The history of the creation of the novel “Doctor Zhivago”. “The creative history of the creation of the novel “Doctor Zhivago”

"J" - pinnacle piece the writer, in his own assessment, prepared by all his previous work, intense spiritual and artistic searches. In fact, all prose and to a greater extent From the very first experiments, P.'s poetry was a preparation for the final novel, to which the author assigned a special role both in his own destiny and in the broader context of 20th-century literature.

“J” is the writer’s pinnacle work, in his own estimation, prepared by all of his previous work, intense spiritual and artistic searches. In fact, all of P.’s prose and, to a greater extent, poetry, from the very first experiments, were preparations for the final novel, to which the author assigned a special role both in his own destiny and in the broader context of 20th-century literature.

P. writes: “I now have the opportunity to work on something of my own, without thinking about my daily bread. “I want to write prose about our entire life from Blok to the current war.” Pasternak says that he began his career during the period of the collapse of form, when description and thought were based in prose. He wanted to create a novel that would give feelings, dialogues and people in a dramatic embodiment, and would reflect the prose of the time.

The first significant milestone in the movement towards a large prose form was the story - "The Childhood of Eyelets" (1921), part of an unfinished novel with the tentative title "Three Names". The novel in verse “Spektorsky” (1929) and the related “Tale” (1929) were a kind of dilogy, where P. made an attempt to combine two elements - poetry and prose - in a single plot whole. In the early 30s, P. again began writing a novel about the fate of his generation. The work was not completed. The surviving excerpts, entitled “The Beginning of the Prose of '36,” contained some elements that later became the novel.

From the point of view of the embodiment of autobiographical motives, the novel is also adjacent to the essays “Safety Certificate” (1930) and “People and Positions” (1957).

In the winter of 1945/46, the novel “D.J.” was started. The novel was completed in 1956. P. proposed the manuscript to Goslitizdat, the magazines “Znamya” and “ New world" P. considered “J” the most important and final work of his work. He said that he created an epic canvas, a kind of “War and Peace” of his century. But Novy Mir and Znamya rejected the novel as an anti-Soviet libel. The largest publisher in Italy, Filtrinelli, became interested in the novel. By handing over his novel to him, P. realized that there could be serious consequences, but publishing the novel was the goal of his life. In November 1957 the novel was published in Italy. In 2 years it was translated into 24 languages. On August 24, 1958, the first “pirated” (released without the author’s knowledge) edition of “DZh” in Russian was published in Holland. Opinions about the novel varied ( for the most part negative). Some said that this is a unique combination of drama and poetry, “a bestseller in Europe,” others said that “the novel has clumsy transitions, verbose dialogues, the reader constantly loses the thread of the conversation, the book has no end.”

On October 23, 1958, the Swedish Academy of Literature and Linguistics announced the award of P. Nobel Prize in literature "for his significant contribution to modern lyricism and to the field of the great traditions of Russian prose writers." On the same day, P. sent a telegram to the Swedish Academy of Sciences: “Endlessly grateful, touched, surprised, embarrassed.” A. Belyaev: “The basis of the decision to award B.P. The awards were based not on aesthetic, but on political considerations.”

Before the death of B.P. there was a year and seven months left. Events rushed with stunning speed. Oct 24 A demonstration was held at P.’s dacha with the slogans: “traitor”, “renegade”, “betrayal paid for by the Nobel Prize”. P. was betrayed to a “national curse”, declared “Judas, a misanthrope, a slanderer, an embittered mongrel,” etc.

Oct 27 At a meeting of the presidium of the board of the Union of Writers of the USSR, P. was expelled from the Union of Writers.

P. sent a second telegram to the secretary of the Swedish Academy of Sciences: “In connection with the importance that your award attaches to the circumstance to which I belong, I must refuse the undeserved distinction awarded to me. I ask you not to take my voluntary refusal with offense.”

S.S. Smirnov appealed to deprive P. of Soviet citizenship. P. addressed a letter to Khrushchev: “Traveling outside my homeland for me = death, I ask you not to take this extreme measure against me. Hand on heart, I did something for Soviet literature and I can still be useful to her.”

He was required to write an appeal to the people, saying that he was proud of the time in which he lived and believed in the Soviet future.

All these ordeals greatly undermined his health. P. writes the poem “Nobel Prize”:

I slept like an animal in a pen.

Somewhere there are people, will, light,

And behind me there is the sound of a chase,

I have no way out.

What kind of dirty trick did I do?

Am I a murderer and a villain?

I made the whole world cry

Over the beauty of my land.

Three decades later (1987), the secretariat of the Writers' Union canceled the decision to exclude P. from the USSR Writers' Union. A year later, “New World” with the novel “DZ” was published in a million copies.

Title options: “There will be no death”, “Boys and girls”, taken from A. Blok’s poem “ Palm Saturday", "Rynva", "The Experience of Russian Faust", "From the unpublished papers of the Zhivago family", "Norms of Russian nobility", "Winter Air", "The Living, the Dead and the Resurrecting", "The Candle Was Burning". In 1948, the final title “DZh” appeared with the subtitle “Pictures of Half a Century of Use,” which was later withdrawn.

The novel “J” is a work that cannot be unequivocally assessed. The difference of opinion was caused by a special “proteistic”, i.e. the multiple and ambiguous nature of the novel, where behind the external simplicity and lapidary style there was hidden a very significant content for the author, and in specific plot situations there is a generalized meaning. This feature of the novel is indicated by hints contained in the text itself, where it seems not the author, but “the flowing speech itself, by the power of its laws, creates along the way, in passing, meter and rhyme, and thousands of other forms and formations even more important, but still unrecognized, unaccounted for, unnamed." The multiplicity and “unrecognizability” of all forms simultaneously predetermined the diversity of interpretations. IN genre sense the novel was read in different ways, depending on the reader’s attitude and his “genre expectations.” It was seen primarily as a “poetic novel” (A.A. Voznesensky), in which the lack of epic objectivity was more than compensated for by an intense lyrical beginning. The work was seen as a spiritual “autobiography, in which there are surprisingly no external facts that coincide with real life author", and main character appears as lyrical hero P., who in his prose remained a lyric poet (D.S. Likhachev), this is “P.’s lyrical confession.”

Dissatisfaction with this somewhat narrowed interpretation gave rise to a different type of argumentation. In "DZ" a novel was discovered that continued the traditions of realistic psychological prose XIX century, where, according to N. Ivanova, main character“closes the row of heroes of Lermontov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.” The novel presented a generalized portrait of the Russian XIX culture- beginning of the 20th century According to I.V. Kondakov, the style and images of this “novel of culture” subtly combined the features of Russian classics, immediately “the entire Russian culture as a whole, organically welded, fused, not divided into separate creative individuals, styles, speech features or philosophical concepts unity."

Indeed, a novel that chronologically spans almost half a century: from 1903 to 1929, and with an epilogue - until the early 50s. - densely “populated” with many major and episodic characters. Close-up portraits of the historian and philosopher Vedenyapin, the chemist Gromeko, the industrialist and philanthropist Kologrivov, the unprincipled lawyer Komarovsky and many others are given. Among the characters, historically reliable personalities are sometimes discerned (N.N. Fedorov, S.I. Mamontov, etc.). At the same time, all the characters are in one way or another grouped around the main character, described and evaluated through his eyes, and “subordinated” to his consciousness. Art world“J” appears as a single monologue of the “author-hero”, uniting and dissolving the “voices” of individual characters. The consciousness of the “author-hero” is self-pressing, which does not at all limit the image. For P., J. is a “tool” of multi-faceted vision, a kind of “thinking eye” placed in the world and recording its state.

In the living fabric of a philosophical novel, ideas-images of Russia, Nature, Love, Creativity, History, Faith, Immortality, Sacrifice coexist and intertwine. They are “dissolved” in the text, but often “condensed” and appear, in B.P.’s own words, in the form of semantic “explosive nests.” Such semantic “clumps” are put into the mouths of Vedenyapin, Yuri, Lara. Taken together, these ideas-images are united into the main and comprehensive concept of Life, which is the leitmotif that subordinates the structure, style, and internal atmosphere of the entire novel.

The novel “Doctor Zhivago” is the result of many years of work by Boris Leonidovich Pasternak, the fulfillment of a life’s dream. Since 1918, he repeatedly began to create large-scale works about the destinies of his generation, but due to various reasons was forced to leave the work unfinished. During this time, everything in the world, and especially in Russia, changed too quickly. Tragic events in the history of our country: the Civil War, collectivization, the impending Stalinist terror - largely influenced the concept of the work and the fate of its heroes.

Judging by the surviving cover, Pasternak originally wanted to call the novel “Notes of Zhivult.” But it was never finished, and the Great Patriotic War, which began six years later, forced the author to completely reconsider the concept of his work. In the light of the sense of universality born in the war, he was seen differently: it was necessary to talk about the atmosphere of the whole European history, during which his generation was formed.

Pasternak wrote that he would like to create historical image Russia over the past forty-five years. This will become an expression of his views on art, on Christianity, on human life in history and much more. Since he was engaged in translations, he did not immediately turn to the implementation of the plan. The novel was first called “Boys and Girls,” then “The Candle Was Burning,” and by the fall of 1946 the title “Doctor Zhivago” remained.

Then Pasternak began reading chapters of the novel to his friends. In the summer of 1948, four parts of the novel appeared in print and formed the first book. This first version reached the writer’s friends, and based on their feedback, the author began to continue working.

In the magazine "Znamya" for April 1954, the first poems of Yuri Zhivago appeared with explanatory note that they remained after the death of the doctor Yuri Andreevich Zhivago, who died in 1929. It is very symbolic that the death of the main character occurred precisely in this year, which became a time of disruption in life in the Soviet Union.

At the beginning of 1956, Pasternak gave the completed manuscript of the novel to the editorial office of the magazines “Znamya” and “New World”, as well as to the publishing house “ Fiction" However, the work was published on November 15, 1957 in Italy, and by the end of 1958 it was published in all European languages. In the same year, the Nobel Committee, on the seventh attempt, awarded him the Prize for outstanding achievements in modern lyric poetry and the continuation of the traditions of great prose."

At home, Pasternak was subjected to real persecution: he was expelled from the Union Soviet writers, a whole stream of accusations and insults appeared in the press, and he was forced to refuse the Nobel Prize. The novel was recognized as anti-Soviet, so it burst out terrible scandal: in the press it was called the “Pasternak case”. This completely undermined the writer’s health, but he was unable to leave Russia.

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak died on May 30, 1960, and his novel “Doctor Zhivago” was read in his homeland only in 1988, 33 years after it was written.

In 1956, Pasternak completed work on the novel Doctor Zhivago. The idea for the novel “Doctor Zhivago,” according to the author himself, arose in 1946, when he was in Georgia to celebrate the centenary of N. Baratashvili: “I wanted to do something big, significant - then the idea of ​​a novel arose. I started with pages about the old estate...”

In the spring of 1954, poems from Doctor Zhivago were published in Znamya (No. 4). The publication was accompanied by a brief summary: “The novel will presumably be completed in the summer. It covers the time from 1903 to 1929 with an epilogue relating to the Great Patriotic War. The hero - Yuri Andreevich Zhivago, a doctor, thinking, searching, creative and artistic, dies in 1929. After him, notes and… poems remain.”

In a letter to O. Freidenberg dated October 1, 1948, the poet admitted: “I work like a convict year after year. And indeed, I am madly, indescribably happy with the open, wide freedom of relations with life, this is how I should have been... at eighteen or twenty years old, but then I was shackled... and did not know the language of life, the language of the sky, the language of the earth as well as theirs. I know now.” Pasternak's mood was largely determined by the post-war social situation, when people hoped for change, a rejection of repression and suppression of the individual. But the poet also had “intervals of despair” when he did not have enough mental strength to endure what was happening. “This triumphant, self-satisfied situation, proud of its mediocrity, is terrible, eventless, prehistoric, sanctimoniously stagnant,” he wrote to V. Shalamov in October 1954. Pasternak informed him that he had finished the novel in November 1953, and is now working on details.

The happiness of inner freedom achieved through “hard labor” expanded the scope of creativity and created in the poet a sense of the integrity of being. The critic V. Vozdvizhensky noted the free breathing with which the novel was written.

Even before finishing the work, Pasternak introduced its handwritten version to those people whose opinions he especially valued. One of his first readers was Marina Tsvetaeva’s daughter Ariadna Efron. At that time she was in a settlement in Ryazan. In a letter from exile in November 1948, Ariadne told Pasternak her impression of the heroes of the novel: “The images of Lara, Yura, Pavel painfully enter the heart, because we knew them as you gave them, and we lost them... How good, that you did what only you could do - you didn’t let them all leave nameless and unidentified, you gathered them all... revived them with your breath and work.”

At this time, Pasternak was having a hard time experiencing the state of alienation in the writing community: “And, perhaps, they all write poorly there. But it’s better to make mistakes all together than to make mistakes alone.” He was tormented by doubts about his possible wrongness and the rightness of the majority. In correspondence with Pasternak, V. Shalamov expressed a much harsher assessment of the then literary world, believing that “baseness and cowardice reign in him... oblivion of everything that makes up the proud and great name of the Russian writer.” In the situation of Pasternak’s separation from writers in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the reasons were laid for the drama that could not help but occur during his attempts to publish the novel “Doctor Zhivago” in 1956 in the magazine “New World” and the publishing house “ Fiction".

According to the poet’s son, in 1956, a representative of the foreign commission of the Writers’ Union brought a representative of the Italian publishing house D. Angelo to Pasternak in Peredelkino, to whom the manuscript of the work was officially handed over for review. This is how the novel came to the Italian publisher Feltrinelli, who soon notified the author of his intention to publish it. Pasternak replied: “If its publication here, promised by many of our magazines, is delayed, and you get ahead of it, the situation for me will be tragically difficult,” although he was convinced that “thoughts are not born in order to be hidden or drowned out in oneself.” , but to be said.”

The editorial board of Novy Mir rejected the novel. The letter, written by Simonov and signed by Lavrenev, Fedin and others, spoke of Zhivago’s “ideological renegadeism” and the “anti-people spirit” of the novel. The publishing house “Khudozhestvennaya Literatura” also refused to publish the book. In Italy they did not listen to the writer’s opinion, and the novel “Doctor Zhivago” was first published there at the end of 1957.

The conflict between the honest artist and the writers of the “corrupt time” (Shalamov) reached its climax when it became known that Pasternak had been awarded the Nobel Prize in 1958.

In 1946, their romance and Pasternak’s work on the novel “Doctor Zhivago” began almost simultaneously. One of the main themes of the novel is fate, its crossroads, what is about to happen. And so it turned out that this novel in prose began to determine the fate of these two people. When they met, their lives already had so many tragedies behind them: the suicide of Ivinskaya’s first husband, the death of her second. Orphaned children - Ira and Mitya. And Pasternak had a family, a second wife, children... their happiness was interspersed with painful explanations. They left each other more than once so as not to meet again, but they could not help but meet. At this time, Boris Leonidovich translated a lot: Petofi, Goethe, Shakespeare. Politicians found political unreliability in Pasternak's translations. On March 21, 1947, the famous article by Alexei Surkov “On the poetry of B. Pasternak” was published in the newspaper “Culture and Life”.
In 1956, the Italian publisher Feltrinelli became interested in the novel and Boris Leonidovich agreed to publish the novel in Italy. In November 1957, the novel appeared in Italy. He was happy. On October 24, 1958, it became known that Pasternak had been awarded the Nobel Prize, and on October 25, the press directly opened military action against Boris Leonidovich. In Literary and other newspapers they accused him of treason, called him Judas, a renegade, a weed, a frog in a swamp, and God knows what else... They tried to persuade him to refuse the Nobel Prize. On October 27, the “Pasternak case” was considered at the Writers’ Union. The transcript of this meeting has not survived.
Pasternak was on the verge of suicide. On one of these days, he arrived at the dacha and said to Ivinskaya: “You once told me that if you take 11 Nembutal tablets, it’s fatal. I have these pills...” Olga Vsevolodovna rushed to help Fedin, but he did not help, saying: “Boris Leonidovich dug such a gap between himself and us that it is impossible to cross.” After this, Pasternak sent a telegram to the Swedish Academy: “In connection with the way the awarding of the Nobel Prize to me was received in the society to which I belong, I consider it necessary to refuse it and ask you not to take it as an insult.” On October 31st, a meeting of the MMSSP was held.
It decided to appeal to the government with a request to deprive Pasternak of Soviet citizenship and expel him from the country. In the evening of the same day, a letter from Boris Leonidovich Pasternak to Khrushchev was broadcast on the radio: “Dear Nikita Sergeevich, I am addressing you personally, the CPSU Central Committee and the Soviet government. From Comrade Semichastny’s report, I learned that the government “would not create any obstacles to my departure from the USSR.” This is impossible for me. I am connected with Russia by birth, life, and work. I don’t think of my destiny separately and apart from it. Whatever my mistakes and delusions, I could not imagine that I would find myself at the center of such a political campaign, which began to be inflated around my name in the West. Realizing this, I informed the Swedish Academy of my voluntary refusal of the Nobel Prize.
Traveling outside of my homeland is tantamount to death for me...” On the same day, a general meeting Moscow writers in order to approve the resolution to expel Pasternak from the Writers' Union and resolve the issue of depriving Pasternak of Soviet citizenship. A selection of quotes from writers’ speeches gives an idea of ​​the atmosphere in which this meeting took place: “The people did not know Pasternak as a writer... they recognized him as a traitor... There is a good Russian proverb: “You can’t change a dog’s disposition.” It seems to me that the most correct thing is for Pasternak to get out of our country as soon as possible.”
“I didn’t read the book then and I haven’t read it now. But I have no doubt that our opinion about Pasternak’s behavior will probably be unanimous...” “He is the brightest example of a cosmopolitan in our midst. We don’t need such a citizen!” A few days later there was another call from the Central Committee. Pasternak was required to write an appeal to the people. They had no sense of proportion... Boris Leonidovich wrote - at first it was by no means a -16- letter of repentance. Then they worked hard on him, so it turned out to be a lie and an admission of guilt! Moreover, it is emphatically voluntary: “no one forced anything from me, and I make this statement with a free soul, with a bright faith in the common and my own future, with pride for the time in which I live and for the people who surround me...” Seeing this “his” letter, Pasternak just waved his hand and signed it. Weakness? Yes. But much more than just endless mental fatigue. When despair reached its limit, Pasternak wrote a poem.
I disappeared like an animal in a pen.
Somewhere there are people, will, light,
And behind me there is the sound of a chase,
I can't go outside.
Dark forest and the shore of a pond,
They ate a fallen log.
Let him be cut off from everywhere.
Whatever happens, it doesn't matter.
What kind of dirty trick did I do?
Am I a murderer and a villain?
I made the whole world cry
Over the beauty of my land.
But even so, almost at the grave
I believe the time will come
The power of meanness and malice
The spirit of goodness will prevail.
The manhunt ring is getting closer and closer,
And I am to blame for someone else:
There is no right hand with me,
The friend of my heart is not with me.
And with such a noose at the throat
I would still like to
To wipe away my tears
My right hand.
With this poem, Pasternak erased his humiliation in an instant. At once he answered for the kind repentance, for that letter, for everything. Became myself again. The last two stanzas of the poem are also connected with the image of Ivinskaya, then there was a temporary gap between them, which they both experienced painfully. These events, of course, could not but affect Pasternak’s health. From May 6th to 7th I had a heart attack. Then Literary Fund doctor Anna Naumova moved into the house, and nurses were on duty around the clock for the patient. Zinaida Nikolaevna spared no expense, and medical luminaries constantly came separately with medical consultations.
On May 30, 1960 at 23:20, Boris Leonidovich Pasternak died. Pasternak's fate is one of the most amazing in our literature - with a tragic and heroic connotation. Survive under Stalin by refusing to sign the writers' petition for execution the whole group right-wing communists, to sit for years in Perepelkin’s solitude, to suddenly receive a Nobel Prize, to become famous throughout the world because of “Doctor Zhivago,” to love the Motherland as much as he does, and amid the thunder of applause from foreigners, to be strangled by “our own people” precisely in this 1959, a “fabulous” year for him.
Pasternak was strong man. Still, such persecution does not add days. Well, we achieved our goal. The days have been shortened. The “fabulous year,” the year of world fame, turned out to be the last. Literature police can rest assured - there is no Pasternak. A writer died, who, together with Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, constituted the glory of Russian literature, and even if we cannot agree with him on everything, we all, however, owe him gratitude for the fact that he set an example of unwavering honesty, an incorruptible conscience and heroic attitude towards his duty as a writer. Only in 1987, the Union of Writers of the USSR recognized the innocence of B. L. Pasternak in the far-fetched moral sins attributed to him and canceled the shameful decision to expel him from the Union of Writers of the USSR.

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In the winter of 194546 the novel “D.J.” was begun. The novel was completed in 1956. P. proposed the manuscript to Goslitizdat, the magazines “Znamya” and “New World”. P. considered “J” the most important and final work of his work. He said that he created an epic canvas, a kind of “War and Peace” of his century. But Novy Mir and Znamya rejected the novel as an anti-Soviet libel. The largest publisher in Italy, Filtrinelli, became interested in the novel. By handing over his novel to him, P. realized that there could be serious consequences, but publishing the novel was the goal of his life. In November 1957 the novel was published in Italy. In 2 years it was translated into 24 languages. On August 24, 1958, the first “pirated” (released without the author’s knowledge) edition of “DZh” in Russian was published in Holland. Opinions about the novel were different (mostly negative). Some said that this is a unique combination of drama and poetry, “a bestseller in Europe,” others said that “the novel has clumsy transitions, verbose dialogues, the reader constantly loses the thread of the conversation, the book has no end.”

On October 23, 1958, the Swedish Academy of Literature and Linguistics announced the award of P. the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his significant contribution to modern lyric poetry and to the field of the great traditions of Russian prose writers.” On the same day, P. sent a telegram to the Swedish Academy of Sciences: “Endlessly grateful, touched, surprised, embarrassed.” A. Belyaev: “The basis of the decision to award B.P. The prizes were not based on aesthetic, but on political considerations. In the novel “Doctor Zhivago,” Boris Pasternak conveys his worldview, his vision of the events that shook our country at the beginning of the 20th century. It is known that Pasternak’s attitude towards the revolution was contradictory. He accepted the ideas of updating social life, but the writer could not help but see how they turned into their opposite. Likewise, the main character of the work, Yuri Zhivago, does not find an answer to the question of how he should live further: what to accept and what not to accept in his new life. In describing the spiritual life of his hero, Boris Pasternak expressed the doubts and intense internal struggle of his generation.

In the novel "Doctor Zhivago" Pasternak revives the idea of ​​self-worth human personality. The personal dominates the narrative. The genre of this novel, which can be conditionally defined as prose of lyrical self-expression, is subject to all artistic media. There are, as it were, two planes in the novel: an external one, telling about the life story of Doctor Zhivago, and an internal one, reflecting the spiritual life of the hero. It is more important for the author to convey not the events of Yuri Zhivago’s life, but his spiritual experience. Therefore the main semantic load in the novel it is transferred from the events and dialogues of the characters to their monologues.

The novel reflects the life story of a relatively small circle of people, several families connected by relationships of kinship, love, and personal intimacy. Their destinies are directly related to historical events our country. Great importance In the novel, Yuri Zhivago has a relationship with his wife Tonya and Lara. Sincere love for his wife, the mother of his children, the keeper of the home, is a natural beginning in Yuri Zhivago. And love for Lara merges with love for life itself, with the happiness of existence. The image of Lara is one of the facets that reflects the attitude of the writer himself to the world.

The main question around which the narrative about external and inner life heroes - this is their attitude to the revolution, the influence turning point events in the history of the country on their destinies. Yuri Zhivago was not an opponent of the revolution. He understood that history has its own course and cannot be disrupted. But Yuri Zhivago could not help but see the terrible consequences of such a turn of history: “The doctor remembered the recently past autumn, the execution of the rebels, the infanticide and wife-murder of the Palykhs, the bloody slaughter and slaughter of people, which had no end in sight. The fanaticism of the Whites and Reds competed in cruelty, alternately increasing one in the answer to another, as if they were multiplied. The blood made me sick, it came to my throat and rushed to my head, my eyes swam with it.” Yuri Zhivago did not take the revolution with hostility, but did not accept it either. It was somewhere between pro and con.

The hero strives away from the fight and ultimately leaves the ranks of the combatants. The author does not condemn him. He regards this act as an attempt to evaluate, see the events of the revolution and civil war from a universal human point of view.

The fate of Doctor Zhivago and his loved ones is the story of people whose lives were thrown out of balance and destroyed by the elements of revolution. The Zhivago and Gromeko families leave their settled Moscow home for the Urals to seek refuge “on earth.” Yuri is captured by the Red partisans, and he is forced against his will to participate in the armed struggle. His relatives were expelled from Russia by the new government. Lara becomes completely dependent on successive authorities, and at the end of the story she goes missing. Apparently, she was arrested on the street or died “under some nameless number in one of the countless general or women’s concentration camps in the north.”

Yuri Zhivago himself is gradually being abandoned vitality. And life around him becomes poorer, rougher and tougher. The scene of the death of Yuri Zhivago, although outwardly not standing out in any way from the general course of the narrative, nevertheless carries with it important meaning. The hero is riding on a tram and he begins to... heart attack. He's eager to Fresh air, but “Yuri Andreevich was unlucky. He got into a faulty carriage, which was constantly beset by misfortunes...” Zhivago dies at the tram wheels. The life of this man, suffocating in the stuffiness of the confined space of a country shocked by the revolution, ends...

Pasternak tells us that everything that happened in Russia in those years was violence against life and contradicted its natural course. In one of the first chapters of the novel, Pasternak writes: “... having woken up, we will no longer regain our lost memory. We will forget part of the past and will not look for an explanation for the unprecedented. The established order will surround us with the familiarity of a forest on the horizon or clouds above our heads. will surround us from everywhere. There will be nothing else." These deeply prophetic words, it seems to me, speak perfectly about the consequences of those distant years. Refusal from the past turns into rejection of the eternal, from moral values. And this should not be allowed.

Poems by Yuri Zhivago in B.L. Pasternak’s novel “Doctor Zhivago”.

Yuri Zhivago's testimony about his time and himself are the poems that were found in his papers after his death. In the novel they are highlighted in separate part. What we have before us is not just a small collection of poems, but a whole book with its own strictly thought-out composition. It opens with a poem about Hamlet, which in world culture has become an image symbolizing reflection on the character of one’s own era. Shakespeare's Hamlet is one of Pasternak's masterpieces of translation art. One of the most important sayings of the Prince of Denmark in Pasternak’s translation sounds like this: “The connecting thread of days has broken. / How can I connect their passages!” Yuri Zhivago puts into Hamlet’s mouth the words of Jesus Christ from a prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, in which he asks his Father to deliver him from the cup of suffering.

This poetic book ends with a poem called “The Garden of Gethsemane.” It contains the words of Christ addressed to the Apostle Peter, who defended Jesus with the sword from those who came to seize him and put him to a painful death. He says that “a dispute cannot be decided with iron,” and so Jesus commands Peter: “Put your sword in its place, man.” What we have before us, in essence, is Yuri Zhivago’s assessment of the events that are taking place in his country and throughout the world. This is a denial to “hardware” and weapons of the opportunity to resolve a historical dispute and establish the truth. And in the same poem there is a motive of voluntary self-sacrifice in the name of atonement for human suffering and a motive of the future Resurrection. Thus, the book of poems opens with the theme of upcoming suffering and the awareness of its inevitability, and ends with the theme of its voluntary acceptance and atoning sacrifice. The central image of the book (and the book of poems by Yuri Zhivago, and Pasternak’s book about Yuri Zhivago) becomes the image of a burning candle from the poem “ Winter night", the candle with which Yuri Zhivago began as a poet.

The image of a candle has in Christian symbolism special meaning. Addressing his disciples in the Sermon on the Mount, Christ says: “You are the light of the world. A city standing on top of a mountain cannot hide. And having lit a candle, they do not put it under a bushel, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to everyone in the house. So let your light shine before people, so that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” The book of poems by Yuri Zhivago is his spiritual biography, correlated with his earthly life, and his “image of the world revealed in words.”