Doctor Zhivago Themes

Doctor Zhivago follows its characters’ individual journeys, experience, and choices through a series of much more momentous historical transformations: the 1905 Revolution, World War I, the Russian Revolution, the Russian Civil War, and World War II. By setting the lives of his characters against this epic backdrop, author Boris Pasternak explores both how history affects individuals and their stories and the degree to which individual people are capable of making their own decisions when caught…

Doctor Zhivago remains preoccupied with the idea of destiny: whether it exists, how it shapes human life , and the ways it manifests in poetic signs and symbols. The plot of Doctor Zhivago is in large part based on elaborate and sometimes improbable coincidences that connect the lives of its characters. Chance encounters and second-degree relationships put Yuri and his lover Lara together again and again. The villainous Komarovsky’s double-dealing affects the Zhivago and…

In Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak explores the tension between love and responsibility, two forms of feeling that don’t always align. This discrepancy is established early on in the novel in the contrast between Lara and Komarovsky’s fraught affair and its aftermath, and Yuri and Tonya’s measured, domestic relationship. Whereas Lara submits to her passions—and, of course, to the will of a much older and more powerful man, upon whom her family depends—Yuri Andreevich…

Though the characters of Doctor Zhivago are caught up in quintessentially modern events and struggles, they often turn to two much older frames of reference to understand them: Russian history and culture and Christian religion and doctrine. The influence of these two ideologies on Russian society is profound, and they offer a natural explanation to characters like Nikolai Nikolaevich, Yuri, and Simushka Tuntseva, who remain skeptical of the more popular frameworks of…