Doctor Zhivago (novel)

Doktor Schiwago ( Russian Доктор Живаго [ ʒiˈvaːgo ], scientific transliteration : Doktor Živago , other transcription methods used by German publishers : Doktor Shiwago , Doktor Zhivago ) is a novel by Boris Pasternak .

The novel tells the life story of the Russian doctor and poet Yuri Andreevich Schiwago, who went from being a sensitive child to a socialist and finally a dissidentdeveloped. The relationship with his lover Larissa (Lara) Antipowa, née Guichard, takes up a lot of space in the plot. The novel combines numerous storylines, in which hundreds of people are involved, into a complex overall narrative. Multiple crossovers are characteristic of this course of action: people appear again and again purely by chance in those storylines in which they should not actually appear from the point of view of probability. One of the central messages of the novel is that the world is not simply split into two camps, but that the apparent abysses are always bridged by the most surprising connections.

The novel, completed in 1956, could not be published because of its apparently critical portrayal of the October Revolution in the Soviet Union . It was published for the first time in Italian translation by the Milan publishing house Feltrinelli in November 1957. A Russian original edition financially supported by the CIA was published in August 1958 by the Mouton publishing house in The Hague . Publication in the original language was a prerequisite for the author to be considered for a Nobel Prize for Literature . The Swedish Academy not only nominated Pasternak, but also declared him their laureate on October 23, 1958. In the Soviet Union, Doctor Zhivago first appeared in 1988, after the beginning of perestroika .

plot

Part 1

The place of the action is initially Moscow , the time the year 1901. The action begins with the funeral of the mother of the then ten-year-old Yuri Zhivago. His mother's brother, Nikolai Vedenjapin, takes him in as a half- orphan and lives with him in a provincial town on the Volga .

Sivzew Wraschek Alley , Moscow. The Gromekos live in a two-story house on this street.

1902. Vedenjapin, who later became famous as a writer, offered Juri an intellectually stimulating environment. On the estate of the Kologrivova family, where Vedenjapin visits the teacher Voskoboinikov, Yuri becomes friends with Nika Dudorov. Vedenjapin finally moves to Saint Petersburg , where he cannot take Juri with him. He is housed in Moscow with a relative, Fedka Ostromyslenski. Since this arrangement did not work, Juri finally moved into the house of other relatives, the Gromekos, in 1905. There he grows up together with Tonia, who is the same age. Another foster child who lives with the Gromekos is Mischa Gordon.

Henryk Siemiradzki : The girl or the vase ? A reproduction of this painting hangs in the booth in which Komarowski has sex with Lara for the first time.

1905. Parallel to the story of Yuri Schiwago, the story of the Guichard family is told. The widow Amalia Guichard has two children: Rodion and Larissa, called Lara. Her benefactor is Viktor Ippolitowitsch Komarowski, a devious lawyer who had already advised her husband and is starting a relationship with her. Soon he also makes 17-year-old Lara his lover. Lara first flatters that this important and attractive man is interested in her, then she is overcome with disgust.

The third line of the story focuses on the Tiverzin family of railway workers and the boy Pascha Antipow, who lives with the Tiverzins. The railroad workers are secretly organized and work towards radical social change. Shortly after the October Manifesto in autumn 1905, Marja Tiverzina and Pascha take part in a demonstration that is bloodily suppressed by dragoons . Lara gets to know the somewhat younger Pasha. He falls in love with her.

January 1906. Amalia Guichard attempts suicide by swallowing iodine. Pasternak leaves it open whether she knows about Komarowski's relationship with Lara or whether her suicide attempt has other reasons. She survived the poisoning, but by chance Juri and Misha also arrive at the scene on the same evening; the sight of the boy here - the half-naked, tearful Amalia Guichard - is not fitting for the two teenagers. They also witness an interaction between Lara and Komarowski, who wordlessly share their relief that Amalia does not know anything about their relationship. They do not understand the immoral implications of this scene, but they suspect it. Misha, who as a child witnessed how Komarowski was complicit in the death of Juri's father, recognizes Komarowski and can now tell Juri about these connections.

Lara, who can no longer stand it at home, becomes an educator in the Kologrivovas' house, but continues to attend high school until 1907 and then studies at the university. For a good three years she was quiet in front of Komarowski, when Rodion unexpectedly appears and begs Lara to ask Komarowski for 700 rubles for him. He embezzled money at the military academy and is in trouble. In return, Lara demands his revolver, but does not ask Komarowski for money, but the Kologrivovas. They are happy to give the money, but Lara finds it difficult to pay off her debts because she has started to support Pasha's family financially. She also gets Pasha a room. Lara dreams of going to the Urals with Pasha , where they both work as school teachers and should build a living for themselves. At her request, Pasha also studies. Lara recognizes early on his extraordinary size and moral purity, which is what sets him apart from Komarowski.

End of 1911. At the gentle urging of Anna Ivanovna, Tonia and Juri become engaged to each other. So far they had only felt brotherly love for one another, which is now giving way to a shy romance.

Lara thinks she's a burden for the Kologrivovs and wants to make herself independent as quickly as possible. After everything Komarowski did to her, Lara says he owes her help and reparation. If he refuses to give her money, she will shoot him with Rodion's revolver. She doesn't find him at home, but at the Sventitskys' Christmas ball, where Juri and the Gromekos also hang out. However, there is no opportunity for Lara to have a one-on-one conversation, and instead of Komarowski, she finally shoots the public prosecutor Boria Kornakov. Kornakov had put Kiprian Tiverzin and Pasha's father in prison after the railway strike in 1905. Kornakov's injury turns out to be a triviality; Juri, who comes to the rescue immediately as a doctor, hardly needs to worry about it. All the more, however, Lara pulls him under her spell, which he still remembers well. It is always the most remarkable circumstances under which he sees her. Komarowski, who is now very afraid that his relationship with her could lead to a scandal, not only prevents Lara from being arrested, but also gives her money and rents a room for her.

1912. Lara and Pascha pass their exams with flying colors and marry. Lara tells him the full truth about her past only after the wedding. Pasha forgives her and they travel to the Urals in Lara's birthplace Yuriatin.

Autumn 1915. Yuri is now married to Tonia in Moscow and is a busy hospital doctor. Tonia gives birth to a son Alexander ("Saschenka"). A few days after the birth, Juri was hired as a military doctor.

In Yuriatin Lara and Pascha have a three-year-old daughter Katenka (also: Katia). Lara sacrifices herself for her husband, but he doubts whether she loves him. Out of disappointment and because he could not stand the narrowness of the province, he left Yuriatin, attended the military school in Omsk , was promoted to ensign and sent to the front in 1915. There he leads his unit into a daring attack, in the course of which he is captured. Yusup Galiullin, who serves in his unit, says that Pasha was killed in the process.

In order to be able to travel after her husband, Lara is training to be a nurse. Her search leads her first to Moscow. Then she travels to Medzilaborce - now as a nurse on a military train - because Pasha's last letter had come from there. Katenka stays behind in Moscow.

Autumn 1916. Juri serves in a military hospital in a village in Galicia . Lara is also on duty in the large hospital, but does not meet Juri. When the village comes under enemy fire, Juri is wounded by a shrapnel bullet.

End of February 1917. The hospital was moved to Meliuzeievo, a (fictional) small town in the western region, to the villa of the interned Countess Zhabrinskaya. Juri is on the way to recovery and shares a sick room with Galiullin, who is also wounded. Lara takes care of the two men. Galiullin tells her that he fought together with Pasha, but does not mention that he thinks he is dead. Juri is biased towards Lara, so that she initially perceives him as dismissive. The February Revolution breaks out in Moscow .

Part 2

After two years of war, the Russian army is in a state of anomie . In June 1917, the local miller Blazheiko, with the support of deserted soldiers, proclaimed an independent republic in the (fictional) town of Zybushino, which, however, collapsed after only two weeks; the rebels flee to Biriuchi, a neighboring town of Meliuzeievo. While the local military leadership wants the men to be disarmed by Cossacks , a new front commissioner comes to Meliuzeievo from the capital , the very young and extremely naive Gintz, who tries to win the mutineers with idealistic phrases to take up the fight against the Germans again. While Gintz is making one of his speeches, he is shot.

Summer 1917. Juri is healed again and goes about his work in the hospital with Lara's help. Mlle Fleuri, a former governess who practically belongs to the living inventory of the villa, is the first to feel the romance that develops between them. When Juri casually mentions Lara in a letter to Tonia, she reacts very strongly and believes that she has already completely lost him to the other woman. A little later, almost against his will, he confesses to Lara how much she means to him, and she replies that she feared it would turn out that way. The following day she leaves for Moscow to take her daughter back to her home. She stays there for a few months and then returns to Yuratin with Katenka.

Shortly after Lara's departure, Juri also finds a place on a train to Moscow. Once there, he is shaken by the misery in which the residents now live. Tonia and her father rented a large part of the house to the Moscow Agricultural Academy. Juri, who resumes his work in the hospital, feels a stranger in family and friends: they seem to be impoverished not only economically but also spiritually. When he helps a stranger who has been ambushed on the street, this brings him unexpected luck, because the man is an important politician who will protect Juri many times in the following years. The winter of 1917/1918 was bitterly hard for the family. They have no firewood and are starving. Sashenka almost dies of a bad cold, then Juri falls ill with typhus . In Moscow, pro-Bolshevik soldiers are fighting street battles with junkers who support the provisional government .

April 1918. On the advice of Juri's half-brother Evgraf, the family - Juri, Tonia, Alexander, Saschenka and the nanny Niuscha - set off for the Urals, where the great estate of Alexander's father-in-law Krueger, Warykino, is located. Krueger has since been caught; nobody knows if he is even still alive. Alexander hopes that if the now ownerless property is plundered, something might also fall away for his family. The family travels in the freight car of a train that also transports 500 forced laborers who were recruited by the military under pretexts to dig trenches on the Eastern Front. The overseers are also not very motivated; one of them escapes during the trip, along with his prisoners. In the train station of Razvilie, a suburb of Yuriatin, Yuri accidentally falls into the hands of Pasha, who as "Strelnikow" is meanwhile an important warlord who works half on his own account for the Bolsheviks . Strelnikov is looking for the white leader Galiullin and lets Juri go when he notices the mix-up.

Yuriatin is still a civil war zone. Mikulitsyn, who lives in the main house in Warykino, reluctantly accepts the billing from Moscow and lets them move into a wooden extension. The Schiwagos survived the following winter because they grow potatoes and vegetables, Juri occasionally practices as a doctor and Samdeviatov, an influential local lawyer, supports them. The joint physical work brings Juri closer to his wife again. Tonia was pregnant in the spring of 1919. For the first time, Juri feels the weakness of his heart, probably inherited from his mother, and is confronted with the fact that his life is finite. He suppresses the fact that it is Lara he longs for and travels to Yuriatin believing that the library is his ultimate goal. He accidentally discovers Lara in the library, but is too self-conscious to speak to her.

Lara lives in Yuratin across from the "house with the figures". The residents of Perm suspect that the Gribushin House , which is quite striking in the cityscape, served as a stimulus.

In May 1919, Juri visits Lara in the apartment she shares with Katenka. They become lovers, but two months later his guilt drives Yuri to the decision to break up with Lara and confess to Tonia his infidelity.

There is a rowan tree near the partisan camp, which reminds Yuri of Lara and gives him consolation during this difficult time

Before he can put the second part of this plan into practice, he is picked up by the “forest brothers” and forcibly recruited as a field doctor. The forest brothers are red partisans who fight against the white people's army ("Komuch") led by Alexander Kolchak and have wrested considerable areas from it. Yuri witnessed great misery there. The partisans shoot a whole unit of white cadets; Juri disguises a survivor as a red and nurses him back to health. The whites also commit unspeakable atrocities against the partisans and even against the civilian population.

Spring 1921. Juri flees the partisan camp and after a very long walk reaches Yuriatin. There he learns that Alexander and Tonia, who has since given birth to a daughter Maria ("Mascha"), have left Warykino and traveled to Moscow, where Alexander was needed as an agronomist; later they were deported and then, as Tonia Juri reported in a letter in 1921, made their way to Paris. Lara had visited Tonia in Warykino and had been very helpful to her during the time around the birth. Now it is Juri who needs her care, because after the long hike he is seriously ill. After his recovery, Juri works as a doctor and lecturer at the same time.

When the whites are defeated, Strelnikov is no longer needed by the reds. Through his war activities he has made countless enemies. As a result, Lara is also in danger. Komarowski appears in December and reports that the major upheavals are about to occur. The Outer Mongolia is to be transformed into a buffer state between Soviet Russia and the rest of Asia with Soviet acquiescence. Komarowski himself is the shadow cabinet minister of justice . He offers Lara and Juri to travel with him and even includes Pasha in his offer. Lara doesn't believe in the success of such an adventurous scenario and throws Komarowski out.

When signs of an imminent arrest grow, Lara and Juri decide to hide in Warykino. So that Juri is not constantly reminded of Tonia, they do not move into the annex there, but into the main house. The Mikulitsyns have long since fled Warykino, but Juri discovers evidence that the house must have had a resident recently. Juri revises his old poems, which he has to reconstruct from memory, and also writes new ones. He knows that he will soon be separated from Lara forever, and all of his sadness about this flows into the poems.

Komarowski appears again after two weeks. A special train is waiting for him, and in order to convince Yuri that escaping to Mongolia is Lara's only chance of rescue, he reports that Strelnikov had been captured and shot. Yuri wants Lara to be safe, but doesn't want to travel with Komarowski herself at any cost. Since Lara does not want to travel without him, he agrees to deceive her about his participation in the escape to Mongolia. When Komarowski leaves Warykino with Lara and Katenka, Lara still believes that Juri will soon follow her in his own sleigh. The pain about saying goodbye to Lara, which mixes with his pain about the dogmatization of the revolution, almost drives Yuri crazy. He starts to drink.

Two days later, Pasha appears in Warykino: he was the mysterious resident. Pasha is half looking for Lara and Katenka, whom he sorely misses, and half on the run, because after Terentii Galuzin betrays him, he is threatened with a court martial. Pasha tells Yuri his story and shoots himself the following night.

Spring 1922. After a long journey, which he initially made on foot, Juri reached Moscow, accompanied by Vasia Brykin, one of the forced laborers who happened to travel to the Urals in the same freight car in 1918. He publishes a whole series of writings and half-heartedly reunites with his family, who now lives in Paris, which then does not work. After a break with Vasia, he moves into a room in the house in which the former caretaker of the Gromekos, Markel, now works, neglects himself, gives up medicine entirely and lives in great poverty. Markel's daughter Marina still takes a liking to him and becomes his partner. They have two daughters.

August 1929. Because Yuri is not doing well, Evgraf advises him to leave friends and family for a while. He found him a room on Kamerger Strasse - which happened to be the same room Lara had rented for Pascha - and a well-paid hospital position. On the day he is supposed to start his new job, he suffers a heart attack on the tram and dies. The last person to see him alive is Mlle Fleury, a former French governess whom he met in Meliuzeievo in 1917.

Juri's funeral, conducted without an ecclesiastical rite, attracts a small number of mourners, including many fans of his publications. Lara also arrives. In 1922 she had a child from Juri, Tanya, who got lost in the turmoil. Evgraf wants to help with the search. Since Lara knows Juris poems better than anyone else, she also helps him sift through the papers he has left behind. Then it disappears without a trace, perhaps in one of the many gulags .

1941. Dudorov is engaged to Christina Orletsova. She has a friend, the foundling Tania Bezocheredeva, who - as Dudorov observes - looks strikingly like Yuri.

Summer 1943. After Christina, who was used as a parachutist in World War II, heroically dies in an operation against the Germans and is celebrated like a saint, Evgraf goes in search of eyewitnesses who knew Christina and comes across Tania . Evgraf realizes that she is the child of Lara and Juri. The novel closes, five or ten years later, with another meeting between Gordon and Dudorov in Moscow, who express their hope that more freedom will be possible in their country in the future.

Poems

The appendix to the novel includes 25 poems that the character Yuri Schiwago wrote at various points in the storyline and that form a key to the symbolic meaning of the novel's plot. Already the first poem, Hamlet , identifies Juri as a character who has a lot in common with the hero Shakespeare . Such as B. Hamlet is threatened by Claudius' apparatus of power, the communists lurk above Juri, who see him as a latent threat and could destroy him at any time. Other poems - The Miracle , Bad Days , The Garden of Gethsemane - point to parallels to Christ and his apostles . His names ( Juri = Saint George , the dragon slayer; Andrejewitsch, from Andreas , the apostle who, according to legend, brought Christianity to Russia) underline that Juri is to be seen as a Christian figure. Like Hamlet and Christ, the poet is destined to be lonely and to fail in the world; only in the end will he be victorious.

Lara also places Pasternak in a Christian symbolic context. The two Magdalene poems refer to her. Just like the New Testament Mary Magdalene , who was traditionally equated with the foot-washing sinner, Lara is a fallen woman.

Characters of the act

The network of characters in the novel is extremely complex.

Juri ("Jura") Andrejewitsch Schiwago

The main character of the plot. As a child, Juri is sensitive, extremely imaginative and dreamy. Since the father ran away and the mother travels a lot because of her illness, he grows up with frequently changing people. It was only in the Gromeko house that externally stable conditions were offered to him. Juri closely follows the same age as Mischa Gordon and the daughter of Alexander Gromekos, Tonia. As teenagers, the three Solovyovs read The Meaning of Love and Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata and, with youthful ardor, subscribe to an ideal of purity and chastity. Juri completed his four-year medical degree in the spring of 1912. He writes poetry and loves literature, especially Alexander Blok , but does not consider it a foundation on which to build a profession, but has a strong desire to make himself useful. The genuine interest he has in physics and the natural sciences, however, leads him again and again into philosophizing. Yuri becomes a doctor. While he was serving in a military hospital at the front, Gordon and Dudorow published his first book without his consent, which was very well received by critics. The February Revolution in 1917, which coincided with his acquaintance with Lara, made a great impression on him. Later, in the 8th section of the 5th chapter, Lara’s mouth and heart pass over him for the first time. He speaks to her of his thoughts on the strange - and obviously linked to the war - circumstances of collective liberation, which he experiences at the same time as personal liberation, namely as overcoming the theory (which, to his regret, had apparently always been denied him as an intellectual ), solid experience of practice and becoming one with fellow human beings, from whom an abyss usually separates him as an intellectual. On the one hand, he perceives both dimensions of liberation as ecstatically exhilarating and, on the other hand, fears the bloodbath that will inevitably follow. After returning to Moscow in 1917, he wrote another book, The Game of Being Human . In the following years he had deep conversations about art with Vedenjapin and in Warykino with Samdeviatov. For him, art is not a question of form, but of hidden content; For him, art is a fundamental statement about life. After separating from Lara, he fell into a depression and gradually deteriorated physically and mentally, but published a number of small works on philosophy, medicine and the theory of evolution, as well as poems and stories.

Larissa ("Lara") Fyodorovna Guishard

Juri's mistress. Even as a young girl, Lara is a complex personality full of internal contradictions. When Komarowski seduces her, she is naive and innocent, but also enjoys the thrill of doing something completely forbidden. She feels that she has it in her hand and at the same time suffers from not being able to assert herself against him. Pasternak characterizes Lara as an extraordinarily resolute and pragmatic woman who usually asserts herself with her will much more purposefully than, for example, the timid and brooding Juri. Pasha's infatuation comes in handy because she wants to escape Komarowski. She urges the secondary school student to study Greek and Latin after completing his training so that he can become a teacher like her. In Yuriatin she works as a teacher at a girls' high school. Their work forces them to study Marxist literature. Because she experienced and saw so much poverty as a child, the revolution was once very close to her; later, however, she moves away from it and the indescribable consolation that she found in religion as a young girl - without being really religious - becomes more and more important to her. In 1919 it is the supposed fool Serafima Tuntseva who brings her closer to the faith. The role model for Lara is said to have been Pasternak's long-time lover Olga Ivinskaya . After separating from Juri in 1921, Lara traveled with Komarowski to Vladivostok , where she was sick for months.

Alexander Alexandrovich Gromeko

Agronomy professor educated in Paris in Moscow. Lives with his family in a house on Siwzew-Wraschek-Gasse . During the war he sided with the provisional government . In 1917 he is chairman of a Moscow district council.

Anna Ivanovna Gromeko

His wife. Anna Ivanovna's father is Ivan Ernestowitsch Krueger, who is the master of a large estate (Warykino near Yuriatin) and an iron mine in the Urals. Anna Ivanovna is ailing and dies unexpectedly of pulmonary edema in 1911 ; At this point, Tonia and Juri are attending the Sventitskys' Christmas ball. Anna Gromeko's best friend is the multiple divorced Schura Schlesinger, a theosophist whose extensive circle of friends includes many intellectuals.

Antonina ("Tonia") Alexandrovna Gromeko

The only child of Alexander Alexandrovich and Anna Ivanovna. She has been growing up with Juri, who is the same age, since they were both 14 years old. After attending high school, she studied law. Tonia harmonizes very well with Juri and reflects his character in many things. When Juri returned to Moscow in 1917 after a two-year separation, their relationship became difficult. While Tonia had always been an intellectual companion to him until then, under the war conditions of extreme economic hardship, her attention is only focused on the bare survival of the family. Tonia describes herself as a woman who is made to make life easy for others.

Viktor Ippolitowitsch Komarowski

Moscow lawyer, devious in his profession and a cynical despiser in his private life. It was he who drove Andrei Schiwago to bankruptcy in 1902 and encouraged suicide. The only real passion he develops in the course of the plot is his longing for Lara. After she shoots Kornakov at the Sventitskys, he begins to seriously fear the possibility that his relationship with her will become known, cause a scandal and damage his reputation. So he gives Lara money, rents a room for her from a friend, the lawyer Ruffina Onissimovna Voit-Voitkovsky, who lives on the Arbat , and stays away from her. However, he appears at their wedding party and announces that he wants to visit her and Pasha in Yuriatin. His plan to pursue a career as justice minister in a buffer state between Russia and abroad has failed. He has to hide from the communists.

Trotsky's armored train (around 1919)

Pavel ("Pasha") Antipov

Son of a Moscow railway worker; Because he was banned in 1905 and his wife Darja was in hospital with typhus, the Tiverzins took Pascha in for six months. As a child, Pasha is shy, gentle, sociable, cheerful and a gifted imitator. It is this ability to imitate that will determine his further personal development. His daughter Katenka will later inherit this talent from him. Pascha idolized Lara from childhood and follows her in everything. Pasha attends secondary school; at Lara's insistence, he also studies afterwards. In Yuratin he begins to be self-taught and to read excessively. He is particularly interested in mathematics. Living with Lara makes him bitter and changes him very much to his disadvantage. When Galiullin met him again in the army in 1915, Pasha seemed clever, but nervous, full of contempt, mockery and taciturn. Pascha was taken prisoner as an ensign, and in 1917 he managed to escape. Although he is non-party and completely unknown, following a recommendation from Tiversin, he subsequently made a unique career. Under the code name "Strelnikow" he recruited new soldiers, took unscrupulous action against deserters and then took on military tasks with great success. Like Leon Trotsky , Strelnikov interfered in the war from his own armored train . When Juri Schiwago met him in 1918, he saw him as a personality with perfect willpower who seemed to be able to cope with any situation. Strelnikow is of extreme moral purity, authenticity and firmness of principles, a fanatical revolutionary who has unconditionally surrendered to an idea. But he has no heart; shortly before meeting Yuri, he had put the village of Nizhni Kelmes under artillery fire simply because the residents of the neighboring village had helped white soldiers. Lara regrets that Pasha's need to “sing in a choir” has become so great that he has lost his inner moral compass.

Other characters in the plot:

Andrei Zhivago

Juri's father, a Moscow merchant who was once rich but then addicted to alcohol, got through his fortune and left his wife and son. In 1901 a son Evgraf was born to him from a marriage with Princess Alice Stolbnova-Enrici; he also leaves this family. In 1902 he committed suicide by jumping off a moving train. Komarowski, who is his lawyer, accompanies him and even encourages his act. Coincidentally, this happens only several hundred meters from the Kologrivovs estate, where Yuri and his uncle Nikolai are currently visiting. In 1911 a legal dispute arises over the small inheritance; in order not to have to deal with Komarowski, who administers the estate, but Juri waives all claims.

Maria Nikolaevna Zhivago

Juri's mother. She contracted tuberculosis and has since traveled extensively to the south. Yuri had been allowed to accompany her twice.

Nikolai Nikolayevich Vedenjapin

Maria Schiwago's brother, a former clergyman who left office to become a publisher and devote himself to his studies. He would later become famous as a writer. Vedenjapin is a Christian free-thinker who is constantly developing spiritually and is moved by all topics that concern his contemporaries - without, however, succumbing to dogmatics like this one. It is Vedenjapin who teaches Juri to listen to his intuition, thus creating the conditions for Juri to later become such a talented diagnostician. At the time of the October Manifesto , Vedenjapin was living in Moscow, at the Sventitsky's house. His philosophical interest is now more and more the question of what tasks art has in a time of social upheaval. Juri will later completely adopt his art philosophy, which has its starting point in Christian teaching. In 1906, after the uprising in Moscow's Presnya district, Vedenjapin left the country and went to Lausanne, but returned to Moscow after the February Revolution. He is on the side of the Bolsheviks .

The Kologrivovas

Lavrenty and Serafina, wealthy Moscow silk manufacturer with an estate (Duplyanka between Sysran visit and Kologrivovka) on which Nicholas and Juri twice educators Voskoboinikov. Her daughter Nadja later goes to high school with Lara. When Lara's domestic situation becomes unbearable due to Komarowski (who is also her mother's lover), it is Nadja who helps her: Lara is accepted into the household of the Kologrivovas as the educator of the younger daughter Lipa, who treat her like a child of her own. Lara stayed until Lipa finished high school in 1911 and got engaged to a German (Friesendank) who was interned in Ufa during the war . Lara spends the summers with the Kologrivovas in Duplyanka, for the last time in 1911. After Komarowski found her a room with his acquaintance, the lawyer Ruffina Onissimovna Voit-Voitkovsky, in 1912, Lara feels openly rejected there. Again, it is the Kologrivovas who help her, with money and by finding her a room in the apartment of an artist who is temporarily living abroad. For the wedding, they give Lara a precious necklace made of yellow sapphires. When all the guests are very drunk during Lara's farewell party, a thief breaks in and almost steals the chain, but is discovered and driven away in good time. Although they belong to the upper class of society, the Kologrivovas sympathize with the revolutionaries.

Innokentii ("Nika") Dudorow

Juri's childhood friend. His father, Dementi Dudorow, is serving a prison sentence in a labor camp as a terrorist. His mother, Nina Galakjonova, comes from a royal family. Nika spends part of his childhood in the household of the teacher Voskoboinikov, who lives on the Kologrivovas' estate. He later lived in Moscow, where he met Lara through Nadja in 1905. Lara experiences him as proud, direct and taciturn. Due to a mistake, Dudorov was drafted into the tsarist army and then had a brief marriage with a woman he had just met. Although he was expelled from high school, as an adult he developed serious intellectual interests, studying and later teaching at Moscow University. Dudorov spends time in the gulag; after Yuri returned to Moscow, however, the friends were in contact again in 1929. In 1941 Dudorov becomes engaged to Christina Orletsova, who studied history with him. Christina happens to be friends with Tania, Lara's daughter. During World War II, Dudorov fought in a punitive battalion and was wounded twice, but was able to cause Gordon to be released from the gulag and transferred to his own unit.

Mischa Gordon

The thoughtful son of the Jewish lawyer Grigori Gordon. In 1902 they both happened to be traveling in the same train compartment in which Andrei Schiwago started his last journey, made his acquaintance and unwillingly witnessed his suicide. As a high school student in Moscow, he became Juri's closest friend. He is studying philosophy. In October 1916 he visited Yuri in the hospital at the front. There he watches with dismay how Russian soldiers mistreat local Jewish people. When the two friends meet again in Moscow in 1917, Juri is disappointed in Gordon, who used to be witty and ironic and now seems superficial to him. When Juri returned to Moscow after 1922, Gordon lived in the nearby Malaya-Bronnaya Street and stayed in close contact. After Gordon spends time in the gulag twice and meets Dudorov again in World War II when he changes the gulag for a punitive battalion.

Amalia Karlovna Guishar

Widow of a Belgian engineer and mother of Rodion and Lara, a naturalized French woman. In 1905 she moved to Moscow with Yuriatin's children, initially to the Hotel Montenegro in Oružejnyj Pereulok. Komarowski supports her in acquiring and running a ladies' tailoring shop on Tverskaya Street and arranges for the children to be well educated: Rodion attends a military academy and Lara the high school. Amalia is terrified of impoverishment and Komarowski sexually exploits her addiction. Because Tverskaya Street was hit by the Presnia uprising in December 1905, Amalia and the children temporarily moved back to the Hotel Montenegro, where she then attempted suicide. As Yuri later learns from Olia, Rodion is shot as a soldier.

Fadei Kasimirowitsch Tyschkewitsch

The Guishars' helpful apartment neighbor, a cellist. Amalia Guishar flees to him when Komarowski's intrusiveness becomes too much for her. When she attempted suicide in 1906, it was Tyschkewitsch who gave Yuri Zhivago access to the guishards' living quarters, where he saw Lara for the first time: Tyschkewitsch was playing at a private concert with the Gromekos that evening. When he was recalled from there because of Amalia's misfortune, Alexander Gromeko and the boys Juri and Misha accompanied the guest home as a courtesy.

Olia Demina

Apprentice in Madame Guishar's tailoring shop and Lara's closest friend. She is a granddaughter of Marfa Tiversina and introduces Lara to Pascha in 1905. Yuri met her by chance when he was visiting a typhus patient on Brestskaya Street in early 1918.

The tiverzins

Moscow railway family: the widow Marfa Gavrilovna and her son Kiprian Savelyevich. Marfa's husband, Savelii Tiverzin, died in the Borki railway accident in 1888 . The tiverzins live in a tenement house at 28 Brestskaya Street, Moscow, near Moscow's Triumphal Gate . In 1902, Marfa and two of her daughters-in-law happened to be on the train in which Andrei Zhivago killed himself. After the end of the civil war, Kiprian Tiverzin, like Pasha's father, is a member of the Revolutionary Court in Yuriatin.

Pavel Ferapontovich Antipov

Pasha's father. As a rail supervisor, he took part in the railway strike in 1905 and was arrested and exiled to Siberia. From 1922 Pawel Ferapontovich, like Kiprian Tiverzin, is a member of the Revolutionary Court in Yuriatin.

Osip ("Yusup", "Yusupka") Gimazedinovich Galiullin

Son of Marfa Galiullina and Gimazetin Galiullin, the caretaker in the tenement house in which the Tiverzins live. Like his parents, Yusup Galliulin is a Muslim and, as a child, was abused by master locksmith Pyotr Kudoleev, with whom he was an apprentice. Galiullin's first meeting with Pascha takes place in 1905, when Pascha lives with the Tiverzins. Later Galiullin becomes an officer in the unit commanded by Pasha and finds the opportunity to take revenge on Kudoleev, who is now a common soldier, for his earlier brutality. Galiullin's father, Gimazetin, dies in 1916 as a result of a terrible wound, in front of Lara and in the presence of Galiullin, who does not recognize him. In 1917, Galiullin is part of the mob lynching Gintz. During the Russian Civil War he leads a regiment of White Guards in the Urals and is thus a direct opponent of Strelnikov. Nevertheless, he has close contact with Lara in Yuriatin. When Juri made a home visit to a typhus patient on Brestskaya Street in early 1918, he met Galiullin's mother, who was still the caretaker there.

The Shchapovs

Markel and Agafya Tikhonovna. Markel, a drunkard, is the caretaker at Gromekos. When Juri returned to Moscow in 1922, he was doing the same job in the house in which the Sventitskys had previously lived. His daughter Marina, who is a telegraph in a post office, becomes Juri's partner. Juri and Marina live in an apartment on Ulitsa Spiridonovka and have two daughters: Kapitolina and Klavdia.

The Sventitskys

Relatives of the Gromekos who live in Moscow's “Flour Town”. Feliciata Semionovna, her husband Pierre and their nephew Georges.

Gintz

Front commissioner sent by the political leadership from the capital to restore order after the Zybushino rebellion. He is around 20 years old and as enthusiastic as he is unprepared and is shot at the Meliuzeievo train station while standing on a water barrel giving an improvised propaganda speech. The shooter, Pamphil Palykh, will later meet Juri at the Forest Brothers' house. Galiullin stabs him with the bayonet and immediately after the incident escapes head over heels. The reasons why the Landser distrust Gintz include his German name and his Petersburg accent. He comes from the Russian upper class and is the son of a senator; the Gromekos are also largely related to the Gintz.

Maxim Aristarkhovich Klintsov-Pogorevshikh

A young deaf-mute who participated in the Zybushin uprising. Since it is said that he found language in moments of inspiration, its existence initially appeared as a myth. Yuri can soon convince himself of its existence, because Klintsov-Pogorevshikh is his compartmentmate on the train that takes both of them from Sukhinichi to Moscow in 1917 . He is the nephew of a well-known revolutionary.

Evgraf Andrejewitsch Zhivago

Juri's half-brother. Son of his father and Princess Alice Stolbunova-Enrizzi, who lives in Omsk. The brothers only meet as adults. When they happened to meet for the first time in October 1917 in a doorway, Juri did not yet recognize their brother. Evgraf helps the older man, whom he admires, but repeatedly - for example during his typhoid fever - and later protects him from his pursuers. In the spring of 1919 he visited the Schiwagos in Warykino. In 1929 he helped Yuri when he was not doing well in Moscow and organized his funeral a little later. He is a general in World War II.

Vasia Brykin

16-year-old son of a Siberian hardware dealer who was recruited as a slave labor due to hair-raising circumstances and who first met the Schiwagos during the train journey to the Urals. His guard, Voroniuk, not only lets him escape, but also takes the opportunity to flee himself. When Kharlam, who gossiped Polia, murders a widow, Vasia is suspected of the act on the basis of his previous history. His village is burned down as a punishment. Vasia's mother drowns herself, the two sisters Alenka and Arishka end up in an orphanage in another district. In 1922 Vasia accompanied Juri to Moscow, where he attended the industrial design school, shared an apartment with Juri and later printed his writings. Vasia becomes intellectually increasingly self-confident and becomes estranged from Juri.

Prokhor Kharitonovic Prituliev

Another forced laborer. From Malmysch , employee of a liquor store. Although he is unsightly and has a wife in Luga , two women accompany him into captivity: Polia and another mistress. Prituliev escapes on the same occasion as Vasia.

Pelagia ("Polia") Nilovna Tiagunova

One of Prituliev's two lovers and sister of Olga Galuzina. Yuri meets her for the first time in the freight car with which his family is traveling to the Urals. When Prituliev escapes, she also leaves the train, but joins Vasia. In his home village Veretenniki she is initially well received, but is then gossiped by a rejected admirer, Kharlam, and suspected of having a love affair with Vasia, so that she has to flee. She finds refuge temporarily with her sister Olga Galuzina (see below), but then has to flee further. She meets Yuri Schiwago again at the Forest Brothers' house.

Kostoied-Amursky

Seasoned revolutionary who had to do forced labor in the old regime and, ironically, was recruited again as forced labor after the revolution. He is the third forced laborer to travel to the Urals in the same freight car as the Schiwagos. Later he renounced his previous convictions and became a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party under the code name “Lidochka”. Like Juri, Kostoied then ends up with the forest brothers.

Anfim Efimovich Samdeviatov

Lawyer and owner of an inn in Yuriatin. Samdeviatov is a very influential man among the Bolsheviks. He meets the Zhivago family on the train to Warykino. Tonia learns from him casually that Lara lives in Yuriatin. Samdeviatov helps the Schiwagos survive the harsh winters in Warykino, and during the time Yuri spends with the forest brothers, he also helps Lara. Juri fears that Samdeviatov could mean something to Lara personally, but his jealousy turns out to be unfounded, because in his radical pragmatism Samdeviatov reminds Lara too much of Komarowski.

Averkii Stepanowitsch Mikulitsyn

Administrator in Warykino. Before joining Krueger's service, he had studied shipbuilding at the Technological Institute in Petersburg. Mikulitsyn was married to Agrippina Severinovna Tuntseva. After her death, Mikulitsyn married the high school student Elena Proklowna, who is a former student of Pasha Antipov and suspects that he is identical to Strelnikow. Agrippina has three younger sisters who appear in the most unlikely contexts in the course of the novel: Jewdokia is a librarian in Yuriatin; Glafira is the switch maker; Serafima is said to suffer from "religious insanity", but in fact she gives Lara great peace of mind with her teachings, which are very close to those of her spiritual teacher, Vedenjapins.

Liberius ("Livka") Averkievich Mikulitsyn

Mikulitsyn's son from his first marriage, an ensign who led the "Forest Brothers" during the Russian Civil War. After Juri is forcibly recruited as a field doctor, he looks for the doctor as a friend and constant confidante; Juri doesn't like Liberius, however, and over time he even develops a real hatred of him. Liberius is not only addicted to cocaine, he also sees people as a raw material that needs to be shaped - a doctrine that strongly repels Juri. Liberius' rule is not without controversy; a group of opponents tries to overthrow him and replace him with the anarchist Vdovichenko. However, the informer Sivobluy exposes the deviants and then shoots them.

The Galucins

Vlas Pakhomovich and his wife Olga, merchants in Krestovozdvizhensk. Olga is Polia's sister. Vlas is a recruiter for red recruits, but ironically, he cannot prevent his own son Terentii ("Terioshka"), who had to leave school because of his stupidity, from being drafted as a soldier. Terentii becomes part of the Forest Brothers and is said to be shot for participating in a plot against Liberius, but survives and is able to flee. His father Vlas has a daughter Ksiusha from his first marriage, who has a student named Blazheim as her lover. Vlas is later captured and shot; Olga has to work as a maid for relatives. Yuri met Terentii by chance on his long walk from the partisan camp to Yuriatin. In order to save his mother from being shot, who eventually ends up in prison, Terentii agrees to extradite Strelnikov to the authorities. He sneaks Pasha's trust and thus prepares its end.

Pamphil Palykh

Simple man who was once discovered and celebrated by the Reds as a "model proletarian ", but who then experienced an unprecedented brutalization and dehumanization under this influence. It was he who shot Gintz in 1917 simply because he found him ridiculous. Later he finds himself among the forest brothers. There he is presented to Juri as a psychiatric case. Because of the atrocities he has committed in the meantime, Pamphil suffers from a nameless fear that the whites might torture his wife and children out of revenge on him. When the partisan women and children arrived at the camp in 1920, he killed his family with an ax.

Tania Bezocheredeva

The daughter of Juri and Lara. Lara didn't want Komarowski to find out about her existence and secretly gave birth to the child. She then gave the baby to the railroad worker Marfa, who raised it with her husband, Vassily Afanasievich. Marfa treats the foster child badly and prefers Tania to her own disabled son, Petia. When Petia is murdered, Tania escapes and joins a group of soldiers.

Emergence

Pasternaks Datsche in Peredelkino

Pasternak is said to have longed for a “very ordinary novel” as early as 1934, which “should contain some unsightly and poor everyday words”.

From 1946 to 1955 he worked on his first and only novel. The model for the fictional city of Yuriatin is Perm , where the author spent several years during the Second World War. The model for the Warykino estate was a dacha that Pasternak owned in Peredelkino , a suburb of Moscow; that of John Box with onion domes designed Ice Palace in David Lean film is a pure cinema invention.

publication

The novel was first published in 1957 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore in Milan in an Italian translation, based on a manuscript that Pasternak gave to Feltrinelli's agent in Russia. A Russian version was first published in 1958 by Mouton Verlag in The Hague and was distributed free to visitors at the Brussels World's Fair in the Vatican pavilion. The submission of the novel in the original language to the committee was a prerequisite for the award of the Nobel Prize. A second small-format thin print edition on Bible printing paper was specially printed for inconspicuous distribution in the Eastern Bloc . Within the Soviet Union, the novel was not officially published until 1988. Pasternak offered his work to the Russian magazine Nowy Mir , which, as expected, refused.

Journalist Ivan Tolstoy published a book in 2009 entitled Pasternak's Washed Novel (Vremya Publishing House, Moscow 2009). In it he advocates the thesis that the CIA financed the Russian first edition of Pasternak's revolutionary epic in the West and thus made it possible for the Russians to receive the Nobel Prize in 1958. After the legal protection period had expired, the US government published documents from the period in April 2014 confirming that the CIA supported the publication.

Translations and adaptations

Abroad, Doctor Zhivago appeared in 18 other languages ​​in addition to the original version.

In 1965, the novel was David Lean with Omar Sharif and Julie Christie in the lead roles filmed ; the film won five Academy Awards. It is the most popular film adaptation to date. Originally Sophia Loren was supposed to play Lara, but David Lean prevailed over producer Carlo Ponti . Carlo Ponti was Sophia Loren's husband.

In 2002 a television adaptation was made with Hans Matheson and Keira Knightley .

In 2006, the most extensive film adaptation to date was made by the director Alexander Proschkin . In the 12-part TV production, Oleg Menshikov plays the title role and Tschulpan Khamatova can be seen as Lara.

As early as 1958, WDR , NDR , SWF and RIAS produced the novel as a radio play adapted by Ernst Schnabel . Under the direction of Otto Kurth , Ludwig Cremer as Schiwago, Joana Maria Gorvin as Lara and Gert Westphal as narrator played among others .

The composer Anton Lubchenko (* 1985) turned the novel into an opera, which was premiered in 2015 at the Regensburg City Theater .

Post-story

When Pasternak was to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 "for his significant achievement both in contemporary poetry and in the area of ​​the great Russian storytelling tradition" - that is, primarily for "Doctor Zhivago" - he initially accepted it, but declined later on pressure from the Soviet authorities. Pasternak, according to a personal letter to Khrushchev , did not want to leave the Soviet Union despite all the attacks on him and his work.

In the course of the cultural-political liberalization in the USSR, Pasternak was rehabilitated on February 23, 1987 and posthumously re-admitted to the Union of Writers of the USSR and his novel Dr. Zhivago was to be published in a Soviet newspaper.

Pasternak's son accepted the Nobel Prize in Stockholm in 1989 in a special ceremony.

The British author Jim Williams published a sequel to the novel, Lara's Child , under the pseudonym Alexander Mollin in 1994 with the Doubleday publishing house , which was also published in German in the same year ( Lara's daughter ). According to the publisher of the German edition, Bertelsmann , the book does not continue Pasternak's novel, but David Lean's film. The Feltrinelli publishing house , which holds the exploitation rights for Pasternak's novel, filed a lawsuit against the publication of Williams' book because it was so closely based on Pasternak's original that it was not a self-creative achievement. The Karlsruhe Higher Regional Court ruled Feltrinelli, and in 1999 the Federal Court of Justice upheld this judgment. Bertelsmann is therefore no longer allowed to sell the sequel.

shape

Doctor Zhivago does not have a strictly closed novel form, but rather forms an intended selection of prose pieces and short episodes from the lives of the multitude of novel characters. In addition, there are considerations relating to the philosophy of religion and art aesthetics.

literature

• Boris L. Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago. , Fischer-Taschenbuch , Frankfurt am Main 1992 (German first edition 1958), ISBN 3-596-29519-X ; current edition, translated by Thomas Reschke: Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2011, ISBN 978-3-596-90329-0 (= Fischer Klassik , volume 90329).
• Olga Ivinskaja: Lara: My time with Pasternak. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1978, ISBN 3-455-03643-0 .
• Petra Couvée, Peter Finn: The Schiwago Affair. The Kremlin, the CIA and the fight over a banned book . Translation from English Jutta Orth, Jörn Pinnow. Stuttgart: Konrad Theiss, 2016 ISBN 978-3-8062-3282-0

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Doctor Shiwago . Structure Verlag, 2003, ISBN 978-3-351-02975-3 .
2. ↑ Doctor Shiwago . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-29519-7 .
3. ↑ International Banned Book: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak. Retrieved June 4, 2018 . Soft power: CIA funded first Russian edition of Dr. Zhivago. Retrieved June 4, 2018 .   
4. ↑ Fred Hiatt: Lara's Theme: A Russian Story. In: The Washington Post. April 25, 1994, Retrieved June 4, 2018 . 
5. ↑ Perm. June 22, 2018, accessed December 14, 2020 . 
6. ↑ ^{a b} Reinhard Lauer: History of Russian Literature. From 1700 to the present . CH Beck, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-406-50267-9 , pp. 797 f .
7. ↑ ^{a b} Julian Voloj: The Father, the Son and Holy Russia. Biographical notes on Leonid and Boris Pasternak . In: Folker Siegert (Ed.): Border Crossings: People and Fates between Jewish, Christian and German Identity. Festschrift for Diethard Aschoff . Lit, Münster 2002, ISBN 3-8258-5856-1 , p. 213 ff .; here: p. 229 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
8. ↑ Horst Bienek on Olga Iwinskaja “Lara. My time with Pasternak ”. In: Der Spiegel. August 28, 1978. Retrieved June 10, 2018 . 
9. ↑ 7 Interesting Facts About Perm. Retrieved June 10, 2018 .  Olga Sazontchik: On the problem of the Moscow text of Russian literature: attempting a determination based on the works of Boris Paternak, Michail Bulgakov, Venedikt Erofeev, Jurij Trifonov and Vasilij Aksenov . Peter Lang, Frankfurt, Berlin and others 2007, ISBN 978-3-631-57277-1 , pp. 132 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
10. ↑ Pasternak's Peredelkino. Retrieved July 12, 2018 . Ian Christie: John Box - Gifted production designer behind the sets of Lawrence of Arabia and Dr Zhivago. In: The Guardian. March 25, 2005. Retrieved July 12, 2018 .   
11. ^ Contemporary history: Propaganda weapon Schiwago , in: Der Spiegel No. 5 2015, page 115, from January 24, 2015
12. ^ CIA Declassifies Agency Role in Publishing Doctor Zhivago
13. ↑ Doctor Schiwago at HÖRDAT, the audio game database (pdf)
14. ↑ Süddeutsche Zeitung No. 21, January 27, 2015, p. 9.
15. ↑ To be continued ... In: Focus Online. March 14, 1994, accessed December 5, 2019 . 
16. ↑ Judgments: To be continued. In: Der Spiegel 18/1999, p. 193. Retrieved on December 5, 2019 .