“The image of Yuri Zhivago is the central image of B. Pasternak’s novel “Doctor Zhivago

In accordance with the ideological and thematic content, a system of images of the novel is built, in the center of which is main character- Yuri Andreevich Zhivago. Often it is called the alter ego of the author, compared with the lyrical hero of poems. On the other hand, they see him as a continuation of that type of Russian hero. literature XIX century, which is commonly called " an extra person". Both of these positions have their justifications. Pasternak himself, according to the recollections of his close friend Olga Ivinskaya, said that in the image of Yuri Andreevich he combined the personality traits of Blok, Yesenin, Mayakovsky and himself. It is also indicative that he trusts the hero not only to express his views, thoughts, thoughts on the most important problems, but even “gives” him the true masterpieces of his lyrics. Nevertheless, Zhivago is a novel hero in whom the author embodied the features of a certain personality of that era. This is a typical intellectual, a smart, educated person, endowed with a sensitive soul and a creative gift. Caught in the maelstrom of historical events, he seems to “stand above the fight”, he cannot fully join any camp - neither white nor red. Zhivago wants to cry out to the White, a schoolboy, still almost a boy, and to the Reds, the Bolsheviks, "that salvation lies not in fidelity to forms, but in liberation from them." Striking in strength is the scene of the battle of the partisan detachment, in which, against his will, Yuri Andreevich found himself. He finds the texts of the 90th Psalm sewn into the clothes of both the killed partisan and the high school student who fought against the partisans. They shot at each other, but called for help and protection from the one Savior.

Later, Zhivago discovers that it is becoming more and more difficult to maintain his isolation, separation from the "herd". “What prevents me from serving, healing and writing?” - he thinks and comes to a striking conclusion: "... not deprivation and wandering, not instability and frequent changes, but the spirit of the crackling phrase that prevails in our days." Sometimes it seems that he is really "superfluous", a weak-willed person who has not been able to find his place in a new life, unlike the friends of his youth Dudorov and Gordon. Everything he does is emphatically everyday, prosaic, and his hesitations, doubts, indecision are sometimes annoying. But this is only an external cut, behind which one can see what makes Zhivago the hero of the novel: in conditions of general impersonality, he remains a personality, amidst the extreme cruelty that the revolution and Civil War, he retains kindness and humanity. He is able to sympathize with people's troubles, and realize the inevitability of what is happening. In the general historical and philosophical concept of Pasternak, it is precisely such a person who is able to comprehend the essence of events, and being creative personality, can express it in his poems, helping others to understand the world around them. At the same time, he himself becomes a victim of time - it is not for nothing that he dies in 1929, which is called the year of the “great turning point”. Once A. Blok said that Pushkin "was killed by the lack of air", and Pasternak literally realizes this metaphor. In that atmosphere of complete lack of freedom, the triumph of mediocrity, the rupture of cultural and spiritual ties, a person like Yuri Zhivago cannot live. But many years later, his friends remember him. Bending over a shabby notebook of Zhivago's poems, they suddenly feel "happy tenderness and calmness", "freedom of the soul", which did not come even after the Great Patriotic War, although everyone expected it, but which the long-dead Yuri Zhivago carried through his life and managed to convey in his poems. These final lines are a statement of the originality of the hero of the novel, the fruitfulness of his existence and the indestructibility and immortality of a great culture, eternal truths and moral values which formed the basis of his personality.

The antipode of Zhivago in the novel is Antipov-Strelnikov. He is the embodiment of the type of "iron fighters" of the revolution. On the one hand, he has great power will, activity, readiness for self-sacrifice in the name of a great idea, asceticism, purity of thoughts. WITH

on the other hand, he is characterized by unjustified cruelty, straightforwardness, the ability to dictate to everyone what he perceives as a “revolutionary necessity”, and by force “drive” into new life even those who do not aspire to fit into it at all. His fate is tragic. Pavel Antipov, having turned from a timid, romantic young man, in love with Lara and professing the humanistic ideas of freedom, equality and fraternity, in a cruel fighter, punisher Strelnikov, turns out to be a victim of a false, deadening revolutionary idea, which, according to the author, contradicts the natural course of history and life itself. Understanding well the inner motivation of her husband’s actions, Lara notes: “With some kind of youthful, falsely directed pride, he became offended by something in life that no one is offended by. He began to pout at the course of events, at history. … He still settles scores with her to this day. … He is going to certain death because of this stupid ambition.”

As a result, Antipov, in the name of the struggle for the revolution, renounces his wife and daughter, from everything that, in his mind, interferes with the "work of life." He even takes another name - Strelnikov - and becomes the embodiment of the brutal force of the revolution. But it turns out that in fact he is weak-willed and powerless in his desire to control the course of history. "Change of life! Yuri Zhi-vago exclaims. - So people can reason ... who have never known life, who have not felt its spirit, its soul. …And material, substance, life never exists. She ... herself is forever reworking and re-creating, she herself is much higher than our stupid theories with you. As a result, Antipov-Strelnikov comes to complete hopelessness and commits suicide. Thus, the author shows that fanatical service to the revolution can only lead to death and, in essence, is opposed to life.

The embodiment of life, love, Russia is in the novel Lara - Zhivago's beloved. She is between two antipodes - Zhivago and Antipov-Strelnikov. Pasternak wrote about the prototype of Lara in a letter to R. Schweitzer in 1958, noting that Olga Vsevolodovna Ivinskaya "is the Lara of my work", "the personification of cheerfulness and self-sacrifice." In an interview with an English journalist in 1959, the writer claimed: “In my youth there was not one, only Lara ... But the Lara of my old age is inscribed in my heart with her (Ivinskaya) blood and her prison.” As in the fate of the author, so in the fate of the hero, there are two beloved, necessary for him, women who determine his life. His wife Tonya is the personification of the unshakable foundations: home, family. Lara is the embodiment of the element of love, life, creativity. This image continues the tradition best heroines Russian classical literature (Tatyana Larina, Natasha Rostova, Olga Ilyinskaya, "Turgenev girls", etc.). But her fate also turns out to be inextricably linked with the fate of Russia. D.S. Likhachev claims that in the novel Lara is a symbol of Russia and life itself. At the same time, this is a very specific image, with its own fate, which is one of the main storylines. It is significant that she is a sister of mercy who helps the wounded during the First World War. It organically combines the elemental, natural beginning and a subtle sense of culture, the best poems of Zhivago are dedicated to it. Her love for Yuri Andreevich was gained through suffering and gained through severe trials of sin, a humiliating relationship with Komarovsky, an influential lawyer who embodies the complete unscrupulousness, cynicism, dirt and vulgarity of bourgeois society. Lara goes without love to marry Antipov in order to free herself from Komarovsky. With Yuri, she is initially connected by love, which is the embodiment of the joy of life, its personification. They are united by a sense of freedom, which is the key to immortality. Although their love is forbidden from the point of view of generally accepted norms (Zhivago is married to Tonya, and Lara is married to Antipov, although relations with Zhivago develop at the moment when Lara considers her husband dead), she is sanctified for the heroes by the whole universe. Here, for example, is how Lara at the coffin of Zhivago speaks of their love: “They loved each other not out of inevitability, not “scorched by passion,” as it is falsely portrayed. They loved each other because everything around them wanted so much: the earth below them, the sky above their heads, clouds and trees. In the finale, Lara, who accidentally came to the funeral of Yuri Zhivago, mourns him, but this scene shocks not only with the depth of feeling expressed in folk poetic traditions, but also with the fact that the heroine addresses the deceased as if he were alive (“Here we are again together, Yurochka... What a horror, think about it!... Think about it!"). It turns out that love is life, it stronger than death, is more important than the “restructuring of the globe”, which, in comparison with the “mystery of life, the mystery of death”, human genius is just “petty world squabbles”. So once again, in the finale, the main ideological and figurative core of the novel is emphasized: the opposition of the living and the dead and the affirmation of the victory of life over death.

The artistic features and genre and compositional originality of the novel from the moment of its first publication to the present time are the subject of heated discussions and disputes. After the publication of the novel in 1988 in Novy Mir, a lively controversy unfolded on the pages of Literaturnaya Gazeta, one of the key issues of which was the definition genre nature this work. It was asserted that in this case"to define a genre means to find the key to the novel, its laws." Several points of view were expressed, which continue to be discussed at the present time: “this is not a novel, but a kind of autobiography”, “a novel is a lyrical poem” (D.S. Likhachev); "novel-life" (G. Gachev); "not only poetic and political, but also philosophical novel"(A. Gulyga); “symbolic novel (in the broad, Pasternakian sense)”, “novel-myth” (S. Piskunova, V. Piskunov); “a modernist, sharply subjective work” that only superficially retains “the structure of a traditional realistic novel” (Vyach. Vozdvizhensky); "poetic novel", "metaphorical autobiography" (A. Voznesensky); "novel-symphony", "novel-sermon", "novel-parable" (R. Gul).

The compositional structure of the work also serves as a subject lively discussions. Many critics consider the novel too "made", schematic, constructive knots clearly sticking out. Others, without denying this, see in such a structure a special artistic technique, allowing the author to carry main idea novel about the conjugation of everything that exists in the world, not only through words, images, descriptions and dialogues, but also with the help of the very composition of the work. This technique is often used in poetry, especially modernist poetry of the 20th century, and is somewhat akin to musical forms. This also applies to cross-cutting figurative-thematic motifs (the above-mentioned image of a blizzard, blizzard, memory motif, etc.), plot-figurative parallels of the natural and human world, history and eternity, etc. So in the scene on the battlefield of the First World War, five actors: “The deceased, mutilated, was Private Gimazetdin, an officer shouting in the forest - his son, Lieutenant Galiullin, his sister was Lara, Gordon and Zhivago - witnesses, they were all together, everyone was nearby, and some did not recognize each other, others did not never knew, and one remained forever unidentified, the other began to wait for discovery until next case, before new meeting". "Waiting to be discovered" and unintentional, but turned out to be fateful meetings of the main characters in Moscow. It is in the room in which the burning candle so struck Yuri, without knowing it, he settles in last days of his life, and accidentally enters there material from the site

Lara, discovering the coffin with the body of her lover, whom she had long ago lost at the crossroads of life. In the epilogue of the novel, there is the last compositional knot: in the summer of 1943, on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War, Gordon and Dudorov meet, remembering Yuri Zhivago, and accidentally discover Tanya Bezcheredeva, a linen worker brought up in an orphanage, who turns out to be the daughter of the late Yuri Andreevich and which his brother, Major General Zhivago, had accidentally found a little earlier.

Critic N. Ivanova claims that the composition of the novel, built according to the musical-symphonic principle, is based on the core leitmotif railway, which branches into many separate motifs, lines, sub-themes. Thus, the first “knot” is tied near the railway: the episode of the suicide of Father Yuri, around which several characters are grouped at once, to a greater or lesser extent participating in the subsequent action (Komarovsky, Misha Gordon, the future revolutionary Tiverzin; from a distance Yura Zhivago himself, his uncle Nikolai Nikolayevich Vedenyapin, who came to visit Duplyanka, where Nika Dudorov was at that time, see the stopped train, not yet knowing about the terrible event that caused it). In the armored car, the most important meeting of Yuri Andreevich and Strelnikov takes place for the further plot. Near the railway there is a booth in which the former servant of Lara Martha lives. It was she who turned out to have the daughter of Zhivago and Lara Tanya, who tells Dudorov and Gordon many years later scary story the murder of Martha's son Petenka. It is significant that the death of Yuri Zhivago also takes place near the rails - at a tram stop. Thus, through the meta-image of the railway, embodying the inexorability of time and the deadly force, the main ideological and compositional Axis of the novel is realized: the opposition of the living and the dead.

Such a construction of the work gives the impression of some theatricality, but understood not straightforwardly, but as the embodiment of the Universal drama of being. Hence such artistic features novel, as a diversity of linguistic forms, including the entire richest palette: from biblical and philosophical vocabulary, literary and poetic tradition to colloquial colloquial forms, street language, rural dialect. “One of the artistic forces ... of the novel is the power of details,” R.B. Ghoul. “On them, on this figurativeness, on this Russian word, the whole novel stands.” As other critics note, the theatricality of the novel is also correlated with the extensive use of detailed comparisons, metaphors, and personifications in it. According to Pasternak himself, metaphor is “a natural consequence of the fragility of a person and the long-term conceived enormity of his tasks, his spirit.” That is why the writer's favorite poetic device so organically enters his novel and allows him to realize his main idea at the stylistic level: to bring together the disparate poles of being and overcome the forces of destruction, defeat death and gain immortality.

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Zhivago Yuri Andreevich- the main character of the novel, a doctor and a poet. The hero's surname associates him with the image of "God Zhivago", that is, Christ (cf. the name of the character's mother - Maria Nikolaevna); the phrase "Doctor Zhivago" can be read as "healing all living things." The name Yury echoes both main toponyms of the novel - Moscow (cf. the mythopoetic connotations of the name Georgy = Yury) and Yuryatin. Wed also the associative connection of the words "Yuri" - "holy fool". The meaning of the patronymic is also significant: Andrei - “man”, Andreevich - “son of man”.

The novel begins with the death of the hero's parents: the mother dies, and the father, a ruined millionaire, commits suicide by jumping out of a courier train on the move. The boy's uncle, Nikolai Nikolaevich Vedenyapin, brings him to Moscow and settles in the family of Professor Gromeko. One day after the interrupted musical evening Zh., together with his friend Misha Gordon, escort Alexander Alexandrovich Gromeko to the rooms "Montenegro": here Zh. first sees Lara - a girl sleeping in an armchair, then watches her silent explanation with Komarovsky. Almost 20 years later, Zh. will remember this scene: “I, a boy who didn’t know anything about you, understood with all the flour of the strength that responded to you: this puny, thin girl is charged, like electricity, to the limit, with all conceivable femininity in the world.” Zh. enters the university at the Faculty of Medicine. Starts writing poetry. After graduating from university, he writes a paper on the physiology of vision. On Christmas Eve in 1911, Zh., together with Tonya Gromeko, goes to the Sventitsky Christmas tree: driving along Kamergersky Lane, he pays attention to the window behind which a candle is lit (this is the window of the room where Lara is talking to Pasha Antipov, but Zh. does not know this). There is a line of the poem: “The candle burned on the table. The candle was burning ... "(" The candle was burning on the table "- an unconscious quote from the poem by K. Romanov in 1885" It was getting dark: we were sitting in the garden ... "). On the Christmas tree at the Sventitskys, Zh. sees Lara immediately after her shot at the prosecutor and recognizes her, although he does not know her name. Returning from the Christmas tree, J. and Tonya learn that Tonya's mother has died; before her death, she asked them to marry. During the funeral, Zh. feels a desire, in contrast to death, “to work on forms, to produce beauty. Now, more than ever, it was clear to him that art is always, without ceasing, occupied with two things. It relentlessly meditates on death and relentlessly creates life through it. Zh. and Tonya get married; in the fall of 1915, their son Sashenka was born. Zh. are drafted into the army; he is wounded; lying in the hospital, meets Lara. He is informed from Moscow that without his permission a book of his poems has been published, which is praised. Working in the town of Melyuzeevo, Zh. lives in the same house with Antipova, but does not even know her room. They often collide at work. He "honestly tries not to love" her, but he blurts out, and she leaves.

In the summer of 1917, Mr.. and Zh. leaves for Moscow from the disintegrating front. In Moscow, having met with his family, he still feels lonely, foresees social cataclysms, "considers himself and his environment doomed." He works in a hospital and also writes The Game of People, a diary of poetry and prose. The days of the October battles in Moscow coincide with the serious illness of Sashenka's son. Going outside a few days later, Zh. at the entrance of the house at the corner of Serebryany Lane and Molchanovka reads in the newspaper the first decree of the Soviet government; in the same entrance he meets an unknown young man, not knowing that this is his half-brother Evgraf. J. accepts the revolution with enthusiasm, calling it "great surgery." In the winter of 1918, he suffers from typhus. When Zh. recovers, in April 1918, together with his wife, son and father-in-law, on the advice of Evgraf, they leave for the Urals, to the former estate of his grandfather Tony Varykino, not far from Yuriatin. They go for several weeks. Already at the entrance to Yuriatin, at one of the stations, Zh. was arrested at night by the Red Army, mistaking him for a spy. He is interrogated by the military commissar Strelnikov (Zh. does not know that this is Antipov, Lara's husband) and after a conversation he is released. Zh. says to a random fellow traveler Samdevyatov: “I was very revolutionary, and now I think that you won’t get anything by violence.” ^K. with his family safely gets to Yuriatin, then they go to Varykino, where they settle, occupying two rooms in an old manor house. In winter, Zh. keeps records - in particular, he writes down that he refused medicine and is silent about the medical specialty so as not to tie his freedom. Periodically, he visits the library in Yuriatin and one day he sees Antipova in the library; does not approach her, but writes off her address from the library card. Then he comes to her apartment; after a while they get closer. Zh. is burdened by the fact that he is deceiving his wife, and he decides to "cut the knot by force." However, when he returns on horseback from the city to Varykino, he is stopped by the partisans of the red detachment and "forced to be mobilized as a medical worker."

Zh. spends more than a year in captivity with the partisans, and he directly tells the detachment commander Livery Mikulitsyn that he does not share the ideas of Bolshevism at all: “When I hear about the alteration of life, I lose power over myself and fall into despair.<...>material, substance, life is never. She herself, if you want to know, is a continuously renewing herself, eternally reworking herself, she herself is eternally remaking and transforming herself, she herself is much higher than our stupid theories with you. Zh. knows nothing about Lara and his family - he does not know how his wife's birth went (when he was captured, Tonya was pregnant). In the end, Zh. manages to escape from the detachment, and, after walking dozens of miles, he returns to Yuryatin. He comes to Lara's apartment, but she, together with Katenka, having heard about his appearance in the vicinity, left for the empty Varykino to wait for him there. While waiting for Lara, J. falls ill, and when he comes to, he sees her next to him. They live together. Zh. works in an outpatient clinic and in medical courses. Despite his outstanding abilities as a diagnostician, he is treated with distrust, criticized for "intuitionism" and suspected of idealism. He receives a letter from Moscow from his wife, which was written five months ago: Tonya reported that their daughter Masha was born, and also that her father, uncle, and her children were being sent abroad.

Komarovsky, who arrived in Yuryatin, says to J.: “There is a certain communist style. Few fit that standard. But no one so clearly violates this manner of living and thinking as you do.<...>You are a mockery of this world, its insult.<...>Your destruction is next." Nevertheless, Zh. refuses Komarovsky's offer to leave for Far East, and she and Lara decide to wait out the danger in Barykino. There, J. begins to write down previously composed poems at night, and also to work on new things: “he experienced the approach of what is called inspiration. The balance of forces that govern creativity, as it were, turns on its head. It is not the person and the state of his soul that he is looking for expression that takes precedence, but the language with which he wants to express it. Language, the homeland and receptacle of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for a person and the whole thing becomes music, not in relation to outwardly auditory sound, but in relation to the swiftness and power of its inner flow. Komarovsky arrives in Varykino, who, in a secret conversation with Zhivago, reports that Strelnikov / Antipov, Lara's husband, has been shot and she and her daughter are in great danger. Zh. agrees that Lara and Katenka leave with Komarovsky, telling her that he himself will join them later. Left alone in Barykino, Zh. drinks at night and writes poems dedicated to Lara, “but Lara of his poems and notes, as they faded and replaced one word with another, moved further and further away from his true prototype.” One day, Strelnikov appears in the Varykin house, who, it turns out, is alive; he and Zh. talk all night, and in the morning, when! Zh. still asleep, Strelnikov at the porch of the house puts a bullet in his temple. Burying him, 2K. goes to Moscow, where he arrives in the spring of 1922, accompanied by a peasant youth Vasya Brykin (whom he once met on the way from Moscow to Yuryatin). In Moscow, Zh. begins to write small books that “contained the philosophy of Yuri Andreevich, a presentation of his medical views, his definitions of health and ill health, thoughts about transformism and evolution, about personality as the biological basis of the body, Yuri Andreevich’s thoughts on history and religion,<...>essays on the Pugachev places visited by the doctor, poems by Yuri Andreevich and stories”; Vasya is engaged in their publication, but gradually their cooperation ceases. Zh. is busy with going abroad to her family, but without much energy. He settles in the former apartment of the Sventitskys, where he occupies a small room; he "abandoned medicine, turned into a slut, stopped seeing acquaintances and became poor." Then he converges with Marina, the daughter of a janitor: “she became the third wife of Yuri Andreevich not registered in the registry office, with the first not divorced. They have children": "two girls, Kapka and Klashka." One day Zh. disappears: on the street he meets Evgraf, and he rents him a room in Kamergersky Lane - the same one in which Antipov once lived as a student and in the window of which Zh. saw a candle burning on the table. Zh. begins to work on articles and poems, the subject of which is the city. He enters the service at the Botkin hospital; but when J. first goes there by tram, he has a heart attack: he manages to get out of the car and dies on the street. Zh.'s poems collected by Evgraf form the final part of the novel.

Boris Pasternak's novel "Doctor Zhivago" is called an autobiography, in which miraculously there are no external facts coinciding with the real life of the author.

The central image of the novel is Dr. Yuri Andreevich Zhivago. Sometimes, in the light of the requirements for novels, he seems pale, inexpressive, and his poems, attached to the work, are an unjustified appendage, as if irrelevant and artificial. And, nevertheless, the author writes about himself, but writes as about an outsider. He invents a destiny for himself in which he could most fully reveal his inner life to the reader.

The real biography of Pasternak did not give him the opportunity to fully express the gravity of his position between the two camps in the revolution, which he so wonderfully shows in the scene of the battle between the partisans and the whites. And after all, he, that is, the hero of the work, Doctor Zhivago, is a legally neutral person, nevertheless involved in the battle on the side of the Reds. He injures and even, it seems to him, kills one of the youths of the gymnasium, and then finds both this youth and the murdered partisan the same psalm, sewn in amulets - the 90th, which, according to the ideas of that time, protected from death.

The novel was written not only about Zhivago, but it was written for the sake of Zhivago, in order to show the drama of such a contemporary of the revolutionary era, who did not accept the revolution.

Yuri Andreevich, scion of a wealthy bourgeois family, Muscovite. He received a medical education at Moscow University, visited, as a doctor, at the front of the First World War. During the revolutionary years, the hero was captured by Siberian partisans, lost contact with his family, who was sent abroad, but still managed to return to Moscow after some time. There he led an indefinite life, feeding himself either on medicine or on literature, since he wrote with young years and died suddenly of a heart attack. After Zhivago, only a notebook of poems remained.

It is not for nothing that the protagonist of the novel bears the surname Zhivago (although the surname is common) - the embodiment of the “spirit of Zhivago” in life and work is this man, connected with the world of nature, history, Christianity, art, Russian culture with the thinnest threads.

Yuri Andreevich Zhivago is an intellectual. He is an intellectual both in his spiritual life (a poet, as they say, from God), and in his merciful, philanthropic profession. And by inexhaustible sincerity, domesticity internal heat, and by restlessness, by the desire for independence - an intellectual.

Yuri Andreevich Zhivago is lyrical hero Pasternak, who remains a lyric poet in prose. Doctor Zhivago is a poet, like Pasternak himself, his poems are attached to the work. This is no coincidence. Zhivago's poems are Pasternak's poems. And these works are written from one person - the poems have one author and one common lyrical hero.

It is noteworthy that there are also no differences between the poetic figurativeness of the author's language and the poetic figurativeness of the speeches and thoughts of the protagonist. The author and the hero are one and the same person, with the same thoughts, with the same line of reasoning and attitude to the world. Zhivago is the spokesman for the secret Pasternak. The image of Zhivago, the embodiment of Boris Leonidovich himself, becomes something more than Boris Leonidovich himself. He develops himself, creates from Yuri Andreevich Zhivago a representative of the Russian intelligentsia, who, not without hesitation and not without spiritual loss, accepted the revolution. Zhivago-Pasternak accepts the world, no matter how cruel it may be at the moment.

Zhivago is a personality, as if created in order to perceive the era without interfering in it at all. In the novel, the main active force is the element of revolution. The protagonist himself does not influence and does not try to influence her, does not interfere in the course of events. He serves those whom he gets to - once, in a battle with the whites, he even takes a rifle and, against his own will, shoots at the attackers, who admire him with their reckless courage.

Tonya, who loves Yuri Andreevich, guesses in him - better than anyone else - this is a lack of will. But Zhivago is by no means weak-willed in every sense, but only in one sense - in his sense of the enormity of the events taking place against his will, in which he is carried and swept all over the earth.

The image of Yuri Zhivago, who, as it were, permeates the entire surrounding nature, which reacts to everything deeply and gratefully, is extremely important, because through it, through its relationship to the environment, the attitude to reality of the author himself is transmitted.

In the novel, we can also see what Russia is for Zhivago. This is the whole world around him. Russia is also created from contradictions, full of duality. Zhivago perceives it with love, which evokes the highest suffering in him.

The novel permeates and organizes the crossing and confrontation of two motives. At the end of the story, it would seem that death triumphs. However, the idea of ​​the immortality of nature and history still wins. And in the text too. No wonder the novel ends with lines about resurrection, rebirth to true life:

I will go down to the grave and on the third day I will rise,

And, as rafts are rafted down the river,

To me for judgment, like the barges of a caravan,

Centuries will float from the darkness.

In the novel "Doctor Zhivago" Boris Pasternak "transmits his attitude, his vision of the events that shook our country at the beginning of the 20th century" Gorelov P. Reflections on the novel. // Questions of Literature, 1988, No. 9, p. 58 .. It is known that Pasternak's attitude to the revolution was contradictory. Update Ideas public life he accepted, but the writer could not help but see how they turned into their opposite. So the protagonist of the work, Yuri Zhivago, does not find an answer to the question of how he should live on: what to accept and what not in the new life. In describing the spiritual life of his hero, Boris Pasternak expressed the doubts and intense inner struggle of his generation.

In the novel "Doctor Zhivago" Pasternak revives "the idea of ​​self-worth human personality» Manevich G.I. "Doctor Zhivago" as a novel about creativity. // Justifications of creativity, 1990. P. 68. Personal prevails in the narrative. The genre of this novel, which can be conditionally defined as prose of lyrical self-expression, is subject to all artistic means. There are, as it were, two planes in the novel: the outer one, which tells the story of Doctor Zhivago's life, and the inner one, which reflects the hero's spiritual life. 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 is transferred from the events and dialogues of the characters to their monologues.

The novel is a kind of autobiography of Boris Pasternak, but not in physical terms (that is, the novel does not reflect the events that happen to the author in real life), but in the spiritual (the work reflects what happened in the soul of the writer). The spiritual path that Yuri Andreevich Zhivago traveled is, as it were, a reflection of his own spiritual path Boris Leonidovich Pasternak.

Being formed under the influence of life is the main feature of Yuri. Throughout the novel, Yuri Andreevich Zhivago is shown as a person who makes almost no decisions. But he does not mind the decisions of other people, especially those dear and close to him. Yuri Andreevich makes other people's decisions like a child who does not argue with his parents, he accepts their gifts along with instructions. Yuri does not object to the wedding with Tonya, when Anna Ivanovna "conspired" them. He does not object to being drafted into the army, to a trip to the Urals. “However, why argue? You have decided to go. I'm joining,"1 says Yuri. Once in partisan detachment, not sharing the views of the partisans, he still remains there, not trying to object.

Yuri is a weak-willed person, but he has a strong mind and intuition. He sees everything, perceives everything, but does not interfere in anything and does what is required of him. He takes part in the events, but just as limply. The element captures him like a grain of sand, and carries him as and wherever she pleases.

However, his complaisance is neither mental weakness nor cowardice. Yuri Andreevich simply follows, obeys what life requires of him. But “Doctor Zhivago is able to defend his position in the face of danger or in situations where we are talking about his personal honor or convictions” Buck D.P. "Doctor Zhivago". B.L. Pasternak: the functioning of the lyrical cycle in the novel as a whole. // Pasternak readings. Perm, 1990., S. 84. Only outwardly Yuri obeys the elements, events, but they are not able to change his deep spiritual essence. He lives in his own world, in the world of thoughts and feelings. Many obeyed the elements and broke down spiritually.

“Friends have strangely faded and discolored. No one has their own world, their own opinion. They were much brighter in his memories. ... How quickly everyone shed, how without regret they parted with an independent thought, which no one seems to have ever had! 2 - this is how Yuriy thinks about his friends. But the hero himself resists everything that tries to destroy his inner world.

Yuri Andreevich against violence. According to his observations, violence leads to nothing but violence. Therefore, being in the camp with the partisans, he does not participate in battles, and even when, due to circumstances, Doctor Zhivago has to take up arms, he tries not to hit people. Unable to endure life in a partisan detachment, the doctor flees from there. Moreover, Yuri Zhivago is burdened not so much by a hard life full of dangers and hardships, but by the sight of a cruel, senseless massacre.

Yuri Andreevich refuses Komarovsky's tempting offer, sacrificing his love for Lara. He can't compromise his beliefs, so he can't ride with her. The hero is ready to give up his happiness for the sake of the salvation and peace of his beloved woman, and for this he even goes to deceit.

From this we can conclude that Yuri Andreevich Zhivago is only a seemingly obedient and weak-willed person, in the face of life's difficulties he is able to make his own decision, defend his convictions, and not break under the onslaught of the elements. Tonya feels his spiritual strength and lack of will. She writes to him: “I love you. Oh how I love you, if you could only imagine. I love everything special in you, everything profitable and unprofitable, all your ordinary sides, dear in their unusual combination, a face ennobled by inner content, which without this, perhaps, would seem ugly, talent and mind, as if taking the place of a completely absent will. . All this is dear to me, and I do not know a person better than you. Antonina Alexandrovna understands that the lack of will more than covers inner strength, spirituality, the talent of Yuri Andreevich, and this is much more important for her.

2.2 Personality and history in the novel. The image of the intelligentsia

G. Gachev's view of Pasternak's novel is interesting - he considers the problem and the plot of the novel as the problem of a person in the whirlpool of history “In the 20th century, History revealed itself as an enemy of Life, All-Being. History has declared itself a treasury of meanings and immortalities. Many turn out to be knocked down with a pantalik, believe science and the newspaper and lament. The other is a man of culture and Spirit: from history itself, he knows that there are epochs when whirlpools historical processes they strive to turn a person into a grain of sand, they have been more than once (Rome, Napoleon). And he refuses to participate in history, personally begins to create his own space-time, creates an oasis where he lives in true values: in love, nature, freedom of spirit, culture. These are Yuri and Lara.

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 to 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. So the protagonist of the work, Yuri Zhivago, does not find an answer to the question of how he should live on: what to accept and what not in the new life. In describing the spiritual life of his hero, Boris Pasternak expressed the doubts and intense inner struggle of his generation.

The main question around which the narrative of the external and inner life heroes - this is their attitude to the revolution, the impact of turning points in the history of the country on their destinies. Yuri Zhivago was not opposed to the revolution. He understood that history has its own course and cannot be broken. 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 suicide of Palykh, the bloody goloshmatina and slaughter, which had no end in sight. The fanaticisms of the whites and the reds competed in cruelty, alternately increasing one in response to the other, as if they were multiplied. The blood made me sick, it came up to my throat and rushed to my head, my eyes swam with it. Yuri Zhivago did not take the revolution with hostility, but he did not accept it either. He was somewhere between "for" and "against".

History can afford to delay the arrival of truth, happiness. She has infinity in stock, and people have a certain period - life. Amid the confusion, a person is called to orient himself directly to the present, in unconditional values. After all, they are simple: love, meaningful work, the beauty of nature, free thought.

The protagonist of the novel, Yuri Zhivago, is a doctor and a poet, perhaps a poet even more than a doctor. For Pasternak, the poet is "a hostage of time in captivity to eternity." In other words, Yuri Zhivago's view of historical events- a view from the point of view of eternity. He can make mistakes, take the temporary for the eternal. In October 1717, Yuri accepts the revolution with enthusiasm, calling it "magnificent surgery." But after he is arrested at night by the Red Army, mistaking him for a spy, and then interrogated by the military commissar Strelnikov, Yuri says: “I was very revolutionary, and now I think that you can’t take anything by violence.” Yuri Zhivago “leaves the game”, renounces medicine, is silent about the medical specialty, does not take sides with any of the warring camps in order to be a spiritually independent person, in order to remain himself under pressure of any circumstances, “not to give up on his face”. After spending more than a year in captivity with the partisans, Yuri bluntly tells the commander: “When I hear about the alteration of life, I lose power over myself and fall into despair, life itself forever alters and transforms itself, it itself is much higher than our stupid theories with you.” By this, Yuri shows that life itself must resolve the historical dispute about who is right and who is not.

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

The fate of Doctor Zhivago and his relatives is the story of people whose lives are unsettled, destroyed by the elements of the revolution. The Zhivago and Gromeko families leave their settled Moscow home for the Urals to seek refuge "on the ground". Yuri is captured by red partisans, and forced against his will to participate in the armed struggle. His family has been expelled new government From Russia. Lara falls into complete dependence on the 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 innumerable general or women's concentration camps in the north."

Doctor Zhivago is a textbook of freedom, starting with style and ending with the individual's ability to assert his independence from the clutches of history, and Zhivago, in his independence, is not an individualist, has not turned away from people, he is a doctor, he heals people, he is turned to people.

“... No one makes history, you can’t see it, just as you can’t see how the grass grows. Wars, revolutions, tsars, Robespierres are its organic stimulants, its fermenting yeast. Revolutions are produced by efficient, one-sided fanatics, geniuses of self-restraint. They overthrow the old order in a few hours or days. Revolutions last for weeks, many years, and then for decades, centuries, the spirit of limitation that led to the revolution is worshiped as a shrine. - These reflections of Zhivago are important both for understanding Pasternak's historical views, and his attitude to the revolution, to its events, as some kind of absolute given, the legitimacy of the appearance of which is not subject to discussion.

"Doctor Zhivago" - "a novel about the fate of man in history. The image of the road is central in it” Isupov K.G. "Doctor Zhivago" as a rhetorical epic (on the aesthetic philosophy of B.L. Pasternak). // Isupov K.G. Russian aesthetics of history. SPb., 1992., S. 10 .. The plot of the novel is laid, as rails are laid ... storylines, the fates of heroes strive into the distance and constantly intersect in unexpected places - like railway tracks. "Doctor Zhivago" is a novel of the era of scientific, philosophical and aesthetic revolution, the era of religious searches and pluralization of scientific and artistic thinking; era of the destruction of norms that seemed unshakable and universal until then, this is a novel of social catastrophes.

B. L. Pasternak wrote the novel "Doctor Zhivago" in prose, but he, talented poet, could not but pour out his soul on its pages in a way closer to the heart - in verse. The book of poems by Yuri Zhivago, separated into a separate chapter, fits perfectly into the main text of the novel. She is part of it, not a poetic insert. In poetry, Yuri Zhivago talks about his time and about himself - this is his spiritual biography. The book of poems opens with the theme of forthcoming suffering and the awareness of their inevitability, and ends with the theme of their voluntary acceptance and redemptive sacrifice. In the poem “The Garden of Gethsemane” in the words of Jesus Christ addressed to the Apostle Peter: “A dispute cannot be settled with iron. Put your sword back in place, man,” Yuri says that it is impossible to establish the truth with the help of weapons. People like B. L. Pasternak, disgraced, persecuted, “unprintable”, he remained for us a Man with a capital letter.

Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago, whose main character is Yuri Andreevich Zhivago, reflects the fate of the Russian intellectual in the whirlwinds of Russian revolutions and wars in the first half of the 20th century. A man, his moral suffering, creative aspirations and searches, his most humane profession in the world and a collision with the inhumane world of cruel and "stupid theories", a man and the noise of time that accompanies his whole life - main topic novel.

Roman deserved Nobel Prize in Literature, however, it was not published in the writer's homeland, and he refused the prize under pressure. What made it possible to consider the novel anti-Soviet? Probably the truth with which life is portrayed ordinary person, who does not accept the revolution, does not want to sacrifice himself to it, but at the same time is too soft and undecided to at least resemble an opposition force.

Character characteristic

Yuri Zhivago enters the narrative of the novel as a little boy. He lost his parents early, was brought up in a good family, which became his own. Zhivago is creative, budding, subtly feeling beauty, art, and sensual, subtle himself. Yuri becomes a doctor, he feels the need not only to help people, but also the need to “create beauty”, as opposed to death.

Zhivago foresees social cataclysms, but at the same time he believes in the revolution, as in a surgeon's true and reliable scalpel, and compares the revolution with a magnificent surgical operation, he even experiences spiritual uplift, realizing what time he lives in. However, he soon realizes that the violence of the revolution went against his welcoming moods - the Reds forcibly mobilize the doctor, I interrogate him as a spy, he is captured by the partisans, and now he is in despair from the ideas of Bolshevism, because he has been taken away and family, and a beloved woman, and now his destruction is only a matter of time, and he is waiting for him. In isolation from the family, one does not work or write, and does not dream of anything. In 1929, Zhivago dies of a heart attack, barely getting out of the tram car. What remains is his lyrics, the lost craving for beauty (and did this pre-revolutionary world exist at all, or was it just a dream?), unfulfilled hopes.

The image in the work

(Omar Sharif as Doctor Zhivago, David Lean's "Doctor Zhivago", USA 1965)

Yuri Zhivago is a collective image of a Russian intellectual whose youth is marked by a revolution. Brought up on classical literature and art, appreciating the beautiful, he, like all Russian intellectuals, is an amateur of a wide profile. He talentedly writes poetry and prose, brilliantly philosophizes, receives a brilliant education, develops in his profession, becomes an excellent diagnostician, but all this goes to dust, because the revolution and civil war instantly made yesterday's citizens respected in society, the color of the nation, despised by the bourgeoisie, renegades.

The rejection of violence, which permeates the new system, does not allow Yuri to deftly integrate into the new social reality, moreover, his origin, his views, and finally, his poems become dangerous - all this can be faulted, everything can be punished.

Psychologically, the image of Zhivago is revealed, of course, in that notebook, in which, as an afterword, poems allegedly written by Yuri are collected. The lyrics show how disconnected from reality he is and how indifferent to "making history". The reader is presented with a subtle lyric poet, depicting snow, a candle flame, household trifles, country comfort, home light and warmth. It is precisely these things that Zhivago sings more than class things - his place, his family, his comfort. And it is precisely because of this that the novel is truthful and was so objectionable to critics.

An inert and motionless person, led somewhere, somewhere too compliant, not defending himself. Sometimes the reader may feel a sense of dislike for the hero’s indecision: he gave himself “a word not to love Larisa” - and did not keep it, hurried to his wife and children - and did not catch up, tried to quit everything - and failed. Such lack of will clearly fits into the Christian principles - to turn the second cheek when the first was hit, and symbolism can be traced in the name of the hero: Yuri (as if "fool fool") Andreevich ("son of man") Zhivago (the embodiment of the "spirit of Zhivago"). The hero seems to come into contact with eternity, without giving assessments, without judging, without opposing.

(Boris Pasternak)

It is believed that the image of Yuri Zhivago is as close as possible to the image of Boris Pasternak himself, and also reflects inner worlds his contemporaries - Alexander Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Sergei Yesenin. The creative intelligentsia looked at revolutionary moods with an individual, heightened understanding, and therefore through the eyes of creative person you can see the truth and experience it by reading a novel.

The image of Zhivago raises questions of humanity, the role of man in the cycle of history, where an individual looks like a grain of sand, but is valuable in itself.


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