Nicola nikolaevich Jenia Vedenyapin: zhivago's uncle.
Nicky Dudorov: zhivago's childhood friend.
Misha Gordon: zhivago's childhood friend, of Jewish descent, witnessed the suicide of zhivago Sr. as a child.
Antonina Aleksandrov Gromeko: zhivago's wife.
Amalia Karovna Guichar: Lala's mother.
Larissa Fedorov Guichar: Pasha's wife and zhivago's lover.
Victor komarovsky: A lawyer who drove old zhivago to death and pestered Lala at the same time.
Pavel Antipov/Strenikov: The son of a railway worker and a childhood friend of Lala. When he was in medical college, a professor of Yuri zhivago reminded him: "Bacteria may look beautiful under the microscope, but they have done some ugly things to human beings."
Zhivago's ideals and principled beliefs stood on the opposite side of the cruelty and terror brought by wars (World War I, Russian Revolution and subsequent Russian Civil War). A large part of the book describes how idealism was destroyed by the Bolsheviks, rebels and the White Army. Yuri had to witness the horrors of cannibalism, dismemberment and other innocent civilians in that turbulent era. Even the love of his life, the lesbian, was taken away.
He thought for a long time that war can make the whole world heartless and people who used to live in peace become incompatible. His journey through Russia can be said to have an epic feeling, because the world he experienced is so different. His desire to find a place to escape from all this drove him across frozen Siberia and finally back to Moscow. Boris Pasternak vaguely criticized the ideology of the Soviet Union: he disagreed with "shaping a new person" because it violated human nature. This is also the theme of this novel.
Paying attention to individual value and freedom does not mean advocating only caring for oneself, but respecting everyone and caring for others, especially the unfortunate people. The idea of fraternity in zhivago's works was also accepted from Weijie Nyam. From an early age, he felt that his uncle always had the noble feelings of getting along with everyone on an equal footing. He once said before tonya's mother's bed, "The person who exists in this person's heart is this person's soul. This is you, and this is what your consciousness breathes, nourishes and even intoxicated. This is your soul, your immortality, your life in others. "
The love between zhivago and Lala is a kind of self-sacrificing love. Although zhivago knew Lala was a "traumatized person", she still loved her selflessly. The deeper the feelings, the more concerned about each other's happiness and encourage each other to return to their loved ones. On the eve of being deported with his family, Togna wrote in a letter to zhivago: "What an embarrassing and heartless punishment not to love! ..... not loving is like murder, and I will never give anyone such a blow. " Zhivago risked his life to rescue and release the white guard soldier Xie Liaosha, who was still a teenager at that time. At the time of crisis, he took the homeless rural child Vasha to Moscow and tried to send him to the arts and crafts school, which was also the embodiment of his spirit of fraternity. According to Pasternak, real people always live among others. As early as in his autobiography, he said, "Only when we can love others and have the opportunity to love can we become human beings." Yuri zhivago is the central figure in this novel. From a medical student in Moscow, who experienced the baptism of war and revolutionary storm, to becoming a poor intellectual in the late 1920s, the basic plot clues of his works are formed. Around zhivago, there are people who have influenced his character and destiny to varying degrees, including his uncle and dependent and secular priest Weijie Nyam, his father-in-law and chemist Gromi, his wife Togna, his lover Lala and her husband Antipov, his half-brother Evgraf, and childhood friends Gordon and Dudorov who have always kept friendship with him. Through zhivago's bumpy experience, with the help of his notes, creations, letters, monologues and reflections, and through his communication and dialogue with all the above-mentioned figures, the works outline the vivid silhouette of that changeable historical era from the perspective of this group of different types of intellectuals. Readers can see the wounded who fell on the sidewalk because of the night fighting in the city, government announcements and decrees posted on the streets, members with unlimited power in leather jackets, and villages trampled by wars and famines, but rarely can they see concrete and direct descriptions of important social events, because the works pay attention to the historical truth itself, but the characters' premonitions, reactions, comments and associations to these historical events. As the exiled Russian critic Stephon said, on top of all the "chaos" outlined in his works, "the refraction of spirit always flashes". For example, after the February Revolution, zhivago returned to Moscow from the front line of World War I and met a young hunter on the train. He concluded in a relaxed tone that a devastating social shock would happen soon. Zhivago argued with him: "It is not appropriate to carry out such risky experiments. Before moving from one turning point to another, this country should be given a sober time and a chance to catch a breath. " This dialogue reflects people's different views on the historical process between the two Russian revolutions. When the October Revolution was about to break out, zhivago predicted that "an unheard-of and unprecedented event was coming", and at the same time he had some unfortunate premonition and realized that he could do nothing in the future. This is also how many people felt at that special time.
When Wago first read the news of the victory of the revolution in the newspaper that day, he said to himself, "What a superb surgical operation! Cleverly cut off the ulcer that has been stinking for many years ... This is an unprecedented feat and a miracle in history. " Gromi, the father-in-law, didn't express any opinions at that time, but only mentioned it on the way from Moscow to Urals, thinking that the revolutionary measures really won the hearts of the people with their frankness at the beginning, but then stressed: "However, this kind of thing can only exist in the initial purity of entrepreneurs' minds, and only on the first day after declaring victory. The vagaries of politics may be completely subverted the next day. "Later, when Wago saw the announcements, decrees and speeches plastered all over the wall in Yuri Akin, he remembered his initial reaction to the revolutionary news that year, and felt that he" praised this arbitrary rhetoric and this straightforward thought only once in his life "and thought it was" a casual approval ". In order to escape the war, zhivago moved his family to the Urals Mountains. What prevented me from serving, practicing medicine and writing? I don't think it is poverty and vagrancy, not the turmoil and uncertainty of life, but the atmosphere where empty talk and big talk prevail, and so on: the dawn of the future, the establishment of a new world, the torch of mankind. "This actually reveals quite accurately a ethos of that era. As a military doctor arrested by guerrillas, zhivago witnessed many people killing each other, and felt that people seemed to be "cruel in the game. You retaliated against me, and I retaliated against you, and the atrocities multiplied." He firmly believes that "violence can't achieve any purpose. It should be good for evil. "What I saw and heard made zhivago feel that" this is not life, but an unprecedented absurd dream. "This is the impression, feeling and thinking of a young intellectual who grew up under the influence of Russian traditional culture on historical events that crossed two eras.
Zhivago's childhood friends Gordon and Dudorov have gone through different life paths. At the end of 1920s, Dudorov was exiled, but after serving his sentence, he resumed his citizenship and university teaching. When three old classmates met in Moscow, Dudorov said sincerely: The education he received in and out of prison made him clear-headed and polished his eyes.
These words are to Gordon's taste, because he has memorized all such formulaic things. From here, it is not difficult to see the results of political education that once existed as a kind of history. However, these "zeitgeist" remarks annoyed zhivago, who was worried about the mental state of contemporary Soviet intellectuals. By the end of World War II, Gordon and Dudorov, who had been promoted to second lieutenant and major of the Red Army, had great changes in their thoughts. Dudorov was imprisoned and tortured again, and Gordon, as a reform-through-labour prisoner, went to the front and survived. When two friends were talking, after reviewing zhivago's experience after his death, Dudorov bluntly said, "I think collectivization is a mistake and an unsuccessful measure, but we can't admit it. In order to cover up the failure, we have to use all means of intimidation to make people lose the ability to think and discuss, force them to see things that don't exist, and try our best to prove the opposite. The resulting unprecedented cruelty led to the publication of an unintentional constitution and elections that violated electoral principles. " It is precisely because of this horrible history before the war that people were able to relax freely after the war broke out and throw themselves into the "oven of despair and salvation" of the war with a certain sense of relaxation. What Dudorov perceived was undoubtedly a unique social and psychological phenomenon in the history of the Soviet Union, and Gordon's statement that "Greece became Rome and the Russian Enlightenment became the Russian revolution" and the poet Brock's original statement that "we are children of the Russian terror era" changed from the image meaning to the literal meaning, which can be regarded as a summary of Russian history in the past few decades.
The value of doctor zhivago lies not only in its unique perspective of writing and reflecting Russian history in the early 20th century, but also in its historical view and its high concern for its personality as a "secular undertaker of meta-history". This is not only reflected in the thoughts and viewpoints of the main characters in the novel, but also in its description of many images and their relationships. The work is not about politics, nor about political system or social system. But about life, about people's mission, about ideals, about nature. "
Zhivago, the hero of the novel, formed his historical view under the direct influence of his uncle Weijie Nyam. As early as a teenager, he heard his uncle talk about history and people who existed in history many times, that is, "history is to determine the explanation of the mystery of death from generation to generation and explore how to overcome it"; In order to carry out this kind of exploration, we should love our relatives as mentioned in the Gospels, and we should have the viewpoint of "freedom of personality and sacrifice of life". Later, Weijie Nyam developed his own idea in his works, "regarding history as the second universe built by human beings with the help of various phenomena and memories of the times, and taking it as an answer to death". Zhivago accepted these views almost completely. Even when his thinking and exploration constantly conflicted with the trend of the times, he never gave up. Instead, he is more and more convinced that the formation of history lies not in "people" but in personality; Only individuality is immortal, and it is individuality that constantly creates history itself; People who live in history cannot live and create without thinking about individual freedom and love for people in reality.
These ideas made zhivago unable to accept all forms of demeaning personality and trampling on individual freedom, which made his conflict with that era of blood and fire inevitable.
Doctor zhivago's view of history is very close to Berdyaev's philosophy of history. In Berdyaev's view, "the individual personality of human beings is all potential and the history of the whole world, and everything in the world is endless with me;" At the same time, everyone's individual personality has its own world. "He also thinks that history can be divided into two levels: history and meta-history." Like Berdyaev, in Pasternak's view, personality is the earthly bearer of meta-history, and historical process is realized in it. In Berdyaev, there is nothing higher than individuality, because from a theological point of view, only individuality can hope to be resurrected. "Pasternak may not have touched the deep essence of Berdyaev's Christian thought, but he can feel the vague existence of this thought in the whole construction of doctor zhivago.
Pasternak's concern for individual life and individual independence makes doctor zhivago show an intention of alienating from "great history". What zhivago values most is an ordinary and ordinary life. He wrote in his notes: "Of all the Russian temperament, I like the innocence of Pushkin and Chekhov best. They shyly ignore such high-profile things as the ultimate goal of mankind and their own redemption. " He quoted Pushkin's poem "yevgeni onegin": "Now my ideal is a housewife,/My wish is a quiet life,/There are many pots of soup" to illustrate the poet's praise for honest labor and daily life customs.
After three years on the front line of World War I, zhivago's most refreshing thing on his way home was to approach his home step by step, feeling that "coming to relatives, returning home and surviving, this is life and feeling, which is what explorers pursue and art refers to."
Lala, the heroine of the work, looks at the current historical events from the perspective of personal happiness and family life, so when talking with zhivago about the fate of her and Antipov, she will say, "This is not just our story. This will be the fate of many people. " She firmly believes that all the misfortunes that befell her generation should be attributed to the war. It was the continuous war that destroyed the small family she had just established, which made the foundation of family lifestyle collapse again and again, and the lies began to fall on the land of Russia. The main disaster, the root of future evil, is the loss of personal opinions and values, and everyone should live according to those strange ideas imposed on everyone. Lala saw, "This is a social superstition that covers everything and spreads everywhere. Everything is shrouded in its influence. Our home can't resist its harm. Something at home is shaken. In the natural and cheerful atmosphere that has always permeated our family, the absurd declaration elements have been infiltrated. " When Lala saw that her young daughter Katja knew nothing about the coming disaster and was still building a house with building blocks, she couldn't help but be moved: "This instinct of loving home is really amazing, and the desire for family and order can't be eliminated." Adults, unlike children, should be "prepared to sell the most precious things, praise the disgusting things, and echo the incomprehensible things." Lala finally cried in front of zhivago's coffin: "The mystery of life, the mystery of death, the charm of genius, and the simple charm are only understood by the two of us. And quarreling in a humble world like chopping the earth again, I'm sorry, forget it, it has nothing to do with us. " This is the history in this woman's eyes, including its brutal and hypocritical process and disastrous consequences. In her view, "Great History" is nothing more than a "humble world quarrel". Through the experience before and after the October Revolution and the Civil War, the author created an image of an honest and upright old Russian intellectual with extremely contradictory thoughts. Doctor zhivago was familiar with the corruption in old Russia, so he sincerely welcomed the October Revolution, calling it "an unprecedented feat and a miracle in history". However, he was quite confused about the war and predicament after the revolution. His opposition to the violence between the White Army and the Red Army reflected the inner contradictions and tortuous experiences of the old intellectuals. The works describe the mistakes and tragedies caused by revolutionary violence, and show the complicated social relations and the heavy price paid by society in the revolutionary period in a more profound and multifaceted way. This kind of writing is different from the previous works of this kind, which is very unique.
The love description in doctor zhivago is the most touching chapter in the novel, and it is not an exaggeration to say that the work is a love novel. Zhivago had an affair with three women all his life-his wife Togna, his lover Lala and his cohabiting girlfriend Marina. Tonia and zhivago are childhood friends, but their affection is greater than love. If it is understood as love, it is only the secular friendship between men and women, the thoughtfulness between lovers and the lack of spiritual elements; Marina lived with zhivago when he was down and out, but they couldn't communicate spiritually. They are just a kind of physical love. Zhivago's truly sacred, crazy and "soul-to-soul meeting" sacred love in his life was actually given to Lala.
Lesbians are a gift from God. So the love between zhivago and Lala has metaphysical significance. It surpassed the humble secular love with madness, eccentricity, passion and irrationality, and their love rose to the true divine height of life. This kind of short-lived true love, born in the smoke of war, exudes a paradise atmosphere of happiness beyond the world and inhuman happiness.
The main line of the novel is zhivago's life history. He is both a doctor, a poet and a thinker. His activities, speeches and thoughts constitute the main contents of his works. He describes or expresses what he sees, hears, feels and thinks in the form of poems and notes. His reading note "Game World" is the diary of that period, which contains essays, poems and miscellaneous feelings. In the ninth chapter of the novel, 16 of "valentino", the first nine sections are nine reading notes of zhivago. Here, he tells about his Robinson-style work for family survival. He and Gromi read Pushkin, Tolstoy, Standahr and Dickens again and again, and talked endlessly about artistic scenes, tonya's feelings for his wife after pregnancy, his thoughts on history, daily life, Russian poetry and the meaning of life while watching the seasonal natural scenery around this ancient manor, and his dreams that revealed his deep psychology. In chapter 15, The Ending, there is another passage written by zhivago after he returned to Moscow. In this passage, he asked, "How can pastoral simplicity exist?" This question. His poems are either independent articles or part of reading notes. For example, the poem "Losing Reason" is about the day after the revolution when he took a cart with typhoid fever to cut firewood, and it is about the time that passed between "being born" and "being resurrected" in illusion; Poems such as "Winter Night" and "Silent Night with the Stars" were written on a snowy night after he and Lala returned to valentino, and they were all included in the last chapter of the novel "Poems by Yuri zhivago". All the 25 poems in this chapter, either implying zhivago's inevitable fate, or depicting Lala's spiritual realm, or recalling their love, expressing their yearning for each other's pain after parting, or judging the times through the mouth of Christ, all echo each other artistically with the narratives in the previous chapters.
The work not only embeds the hero's notes and poems directly into the text as some chapters in the book, but also describes his writing process, inner activities and the fate of the manuscript, making the text appear "about writing". Back to valentino and Lala together, zhivago wrote more for a period of time. At that time, everything around him seemed to call him to express. Every night, he browses the manuscript of the poem written the day before, scrutinizes its beginning and end, ponders its lyric style and considers the poetic style he adopts. Sometimes he felt disappointed and sad about what he had written, and sometimes he was so excited that he burst into tears and was surprised. After carefully revising the first draft, copy it in neat font. During this period, most of his poems were dedicated to lesbians. After she left Valentino, she cried and pulled, and he also sorted out his graffiti works about various things in various periods, such as nature and daily life. As usual, when he was writing, many thoughts about personal life and social life came at him together. This narrative about "writing" often makes readers feel that the images of the protagonist and the author overlap, and even feel like Pasternak is telling his own writing process.
Zhivago's reading notes and the later fate of poetry have not been ignored in the book. After returning to Moscow, he published a pamphlet of zhivago, which contained his thoughts on personality, history and religion, as well as his novels and lyric poems. This book was deeply loved by readers at that time. Later, Vargo avoided the noise, sorted out old poems, revised unfinished works and began to write new ones. Unfortunately, he died soon after. But at this time, his thoughts and poems have gained many unknown bosom friends. Lala, who miraculously returned to Moscow, took part in sorting out the manuscript of Yuri zhivago's half-brother, Evgraf, but was interrupted by her arrest. But Evgraf sorted out Yuri's works, so Gordon and Dudorov had the opportunity to read and talk about it in the postwar years, thinking that "this book seems to know everything, supporting and affirming their feelings (about spiritual freedom, about the future, etc.). ). "At this point, readers seem to feel that zhivago's creation seems to be doctor zhivago, and the images of" the book in the book "and the book itself overlap.
In terms of narrative methods, doctor zhivago often uses metaphor and symbolism to express the psychology, fate or relationship between characters through the dreams and hallucinations of the protagonist. For example, when zhivago was ill for a long time, he was in delirium. In his illusion, he saw a Kyrgyz boy with small eyes, wearing a deerskin coat with fur on both sides, which is very common in Siberia or Urals. He decided that the boy was his death, but the boy helped him write a poem. This illusion symbolically foreshadows what happened to zhivago later. For another example, after being seduced by komarovsky, Lala once dreamed that "she was buried in the soil, leaving only her left rib, left shoulder and right paw outside;" A clump of grass grew on her left breast, and people sang "Black Eyes and White Chest" and "Let Martha Cross the Stream" on the ground. Before this, the work has written that "through the two contact points of the left scapula and the toes of the right foot, Lala can feel her figure and the posture lying under the quilt". Obviously, this dream is a metaphor for Lala's newly aroused feelings about her body, as well as her sense of shame and guilt under scrutiny. After zhivago fell into the guerrillas, when he heard a tyrannical legend, he also saw in his hallucination that "Lala's left shoulder was pierced a little", as if a sword had split her scapula. In the open soul, the secret hidden there is revealed. "This illusion echoes Lala's dream, suggesting that zhivago has entered the secret place of her mind.
Complementing metaphor and symbolism is the use of images in the works. The image of "burning candles on the table by the window" appears many times in the novel. When I was a student, Lala liked to talk by candlelight. Pasha Antipov always prepares candles for her. Whenever they talk in the rented house on Karel Gorski Street, he puts the candle on the table by the window and lights it. At this time, the room was filled with soft candlelight, and the window grilles slowly melted into a circle near the waxing head of the window glass. On the last winter of zhivago's college days, he and Togna went to Sventzky's home for a Christmas party. When they crossed the avenue, he noticed that the window grilles on a glass window were melted into a circle by candlelight, and subconsciously read "A candle is lit on the table ...". Coincidentally, Lala, who decided to shoot komarovsky, is talking to Pasha at this time; It was at this Christmas party that zhivago met Lala for the first time. Many years later, the house where zhivago's body was parked after his death was the house that Pasha rented that year; When Lala miraculously appeared beside zhivago's coffin, how did she think that the deceased saw candles and frosted flowers in front of the window when he drove by? From the moment he saw this candle outside-'candle on the table, candle on the table'-it decided his life's fate. "Candles lit on the table" is also the dominant image of "winter night" in 15 poem "Poems of Yuri zhivago". This recurring image in the novel is deeply imprinted in the consciousness of the hero and heroine, symbolizing the light in their hearts.
The description of scenery in doctor zhivago is also unique, which is also related to the writer's concern for personality. This is especially manifested in the "metonymic description" of natural scenery in the works. On the one hand, the writer endows the natural scenery with humanity, on the other hand, he projects the characters' mood into nature, and even lets the characters penetrate into nature, deliberately emphasizing the inseparability between man and nature. The scenery description in the whole novel is always dominated by cool colors, and there are many images such as wilderness, frost and snow, cold night, lone star and Leng Yue, which echo the melancholy spirit of the protagonist and the melancholy lyric style of cello music.