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Part 1

The novel opens in Imperial Russia, 1902, during a Russian Orthodox funeral liturgy, or panikhida, for Yuri's mother, Marya Nikolaevna Zhivago. Having long ago been abandoned by his father, Yuri is taken in by his maternal uncle, Nikolai Nikolaevich Vedenyapin, a philosopher and former Orthodox priest who now works for the publisher of a progressive newspaper in a provincial capital on the Volga River. Yuri's father, Andrei Zhivago, was once a wealthy member of Moscow's merchant gentry, but has squandered the family's fortune in Siberia through debauchery and carousing.

The next summer, Yuri (who is 11 years old) and Nikolai Nikolaevich travel to Duplyanka, the estate of Lavrenty Mikhailovich Kologrivov, a wealthy silk merchant. They are there not to visit Kologrivov, who is abroad with his wife, but to visit a mutual friend, Ivan Ivanovich Voskoboinikov, an intellectual who lives in the steward's cottage. Kologrivov's daughters, Nadya (who is 15 years old) and Lipa (who is younger), are also living at the estate with a governess and servants. Innokenty (Nika) Dudorov, a 13-year-old boy who is the son of a convicted terrorist has been placed with Ivan Ivanovich by his mother and lives with him in the cottage. As Nikolai Nikolaevich and Ivan Ivanovich are strolling in the garden and discussing philosophy, they notice that a train passing in the distance has come to a stop in an unexpected place, indicating that something is wrong. On the train, an 11-year-old boy named Misha Grigorievich Gordon is traveling with his father. They have been on the train for three days. During that time, a kind man had given Misha small gifts and had talked for hours with his father, Grigory Osipovich Gordon. However, encouraged by his attorney, who was traveling with him, the man had become drunk. Eventually, the man had rushed to the vestibule of the moving train car, pushed aside the boy's father, opened the door and thrown himself out, killing himself. Misha's father had then pulled the emergency brake, bringing the train to a halt. The passengers disembark and view the corpse while the police are called. The deceased's lawyer stands near the body and blames the suicide on alcoholism.

Part 2

During the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), Amalia Karlovna Guichard arrives in Moscow from the Urals with her two children: Rodion (Rodya) and Larissa (Lara). Guichard's late husband was a Belgian who had been working as an engineer for the railroad and had been friends with Victor Ippolitovich Komarovsky, a lawyer and "cold-blooded businessman". Komarovsky sets them up in rooms at the seedy Montenegro hotel, enrolls Rodion in the Cadet Corps and enrolls Lara in a girls' high school. The girls' school is the same school that Nadya Kologrivov attends. On Komarovsky's advice, Amalia invests in a small dress shop. Amalia and her children live at the Montenegro for about a month before moving into the apartment over the dress shop. Despite an ongoing affair with Amalia, Komarovsky begins to groom Lara behind her mother's back.

In early October, the workers of the Moscow-Brest railroad line go on strike. The foreman of the station is Pavel Ferapontovich Antipov. His friend Kiprian Savelyevich Tiverzin is called into one of the railroad workshops and stops a workman from beating his apprentice (whose name is Osip (Yusupka) Gimazetdinovich Galiullin). The police arrest Pavel Ferapontovich for his role in the strike. Pavel Ferapontovich's boy, Patulya (or Pasha or Pashka) Pavlovich Antipov, comes to live with Tiverzin and his mother. Tiverzin's mother and Patulya attend a demonstration which is attacked by dragoons, but they survive and return home. As the protestors flee the dragoons, Nikolai Nikolaevich (Yuri's uncle) is standing inside a Moscow apartment, at the window, watching the people flee. Some time ago, he moved from the Volga region to Petersburg, and at the same time moved Yuri to Moscow to live at the Gromeko household. Nikolai Nikolaevich had then come to Moscow from Petersburg earlier in the Fall, and is staying with the Sventitskys, who were distant relations. The Gromeko household consists of Alexander Alexandrovich Gromeko, his wife Anna Ivanovna, and his bachelor brother Nikolai Alexandrovich. Anna is the daughter of a wealthy steel magnate, now deceased, from the Yuriatin region in the Urals. They have a daughter Tonya.

In January 1906, the Gromekos host a chamber music recital at their home one night. One of the performers is a cellist who is a friend of Amalia's, and her next-door neighbor at the Montenegro. Midway through the performance, the cellist is recalled to the Montenegro because, he is told, someone there is dying. Alexander Alexandrovich, Yuri and Misha come along with the cellist. At the Montenegro, the boys stand in a public corridor outside one of the rooms, embarrassed, while Amalia, who has taken poison, is treated with an emetic. Eventually, they are shooed into the room by the boarding house employees who are using the corridor. The boys are assured that Amalia is out of danger and, once inside the room, see her, half-naked and sweaty, talking with the cellist; she tells him that she had "suspicions" but "fortunately it all turned out to be foolishness." The boys then notice, in a dark part of the room, a girl (it is Lara) asleep on a chair. Unexpectedly, Komarovsky emerges from behind a curtain and brings a lamp to the table next to Lara's chair. The light wakes her up and she, unaware that Yuri and Misha are watching, shares a private moment with Komarovsky, "as if he were a puppeteer and she a puppet, obedient to the movements of his hand." They exchange conspiratorial glances, pleased that their secret was not discovered and that Amalia did not die. This is the first time Yuri sees Lara, and he is fascinated by the scene. Misha then whispers to Yuri that the man he is watching is the same one who got his father drunk on the train shortly before his father's suicide.

Part 3

In November 1911, Anna Ivanovna Gromeko becomes seriously ill with pneumonia. At this time, Yuri, Misha, and Tonya are studying to be a doctor, philologist, and lawyer respectively. Yuri learns that his father had a child, a boy named Yevgraf, by Princess Stolbunova-Enrizzi.

The narrative returns to the Spring of 1906. Lara is increasingly tormented by Komarovsky's control over her, which has now been going on for six months. In order to get away from him, she asks her classmate and friend Nadya Laurentovna Kologrivov to help her find work as a tutor. Nadya says she can work for Nadya's own family because her parents happen to be looking for a tutor for her sister Lipa. Lara spends more than three years working as a governess for the Kologrivovs. Lara admires the Kologrivovs, and they love her as if she were their own child. In her fourth year with the Kologrivovs, Lara is visited by her brother Rodya. He needs 700 rubles to cover a debt. Lara says she will try to get the money, and in exchange demands Rodya's cadet revolver along with some cartridges. She obtains the money from Kologrivov. She does not pay the money back, because she uses her wages to help support her boyfriend Pasha Antipov (see above) and his father (who lives in exile), without Pasha's knowledge.

We move forward to 1911. Lara visits the Kologrivovs' country estate with them for the last time. She is becoming discontented with her situation, but she enjoys the pastimes of the estate anyway, and she becomes an excellent shot with Rodya's revolver. When she and the family return to Moscow, her discontent grows. Around Christmastime, she resolves to part from the Kologrivovs, and to ask Komarovsky for the money necessary to do that. She plans to kill him with Rodya's revolver should he refuse her. On 27 December, the date of the Sventitsky's Christmas party, she goes to Komarovsky's home but is informed that he is at a Christmas party. She gets the address of the party and starts toward it, but relents and pays Pasha a visit instead. She tells him that they should get married right away, and he agrees. At the same moment that Lara and Pasha are having this discussion, Yuri and Tonya are passing by Pasha's apartment in the street, on their way to the Sventitskys. They arrive at the party and enjoy the festivities. Later, Lara arrives at the party. She knows no one there other than Komarovsky, and is not dressed for a ball. She tries to get Komarovsky to notice her, but he is playing cards and either does not notice her or pretends not to. Through some quick inferences, she realizes that one of the men playing cards with Komarovsky is Kornakov, a prosecutor of the Moscow court. He prosecuted a group of railway workers that included Kiprian Tiverzin, Pasha's foster father.

Later, while Yuri and Tonya are dancing, a shot rings out. There is a great commotion and it is discovered that Lara has shot Kornakov (not Komarovsky) and Kornakov has received only a minor wound. Lara has fainted and is being dragged by some guests to a chair; Yuri recognizes her with amazement. Yuri goes to render medical attention to Lara but then changes course to Kornakov because he is the nominal victim. He pronounces Kornakov's wound to be "a trifle", and is about to tend to Lara when Mrs. Sventitsky and Tonya urgently tell him that he must return home because something was not right with Anna Ivanovna. When Yuri and Tonya return home, they find that Anna Ivanovna has died.

Russian text published by CIA

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency realized that the novel presented an opportunity to embarrass the Soviet government. An internal memo lauded the book's "great propaganda value": not only did the text have a central humanist message, but the Soviet government's having suppressed a great work of literature could make ordinary citizens "wonder what is wrong with their government".

The CIA set out to publish 1,000 copies of a Russian-language hardcover edition at Mouton Publishers of the Hague in early September 1958, and arranged for 365 of them, in Mouton's trademark blue linen cover, to be distributed at the Vatican pavilion at the 1958 Brussels world's fair.

The printing by Mouton Publishers of the 1,000 copies of an adulterated Russian-language version, organized by the CIA, had typos and truncated storylines, and it was illegal, because the owner of the manuscript was Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, who later put his name on the Mouton edition.

Author Ivan Tolstoi claims that the CIA lent a hand to ensure that Doctor Zhivago was submitted to the Nobel Committee in its original language, in order for Pasternak to win the Nobel prize and further harm the international credibility of the Soviet Union. He repeats and adds additional details to Fetrinelli's claims that CIA operatives intercepted and photographed a manuscript of the novel and secretly printed a small number of books in the Russian language. Recently released CIA documents do not show that the agency's efforts in publishing a Russian-language edition were intended to help Pasternak win the Nobel, however.

Anna Sergeyeva-Klyatis, a Russian philologist, also contributed her research about the history of publications, following the publication of Lazar Fleishman's book Russian Emigration Discovers "Doctor Zhivago", where she thought that the only possible conclusion was that the pirated edition of Doctor Zhivago was initiated by one of the biggest émigré organizations in Europe: the Central Association of Postwar Émigrées. While CAPE was known to engage in anti-Soviet activities, the printing of this edition was not an imposition of its own political will but rather a response to the spiritual demands of the Russian emigration that was greatly stirred by the release of Pasternak's novel in Italian without an original Russian edition.

Doctor Zhivago after author's death

Pasternak died of lung cancer in his dacha in Peredelkino on the evening of 30 May 1960. He first summoned his sons, and in their presence said, "Who will suffer most because of my death? Who will suffer most? Only Oliusha will, and I haven't had time to do anything for her. The worst thing is that she will suffer." Pasternak's last words were, "I can't hear very well. And there's a mist in front of my eyes. But it will go away, won't it? Don't forget to open the window tomorrow."

Shortly before his death, a priest of the Russian Orthodox Church had given Pasternak the last rites. Later, in the strictest secrecy, an Orthodox funeral liturgy, or Panikhida, was offered in the family's dacha.

Despite only a small notice appearing in the Literary Gazette, handwritten notices carrying the date and time of the funeral were posted throughout the Moscow subway system. As a result, thousands of admirers traveled from Moscow to Pasternak's civil funeral in Peredelkino. According to Jon Stallworthy, "Volunteers carried his open coffin to his burial place and those who were present (including the poet Andrey Voznesensky) recited from memory the banned poem 'Hamlet'."

One of the dissident speakers at the graveside service said, "God marks the path of the elect with thorns, and Pasternak was picked out and marked by God. He believed in eternity and he will belong to it... We excommunicated Tolstoy, we disowned Dostoyevsky, and now we disown Pasternak. Everything that brings us glory we try to banish to the West... But we cannot allow this. We love Pasternak and we revere him as a poet... Glory to Pasternak!"

Until the 1980s, Pasternak's poetry was only published in heavily censored form. Furthermore, his reputation continued to be pilloried in state propaganda until Mikhail Gorbachev proclaimed perestroika.

In 1988, after decades of circulating in samizdat, Doctor Zhivago was finally serialized in the pages of Novy Mir, which had changed to a more anti-communist position than in Pasternak's lifetime. The following year, Pasternak's son Yevgeny Borisovich was at last permitted to travel to Stockholm to collect his father's Nobel Prize Medal. At the ceremony, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich performed a Bach composition in honor of his fellow Soviet dissident.

The novel has been part of the Russian school curriculum since 2003, where it is taught in 11th grade.

Literary criticism

Edmund Wilson wrote of the novel: "Doctor Zhivago will, I believe, come to stand as one of the great events in man's literary and moral history." V. S. Pritchett wrote in the New Statesman that the novel is "[t]he first work of genius to come out of Russia since the revolution." When the novel came out in Italian, Anders Österling, the then permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy which awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote in January 1958:

A strong patriotic accent comes through, but with no trace of empty propaganda... With its abundant documentation, its intense local color and its psychological frankness, this work bears convincing witness to the fact that the creative faculty in literature is in no sense extinct in Russia. It is hard to believe that the Soviet authorities might seriously envisage forbidding its publication in the land of its birth.

Some literary critics "found that there was no real plot to the novel, that its chronology was confused, that the main characters were oddly effaced, that the author relied far too much on contrived coincidences." Vladimir Nabokov, who had celebrated Pasternak's books of poetry as works of "pure, unbridled genius", however, considered the novel to be "a sorry thing, clumsy, trite and melodramatic, with stock situations, voluptuous lawyers, unbelievable girls, romantic robbers and trite coincidences." On the other hand, some critics praised it for being things that, in the opinion of translator Richard Pevear, it was never meant to be: a moving love story, or a lyrical biography of a poet in which the individual is set against the grim realities of Soviet life. Pasternak defended the numerous coincidences in the plot, saying that they are "traits to characterize that somewhat willful, free, fanciful flow of reality." In response to criticism in the West of his novel's characters and coincidences, Pasternak wrote to Stephen Spender:

Whatever the cause, reality has been for me like a sudden, unexpected arrival that is intensely welcome. I have always tried to reproduce this sense of being sent, of being launched... there is an effort in my novels to represent the whole sequence (facts, beings, happenings) as a great moving entity... a developing, passing, rolling, rushing inspiration. As if reality itself had freedom of choice... Hence the reproach that my characters were insufficiently realized. Rather than delineate, I was trying to efface them. Hence the frank arbitrariness of the "coincidences". Here I wanted to show the unrestrained freedom of life, its very verisimilitude contiguous with improbability.

Doctor Zhivago

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Doctor Zhivago

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Plot summary

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Parts 6 to 9

Parts 10 to 13

Part 14

Part 15

Epilogue

Background

Influences and inspiration

Soviet censorship

Translations

Russian text published by CIA

Nobel Prize in Literature

Soviet revenge

Doctor Zhivago after author's death

Themes

Loneliness

Disillusionment with revolutionary ideology

Coincidence and the unpredictability of reality

Literary criticism

Names and places

Adaptations

Television

Film

Theatre

Translations into English

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