Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak (1957)
“A poet-doctor's struggle to remain human in a century that demanded he become a cog — written by a man the Soviet state tried to destroy for writing it.”
Short Summary
Yuri Zhivago, an orphaned poet-physician, comes of age in pre-revolutionary Moscow, marries the devoted Tonya Gromeko, and is swept into the cataclysms of World War I and the Russian Revolution. He falls into an all-consuming love affair with Lara Antipova, a woman marked by her own traumatic past with the predatory Komarovsky. Torn between duty and passion, between art and survival, Zhivago is conscripted by Red partisans, separated from both women, and watches his world disintegrate. He returns to Moscow a broken man, dies of a heart attack on a streetcar, and leaves behind a cycle of poems that outlast everything the revolution tried to build. Years later, his friends discover the poems — and through them, Zhivago's life achieves the permanence that history denied him.
Detailed Summary
Yuri Andreievich Zhivago loses both parents as a child and is raised by the cultivated Gromeko family in Moscow. He grows into a sensitive young man — poet, medical student, and inheritor of the Russian intelligentsia's belief that individual conscience matters more than collective ideology. He marr...