Doctor Zhivago Analysis

Russia, in All Its Glory Throughout this book, Pasternak has a bit of a love affair with his home country of Russia, regardless of how much he disagrees with what the Bolshevik Revolution has done...

The narrator of this book is basically like a god who can see into the minds of many different characters. That means that we've got a straight-up Third Person Omniscient narrator on our hands here...

Doctor Zhivago follows several different characters and gives us a lot of insight into each of their lives. But at its heart, the novel is about… well… Doctor Zhivago and his struggle to live a...

Pasternak doesn't pull any punches when it comes to showing us people's failings. He doesn't, for example, let Zhivago off the hook for cheating on his wife with another (married) woman. But at the...

Have you ever read a book and thought to yourself, "Huh, this is an interesting character. I wonder what his entire life has been like up to this point?" Well, if you're reading a Russian writer li...

At its core, Doctor Zhivago is all about one man's struggle to live the life he wants in a society that constantly orders him to live the life it tells him to. So what better way to acknowledge thi...

"I shall go to the grave, and on the third day rise,And, just as rafts float down a river,To me for judgment, like a caravan of barges,The centuries will come floating from the darkness." There are...

There are several things that make this book a tough read, and these things are pretty common to Russian novels in general. First off, the book is really long, and it introduces so many characters...

Exposition: From Moscow, With Love (For More than One Woman) There's no getting around it. Pasternak takes his sweet time setting the table for this story. In the Initial Situation, we learn all ab...

It takes a while for Doctor Zhivago's true desires to start making themselves known to us. After the rise of Communism in Russia, though, we start to get a really good sense of how dissatisfied Zhi...

Zhivago grows up from a sensitive little boy into a stubborn young man. He marries Tonya Gromeko and has a son with her, but he also gets called away to work as an army doctor during World War One....

Doctor Zhivago was originally published in Italian because the Soviet government wouldn't allow Pasternak to publish it in Russian. The poor guy had to smuggle the book out of the country before an...

While we might not get a lot of direct descriptions of sex scenes in this book, there's definitely a lot of steamy stuff happening just behind the narrator's curtain. Zhivago, for one, starts havin...

Lev Tolstoy (6.8.27)Vladimir Soloviev (1.5.17)Immanuel Kant (1.5.17)Karl Marx (1.5.17)Alexander Blok (3.10.5)The Russo-Japanese War (2.1.1) New Economic Policy—NEP (15.1.2)Admiral Alexander Kolch...