He had just begun a relationship with her before he was taken by the partisans and they came together again after his escape. One of these relationships was in the person of Lara whom Yuri had met when he was a boy and later on as he was working in the hospital in town. Throughout the novel there are threads of long-term friendships and a vast network of relationships that intertwine and separate throughout. Given an opportunity to escape his forced detention, he basically walked across Siberia to his old home but found his family had relocated. In many ways he was a victim of the times: forcibly taken by the partisans to work in hospitals on the battlefields, he was removed without notice from his wife, Tonya, and young family, who could only guess at his whereabouts. Zhivago was an intellectual and as such, an enemy of the people in the new Communist regime.
Zhivago’s life reflected that of the author’s in his relationships with women also. He went on to study music and philosophy but gave them up to devote himself to poetry. Pasternak was born into an artistic family and had a classical education. Yuri Zhivago, the main character, is a physician and poet. From what I’ve read about the author, the book is partly autobiographical. It wasn’t until 1988, twenty-eight years after his death, that the book was published in Russia for the first time. It was either that or be banished from the country he loved. Pasternak initially accepted the award but after a brutal denunciation by the Soviet regime he reluctantly renounced it.
Pasternak won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958 ‘For his important achievement both in contemporary lyrical poetry and in the field of the great Russian epic tradition.’ Doctor Zhivago was first published in the West in 1957 but was banned in the Soviet Union.
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