Love always accompanies heroes famous writer Boris Pasternak. Therefore, the main theme of the work "Doctor Zhivago" was the theme of love, amazing stories, which the author told about on the pages of his novel. All these amazing and different love stories happened to the main character. In his novel, Pasternak created various types of heroines, but there is only one main character - Yuri Andreevich Zhivago.

Therefore, all love stories with different women weave together around him. It is known that Pasternak initially planned to name his work differently. In the first edition, the novel is titled "Boys and Girls". The reason for this is that the action of the novel begins with the main characters represented by female images: Nadia, Tonya. But the author called the other, second part of the work “The Girl from Another Circle”, in which the image of a completely new heroine appears - Larisa Guichard. At the end of the whole action, when the novel is slowly coming to a conclusion, another female image appears - Marina Zhivago, the wife of the protagonist.

The first wife of Yuri was Tonya Gromenko. They grew up together, became friends with early childhood. Once Zhivago was able to discern a girl in a friend, who turned out to be some kind of complex, incomprehensible, inexplicable creature for him. Yura fell in love, thinking that it was Tonya, so close from childhood, dear and well known, who was destined by fate. But not only this pushed young people to marriage. The dying mother of the girl blessed them. Anna Pavlovna instilled in them the idea that they were made for each other, so they should not part. The words of a woman who was leaving for another world made her friends look at each other in a completely different way from childhood. And here, quite unexpectedly, some new feeling arose - falling in love. Both experienced it for the first time, and it also connected them, connected them. But Yuri did not emotionally perceive his wife, he loved her for those feelings, smells that she was filled with.

Yes, of course, he was grateful to her for the fact that she was not only always sincere with him, she was quiet, calm and pure, but also turned out to be a reliable support in his life. But to this wonderful feeling, Yuri himself had another thing mixed in - a feeling of guilt for the fact that he loved another woman.

Another woman whom the hero fell in love with was Lara Guichard. Brought up in a modest and poor environment, she was the purest creature. She had a very hard time in her life. Since she was forced to endure the caresses of the rich Komarovsky, who was rude and impudent. In addition, she took care of her sick and suffering mother, and in order to survive, she gave private lessons. Zhivago and Larisa meet sometimes, quite by chance, casually, practically without noticing each other.

Time passes and life brings the heroes together at a dinner party. A candle burning every evening in Lara's room becomes a symbol of new love, and Zhivago, who needed to escape and take refuge in this small room, sees her one day and goes to her. Love for Lara is spiritual, it is saving. The first close meeting and acquaintance was interesting and caused Zhivago a real shock. A young girl shoots at the hated Komarovsky, who is tired of her and hated, right at the ball.

But this love must go through many trials that fate has prepared for them. First of all, these are terrible and severe events in the country: civil war, coups, revolution, strikes. Yes, and their personal lives are complex and difficult. So, Yuri is married, he has children, and he does not want to cause them pain and suffering. Lara is also married. It can be seen that their connection will definitely happen, as they are drawn to each other.

Each time Larisa appears before Zhivago in a different way. She seems to look like a swan, and sometimes the author compares her with a mountain ash. This author's technique is used to show how necessary these people are for each other, that a girl is the embodiment of nature and perfection. And for Yuri Andreevich, Larisa Fedorovna is the ideal of femininity and beauty. The heroine herself experiences the tragedy: she is broken and she was made a woman early and criminally.

Larisa thinks not only about Zhivago. Expecting an early arrest, she tries to take care of her daughter. And it opens before the reader new image: A loving woman turns into a beautiful mother. She chooses to run away with an unloved person, saving her daughter. Upon returning, Lara learns that Zhivago has died, and she has never been able to forgive herself for this act. Her life ends tragically: once a woman left home and never returned here, and no one saw her. It can be assumed that she was arrested right on the street, and she died in one of the northern women's concentration camps.

But in the life of the hero there was another, third, woman. Marina's next wife. Submissive and silent, completely obeyed Yuri Andreevich, accepted her husband with all the oddities, quirks and whims. He sank lower and lower, but Marina endured and accepted everything. And, perhaps, this is her feat, as a wife, as loving woman. In his novel, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak showed three women, the images of which he created completely different. But they have one thing in common - Yuri Andreevich Zhivago. They were able to give him the greatest - their love.

Pasternak's novels show the problems of life at that time.

"Doctor Zhivago" main characters

  • Yuri Andreevich Zhivago - doctor, protagonist of the novel
  • Antonina Alexandrovna Zhivago (Gromeko) - Yuri's wife
  • Larisa Fyodorovna Antipova (Guichard) - Antipov's wife
  • Pavel Pavlovich Antipov (Strelnikov) - Lara's husband, revolutionary commissar
  • Alexander Alexandrovich and Anna Ivanovna Gromeko - Antonina's parents
  • Evgraf Andreevich Zhivago - major general, half-brother of Yuri
  • Nikolai Nikolaevich Vedenyapin - uncle of Yuri Andreevich
  • Victor Ippolitovich Komarovsky - Moscow lawyer
  • Katenka Antipova - daughter of Larisa
  • Mikhail Gordon and Innokenty Dudorov - Yuri's classmates at the gymnasium
  • Osip Gimazetdinovich Galiullin - white general
  • Anfim Efimovich Samdevyatov - lawyer, Bolshevik
  • Livery Averkievich Mikulitsyn (Comrade Lesnykh) - Leader of the Forest Brothers
  • Marina - third common-law wife of Yuri
  • Kipriyan Savelyevich Tiverzin and Pavel Ferapontovich Antipov - workers of the Brest railway, political prisoners
  • Maria Nikolaevna Zhivago (Vedenyapina) - Yuri's mother
  • Prov Afanasyevich Sokolov - acolyte
  • Shura Schlesinger - friend of Antonina Alexandrovna
  • Marfa Gavrilovna Tiverzina - mother of Kipriyan Savelyevich Tiverzin
  • Sofia Malakhova - savelia's friend
  • Markel - janitor in the old house of the Zhivago family, Marina's father

Yuri Zhivago is a little boy who is experiencing the death of his mother: “We walked and walked and sang“ Eternal Memory ”...”. Yura is a descendant of a wealthy family who made a fortune in industrial, commercial and banking operations. The marriage of the parents was not happy: the father left the family before the death of the mother.

Orphaned Yura will be given shelter for a while by his uncle who lives in the south of Russia. Then numerous relatives and friends will send him to Moscow, where he will be adopted as a native into the family of Alexander and Anna Gromeko.

The exclusivity of Yuri becomes apparent quite early - even as a young man, he manifests himself as a talented poet. But at the same time, he decides to follow in the footsteps of his foster father Alexander Gromeko and enters the medical department of the university, where he also proves himself as a talented doctor. The first love, and later the wife of Yuri Zhivago, is the daughter of his benefactors - Tonya Gromeko.

Yuri and Tony had two children, but then fate separated them forever, and the doctor never saw his youngest daughter, who was born after the separation.

At the beginning of the novel, new faces constantly appear before the reader. All of them will be connected into a single ball by the further course of the story. One of them is Larisa, the slave of the elderly lawyer Komarovsky, who is trying with all her might and cannot escape from the captivity of his "protection". Lara has a childhood friend - Pavel Antipov, who will later become her husband, and Lara will see her salvation in him. Having married, he and Antipov cannot find their happiness, Pavel will leave his family and go to the front of the First World War. Subsequently, he would become a formidable revolutionary commissar, changing his last name to Strelnikov. At the end civil war he plans to reunite with his family, but this wish will never come true.

Fate brings Yuri Zhivago and Lara in different ways during the First World War in the front-line settlement of Melyuzeevo, where the protagonist of the work is drafted to war as a military doctor, and Antipova is voluntarily a nurse, trying to find her missing husband Pavel. Subsequently, the lives of Zhivago and Lara intersect again in the provincial Yuriatin-on-Rynva (a fictional city in the Urals, the prototype of which was Perm), where they vainly seek refuge from the revolution that destroys everything and everything. Yuri and Larisa will meet and fall in love with each other. But soon poverty, hunger and repression will separate both the family of Doctor Zhivago and Larina's family. For a year and a half, Zhivago would disappear in Siberia, serving as a military doctor as a prisoner of the Red partisans. Having escaped, he will walk back to the Urals - to Yuriatin, where he will meet Lara again. His wife Tonya, together with the children and Yuri's father-in-law, while in Moscow, writes about the imminent forced expulsion abroad. Hoping to wait out the winter and the horrors of the Yuryatinsky Revolutionary Military Council, Yuri and Lara take refuge in the abandoned estate of Varykino. Soon an unexpected guest arrives - Komarovsky, who received an invitation to head the Ministry of Justice in the Far Eastern Republic, proclaimed on the territory of Transbaikalia and the Russian Far East. He persuades Yuri Andreevich to let Lara and her daughter go east with him, promising to send them abroad. Yuri Andreevich agrees, realizing that he will never see them again.

Gradually, he begins to go crazy with loneliness. Soon Lara's husband, Pavel Antipov (Strelnikov), comes to Varykino. Degraded and wandering across the expanses of Siberia, he tells Yuri Andreevich about his participation in the revolution, about Lenin, about the ideals of Soviet power, but, having learned from Yuri Andreevich that Lara loved and loves him all this time, he understands how bitterly he was mistaken. Strelnikov commits suicide with a shot from a rifle. After Strelnikov's suicide, the doctor returns to Moscow in the hope of fighting for his later life. There he meets his last woman - Marina, the daughter of the former (still under Tsarist Russia) Zhivagovsky janitor Markel. In a civil marriage with Marina, they have two girls. Yuri gradually descends, abandons his scientific and literary activities, and, even realizing his fall, cannot do anything about it. One morning, on his way to work, he becomes ill on the tram and dies of a heart attack in the center of Moscow. His half-brother Evgraf and Lara come to say goodbye to his coffin, who will go missing soon after.

Ahead will be the Second World War, and the Kursk Bulge, and the washerwoman Tanya, who will tell the gray-haired childhood friends of Yuri Andreevich - Innokenty Dudorov and Mikhail Gordon, who survived the Gulag, arrests and repressions of the late 30s, the story of his life; it turns out that this is the illegitimate daughter of Yuri and Lara, and Yuri's brother Major General Evgraf Zhivago will take her under his care. He will also compile a collection of Yuri's works - a notebook that Dudorov and Gordon read in the last scene of the novel. The novel ends with 25 poems by Yuri Zhivago.

The novel "Doctor Zhivago" became the apotheosis of the brilliant work of Pasternak as a prose writer. He describes the procession and transformation of the consciousness of the Russian intelligentsia through dramatic events throughout the first half of the 20th century.

History of creation

The novel was created over a decade (from 1945 to 1955), the fate of the work was surprisingly difficult - despite world recognition(the pinnacle of it was getting Nobel Prize), in the Soviet Union the novel was allowed for publication only in 1988. The prohibition of the novel was explained by its anti-Soviet content, in connection with this, Pasternak began to be persecuted by the authorities. In 1956, attempts were made to publish the novel in Soviet literary journals, but, of course, they were unsuccessful. The foreign publication brought glory to the poet-prose writer and responded in Western society with an unprecedented resonance. The first Russian edition was published in Milan in 1959.

Analysis of the work

Description of the artwork

(Cover for the first book, drawn by the artist Konovalov)

The first pages of the novel reveal the image of an early orphan little boy, who would later be adopted by his own uncle. The next stage is Yura's move to the capital and his life in the Gromeko family. Despite the early manifestation of a poetic gift, the young man decides to follow the example of his adoptive father, Alexander Gromeko, and enters to study at the Faculty of Medicine. Tender friendship with the daughter of Yuri's benefactors, Tonya Gromeko, eventually turns into love, and the girl becomes the wife of a talented doctor-poet.

The further narration is a complex interweaving of the fates of the main characters of the novel. Shortly after his marriage, Yuri becomes passionately in love with a bright and extraordinary girl, Lara Guichard, later the wife of Commissar Strelnikov. tragic story the love of the doctor and Lara will periodically appear throughout the novel - after many ordeals, they will never be able to find their happiness. A terrible time of poverty, hunger and repression will separate the families of the main characters. Both lovers of Doctor Zhivago are forced to leave their homeland. The theme of loneliness sounds sharp in the novel, from which the main character subsequently goes crazy, and Lara Antipov's husband (Strelnikov) commits suicide. Doctor Zhivago's last attempt to find family happiness also fails. Yuri leaves attempts to scientific and literary activity and ends his earthly life as a degenerate man. Main character Romana dies of a heart attack on her way to work in the center of the capital. In the last scene of the novel, childhood friends Nika Dudorov and…….. Gordon are reading a collection of poems by the poet-doctor.

Main characters

(Poster for the film "Doctor Zhivago")

The image of the protagonist is deeply autobiographical. Pasternak through him reveals his inner "I" - his reasoning about what is happening, his spiritual worldview. Zhivago is an intellectual to the marrow of his bones, this trait is manifested in everything - in life, in creativity, in the profession. The author skillfully embodies the highest level of the hero's spiritual life in the doctor's monologues. The Christian essence of Zhivago does not undergo any changes due to circumstances - the doctor is ready to help all those who suffer, regardless of their political worldview. Zhivago's outward lack of will is in fact the highest manifestation of his inner freedom, where he exists among the highest humanistic values. The death of the protagonist will not mark the end of the novel - his immortal creations will forever erase the line between eternity and existence.

Lara Guichard

(Larisa Fedorovna Antipova) is a bright, even in a sense shocking woman with great fortitude and a desire to help people. It is in the hospital, where she gets a job as a nurse, that her relationship with Dr. Zhivago begins. Despite attempts to escape from fate, life regularly pushes the heroes together, these meetings each time strengthen the mutual pure feelings that have arisen. Dramatic circumstances in post-revolutionary Russia lead to the fact that Lara is forced to sacrifice her love for the sake of saving her own child and leave with her hated former lover lawyer Komarovsky. Lara, who finds herself in a hopeless situation, will reproach herself for this act all her life.

A successful lawyer, the embodiment of the demonic principle in Pasternak's novel. Being the lover of Lara's mother, he vilely seduced her young daughter, and subsequently played a fatal role in the girl's life, separating her from her beloved by deceit.

The novel "Doctor Zhivago" consists of two books, which in turn contain 17 parts, which have continuous numbering. The novel shows the whole life of a generation of young intelligentsia of that time. It is no coincidence that one of the possible titles of the novel was "Boys and Girls". The author brilliantly showed the antagonism of two heroes - Zhivago and Strelnikov, as a person who lives outside of what is happening in the country, and as a person wholly subordinate to the ideology of the totalitarian regime. Spiritual impoverishment The author conveys the Russian intelligentsia through the image of Tatyana, the illegitimate daughter of Lara Antipova and Yuri Zhivago, a simple girl who bears only a distant imprint of hereditary intelligentsia.

In his novel, Pasternak repeatedly emphasizes the duality of being, the events of the novel are projected onto the New Testament plot, giving the work a special mystical overtones. Yuri Zhivago's poem notebook crowning the novel symbolizes the door to eternity, this is confirmed by one of the first variants of the novel's title - "There will be no death."

Final conclusion

"Doctor Zhivago" is a novel of a lifetime, the result of creative searches and philosophical searches of Boris Pasternak, in his opinion, main topic novel - the relationship of equal beginnings - personality and history. The author attaches no less importance to the theme of love, it permeates the entire novel, love is shown in all possible forms, with all the versatility inherent in this great feeling.

>Characteristics of heroes Doctor Zhivago

Characteristics of the hero Antonin

Antonina - the wife of Yuri Andreevich Zhivago and the mother of his two children; daughter of Alexander Alexandrovich and Anna Ivanovna Gromeko. Yura and Tonya have been friends since childhood. When his parents died, Uncle N. N. Vedenyapin gave him up to be raised by the intelligent and decent Gromeko family. So he grew up side by side with Tonya, and eventually married her, since he could not imagine another life for himself. Anna Ivanovna, during her lifetime, joined their hands and blessed them for a strong union. However, as you know, we propose, but God disposes. The marriage of Doctor Zhivago with Antonina turned out to be so calm and measured that soon the positive charges began to repel each other.

Young people moved away, despite the fact that they already had a son. Yura began to reach out to the woman with whom fate had confronted him more than once in Moscow, to Larisa Guichard (Antipova). She also did not have a personal life, since her husband Pavel believed that she married only out of compassion for him and for his "childish" love. So in Pasternak's novel, two love triangles formed, although in reality there were more of them. Tonya quickly found out about Larisa's relationship with her husband, but did not interfere. She still continued to love Yura and tried to guess his fleeting desires and whims. If he needed to be alone, she sympathetically accepted it. If he wanted to be quiet and think, she never interfered with him.

So one evening, when he and Tonya were heading to the Christmas tree to friends, the lines were born in his head: “The candle was burning on the table, the candle was burning ...” Later they formed the basis of his poem “Winter Night”. In Larisa, Tonya saw her complete opposite. If she was born to simplify life and seek right exit, then Lara had a friend's mission to complicate her and lead her astray. So she saw the current situation and was somewhat right. Yuri Andreevich never saw his daughter from Tonya, since she and her children emigrated to France. Before leaving, she wrote him a letter in which she promised to raise her children with full respect for her father.