Yuri and Lara spend a good deal of time together and it seems as though there may be some romantic interest growing, but both of them leave before it comes to fruition. She is working as a nurse in the hope of finding Pasha who had stopped responding to her letters. Wounded by an artillery shell, he meets Lara yet again when she treats him in the hospital.

War breaks out between Russia and Japan, and Yuri, now a doctor, joins the army. He marries Tonia Gromeko and their first child is born before the start of World War I. Yuri finds mingling with people from the lower levels of society fascinating.

They decide to go to Yuriatin, in the Urals. Placed with a helpful family, she finishes at a school for teachers. Lara attempts to kill Komarovsky at a Christmas party, desperate to get out of his clutches. While tending to her mother, Yuri crosses paths with Lara for the first time. Yuri, now a medical student studying in Moscow, is asked to accompany the doctor who treats Amalia after her suicide attempt. This drives Amalia mad, and she attempts to commit suicide, feeling that she will live her life constantly under Komarovsky’s thumb. Andrei Zhivago’s old lawyer, Komarovsky, who financially supports Amalia, seduces Lara. Pasha falls in love with Lara, the sixteen-year-old daughter of Amalia Guischar, a French dressmaker with a shop in Moscow. Yuri is now surrounded by a whole cast of new characters, including Pasha Antipov, a revolutionary. He was traveling with his lawyer, Victor Komarovsky, who maintains that Zhivago was an alcoholic and killed himself in a fit of withdrawal.Īs Yuri is getting older, his uncle sends him to live with the Gromeko family and their daughter, Tonia. He ends up committing suicide while traveling by train. Andrei Zhivago, Yuri’s father, once a wealthy businessman, was a philanderer and squandered his family’s wealth, leaving Yuri and his mother with nothing.

Believing in personal strength, he teaches Yuri about the importance of developing resilience. Yuri is very fond of his uncle, who also works as a university professor and is a scholar of the revolution. His father has deserted the family so Yuri will now be raised by his uncle, a former priest turned writer. After the funeral, Yuri spends the night in his room in a monastery. The book opens with ten-year-old Yuri attending his mother’s funeral alongside his uncle, Nikolai Nikolaievich Vedeniapin, who consoles him. The novel tells the story of Yuri Zhivago, a man torn between his love for two women while simultaneously attempting to navigate the tumultuous times of twentieth-century Russia. Set between the 1905 Russian Revolution and the Second World War, Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhivago, first published in Italy in 1957, takes its name from its protagonist, Yuri Zhivago.

Doctor zhivago by boris pasternak