and Yuri, Lara, and Galliulin each barely escape Meliuzeevo. Gintz is killed. Yuri is eventually able to secure passage to Moscow, encountering on the train a deaf man named Pogorevshikh, who partially inspired the uprising.

Yuri finds Moscow radically changed, the hardships of war and revolution already taking their toll on the city. He and his family celebrate with his friends Gordon and Dudorov, and Yuri’s uncle, Nikolai Nikolaevich, who has recently returned from political exile. Yuri is greatly excited by the Bolshevik uprising and the new order it seems to promise, but his enthusiasm for the revolution wanes as winter sets in and food becomes increasingly scarce. Yuri becomes extremely ill and is saved only by the intervention of his mysterious half-brother Evgraf, who is well-connected with the authorities. Unsure if they will survive in starving Moscow, the Zhivago family and Tonya’s father, the liberal socialist Alexander Alexandrovich Gromeko, decide to leave for Varykino, the former country estate of Anna Ivanovna’s relatives outside of Yuriatin.

The train to Yuriatin carries a motley crew of soldiers, passengers, and labor-conscripts across war-torn Russia, passing through towns bustling with illegal trade and villages which have been burned to the ground by the Reds or the Whites. Many days and intermediate stops later the train finally reaches the outskirts of Yuriatin but can go no further, as the city is an active combat zone, though the Reds have the upper hand. A sentry arrests Yuri upon his dismemberment and brings him before the fearsome Red Army commander Strelnikov, who lets Yuri go but warns him that he may not be so merciful if—or when—they meet again.

The Zhivagos’ train is able to circumvent Yuriatin. Onboard they meet Anfim Efimovich Samdevyatov, a local Bolshevik notable who takes a liking to them and advises them on where to find Mikulitsyn, the former estate manager of Varykino. Though the family’s arrival is a major imposition, Mikulitsyn takes them in and sets them up in an abandoned manor house. The family renovate the house and grow their own food.

Spring arrives, and Yuri begins to venture into Yuriatin to visit the library, where he once again crosses paths with Lara. At her apartment, Lara tells Yuri about the horrors the city suffered under White occupation—an occupation commanded by Galliulin. Lara also tells Yuri her theory that Strelnikov is none other than her husband Pasha Antipov, but Yuri is skeptical. Yuri and Lara have a romantic affair, but before the guilt-ridden Yuri can confess to Tonya he is kidnapped and forcibly mobilized as a doctor by partisans led by Mikulitsyn’s estranged son, Liberius.

The towns and villages along the Siberian highway suffer under White occupation as local merchants and officers persecuting Jewish people, socialists, and other groups the occupation opposes. Young are rounded up for the draft. Yuri remains in the forests with the partisans, who keep him with them for two years as they crisscross Siberia in advances and retreats. Yuri avoids combat as much as possible and secretly nurses the White prisoners back to health. Liberius takes a personal liking to the doctor and chews his ear off with monologues about communism and the revolution. Eventually the partisans are surrounded in the taiga and are forced to lay in for a winter siege. Yuri feels a complicated mixture of loyalty and resentment when a plot against Liberius is uncovered, and conspirators and dissenters alike are executed.

The tide of the war begins to turn in the Red Army’s favor, but Yuri is disturbed by rumors of an attack on Varykino and the lack of news about his family. He decides to escape and crosses Siberia again in the other direction and returns to Yuriatin, where he finds Lara but not his family—Alexander Alexandrovich, it turns out, was called back to Moscow by the government. Yuri moves in with Lara and her daughter Katenka and works in the city, hoping to secure passage back to Moscow, but Yuri and Lara are warned that they are targets of the retaliatory Red Terror now being carried out—even Strelnikov is now a wanted man. Yuri is devastated by the news that his family is being deported, conveyed to him in a letter from Tonya in which she also accuses him of not loving her.

Yuri and Lara remain happy together, despite the sense of impending danger, but their delusional idyllic life is interrupted by Komarovsky, who arrives in Yuriatin on his way east to the last White stronghold on the Pacific coast. Komarovsky attempts to convince them to join him, but Yuri refuses, and Lara refuses to go without him. Instead the couple go back to abandoned Varykino, now run down and infested with wolves. While Yuri concentrates on his writing, Lara becomes increasingly agitated and repeatedly insists they return to the city, only to change her mind at the last minute. Komarovsky visits them to offer one last chance, and Yuri pretends to cooperate to trick Lara into saving herself and Katenka, promising her he will follow her shortly.

After Lara’s departure, Yuri wallows in sorrow and drinks himself into a stupor. Strelnikov arrives, interrupting Yuri’s suffering. The two men talk late into the night about fate, history, and Lara. Strelnikov, who refused to go back to his family because of a deep inferiority complex he felt toward Lara, is greatly moved by what Yuri tells him: that Lara wanted nothing more but to have her husband back. When Yuri wakes up the next morning, he finds that Strelnikov has shot himself outside in the snow.

Yuri returns to Moscow on foot, arriving at the beginning of the NEP. Alone and purposeless, he lives a quiet, unambitious life, only slowly returning to writing and finding some moderate success as a poet. He takes up with another woman, Marina, though he is still technically married to Tonya. He remains close with Gordon and Dudorov, though he no longer understands his friends, who have adapted to the new society. With Evgraf’s help Yuri leaves his family once again to concentrate on his work, but he dies of a heart attack on the way to his new job at a hospital. At Yuri’s wake, Evgraf and Lara meet, and Evgraf convinces her to help him sort through Yuri’s papers for posthumous publication, but Lara suddenly disappears, having likely been arrested and deported to the camps—or possibly executed.

Many years later, Gordon and Dudorov meet on the frontlines of World War II, both of them as officers in the Red Army; Evgraf is now a general. As they reminisce, they encounter a peasant girl, Tanya, who was recently summoned by Evgraf and asked to tell him her life story. As Tanya repeats her story, the two friends deduce that she is in fact Yuri and Lara’s daughter, forcibly left with a peasant family at Komarovsky’s insistence, and a lifetime of hardship and suffering far removed from Yuri’s refined sensibility has brought her here to meet them.

After the war, Gordon and Dudorov read Yuri’s poems, and in the poems they find a sense of peace that gives meaning to the tumultuous, difficult, and often painful history they all endured together.