Essay based on the novel by B. Pasternak “Doctor Zhivago”

MAN AND REVOLUTION (based on the novel by B, Pasternak “Doctor Zhivago”, version 2)

A short essay-discussion on literature on the topic: Characteristics of Doctor Zhivago from Pasternak’s novel of the same name. Fate and love of Yuri Zhivago. Description of the hero in quotes

The novel "Doctor Zhivago" became a landmark event in the world of literature of the 20th century. Its author even won a Nobel Prize and gained worldwide fame. However, along with fame, Pasternak also received severe persecution. The authorities did not want to see the intellectual as a positive hero, because literature was used as a means of promoting the political course of the party, so only “proletarians of all countries” could be “good.” However, the writer considered it necessary to raise the topic of the intelligentsia and devote the novel to how they survived the hard times of the civil war. And it was for such a book that he was awarded a prestigious prize, which the party elite could not forgive Pasternak for. But the novel was fully appreciated by descendants, who were able to understand the complex and contradictory image of the central character of the novel - Yuri Zhivago.

The fate of Yuri Zhivago is the fate of a typical intellectual during the Civil War. His family was rich, and his prospects in peacetime were cloudless. But a revolution occurred, and then a civil war, and yesterday’s respectable citizens turned into bourgeois. Therefore, even though he received an excellent education, he still could not integrate into the new social reality. For his country, he became a renegade by birthright. Neither his creativity nor his spiritual wealth were in demand and understood.

Initially, the hero welcomed the revolution as a “magnificent surgery,” but he was one of the first to realize that “you can’t take anything with violence.” He does not like “the leap from serene, innocent regularity into blood and screams, general madness and savagery of everyday and hourly, legalized and praised murder.” Although he understands that he cannot stop the course of history, he still does not accept “bloody slaughter and slaughter.” And so, when “everything everyday has been overturned and destroyed,” all that remains is “naked, stripped to the bone soulfulness,” which the hero has no use for.

The characteristics of Doctor Zhivago, first of all, are revealed to those who carefully read his poems. In them, the hero appears before us as a sophisticated lyricist who thinks about eternal issues more than about pressing matters. He is always somewhat divorced from reality. Many reproach him for lack of will and absolute inertia, because Yuri Andreevich cannot even decide whose side he is on. At a time when people sacrifice themselves to defend their vision of the future of Russia, he tries to stay away from the makers of history. Doctor Zhivago’s love also reveals him as an indecisive and driven person: he had three women, but he could not make any of them happy. The hero sometimes gives the impression of a restless holy fool who lives parallel to reality and regardless of society. Unlike the brave and determined heroes of socialist realism, Zhivago, it would seem, cannot serve as an example for anyone to follow: he cheated on his wife, abandoned his children, etc.

Why did Pasternak portray such an unsightly hero? Yes, he could have been awarded for such a portrait of the intelligentsia. But it was not there. Yuri Zhivago defends ideals much more important than class interests. He defends his right to individuality even in war. The hero abstracted himself from society with its eternal squabble for power and began to live in his own inner world, where the true spiritual values ​​of love and freedom of thought and creativity reign. Yuri lives the way he wants, with quiet, creative activity for the good, and does not bother anyone: “Oh, how sweet it is to exist! How sweet it is to live in the world and love life!” He is not weak, it’s just that all his strength is directed inward and concentrated on spiritual work.

Yuri Zhivago reflects the inner world of Pasternak himself. The author wrote that in this image he combined the characters of Blok, Mayakovsky, Yesenin and himself. Therefore, listening to Yuri, we hear the voice of his creator, and by the number of monologues of the main character we understand that the writer is “boiling” and in this novel he is trying to throw out his experiences and impressions that are bursting him from the inside.

Pasternak in his novel “Doctor Zhivago” raises the question of the role of man in history and affirms the idea of ​​the self-worth of the individual. A person, according to Pasternak, is valuable in himself, and without his contribution to common affairs, if he does not consider them as such. Despite everything, the hero retained his “I” and remained himself, without staining his inner world in the blood and dust of hard times.

Doctor Zhivago

In man, in his modest peculiarity, in his right to this peculiarity is the only and eternal meaning of the struggle for life.

V. Grossman

I've always despised people who care too much about being well-fed.

Great Gorky

There is something cruel and the only right thing in a person’s desire to fight. And happiness is when this struggle is not for a piece of bread, not for the right to live and survive, but for your soul, for your right to be human. This is the only thing worth living, fighting and dying for, remaining true to yourself, your principles and your human dignity until the last minute. And then a hundred great classics will say: “Here he is, our hero!” This is the uniqueness of the human soul!” They will say and take up the pen, and another new hero will appear in literature, and after him another and another... Each will be a little new, a little traditional, for example, a hero of the early 20th century.

Beginning of the century... What is the beginning of the century? The time when “need and inaction became more acute, as a result of which the activity of the masses sharply increased”? No, this is not yet the main reason for the emergence of a new hero of the 20th century. Yes, a break occurred, a weak intellectual and a strong worker appeared. Yuri Zhivago and the shelter at the very bottom of his life. But didn’t people, separated by class barriers, try to find themselves in this chaotic time? We tried! The actor was looking for a hospital, Ashes was looking for happiness, Luka was looking for faith, Satin was looking for truth... Everyone set a goal for themselves.

One day, any person sets a goal for himself and it depends on him whether this goal will become the meaning of his life or whether it is just a momentary desire. The goal always exists, often it becomes the only and final one, without it there is no life, and the struggle for it is a struggle for life. There is something offensive and unfair about the revolution, probably because it forced people to fight with particular force and cruelty. She threw out a naive doctor named Zhivago from her fanatical ranks. “As a little boy, he found a time when the name he bore was called for many self-differentiating things. There was Zhivago's manufactory, Zhivago's baths, Zhivago's houses, Zhivago's method of tying and burying a tie with a pin, even some kind of round-shaped sweet cake, like a baba, called Zhivago. Suddenly it all fell apart. They became poor." There is only one treasure left: Zhivago's priceless soul. For this, the revolution presented him with a choice: become cruel or die. But could the fragile, kind Zhivago become cruel? And suddenly, one day, to become completely, completely different, to forget about the ability to dream, write poetry... No, he made another final choice, which sounded like a sentence: he decided to stay in his time, while the new life carried everyone somewhere further, into new dimensions that defy the laws of space. He decided to die, but to preserve himself as an individual. This is the meaning of his struggle: the desire to preserve himself. Life through death. It is very difficult to know that you are going to die and to continue living. But Zhivago knew that he would die.

Chalk, chalk all over the earth

To all limits

The candle was burning on the table,

The candle was burning.

Like a swarm of midges in summer

Flies into the flames

Flakes were swept from the yard

To the window frame.

Those who still doubted the correctness of their choice flocked to Yuri Zhivago. They flocked for support, for a piece of the firmness that he possessed in his convictions. And they left him quiet and silent. Tonya, Lara, Gordon... Probably not convinced, but amazed by his arguments. They knew he would die. They already knew then.

But he made it simpler: he stopped thinking that he was different, that he was destined to fight, and then go somewhere, “not paying attention to the shouts,” break through the crowd, step from the steps of a standing tram onto the pavement, take one step, another , third, collapse on the stones and never get up again.”

He stopped thinking about the future and tried to live the time allotted to him the way he would always like to live. And the candle flame burned brighter, the soul became stronger in its faith, and a new star shone in the sky (it could not help but rise). She became a guide for souls wandering in the dark. People called it Christmas

because once upon a time,

unknown before

shyer than a bowl

At the gatehouse window

A star twinkled along the way

to Bethlehem.

Ova was burning like a haystack,

aside

From heaven and God,

Like the glow of arson,

Like a farm on fire and a fire

on the threshing floor.

She rose like a burning stack

Straw and sowing

In the middle of the whole universe,

Alarmed by this new

She illuminated the birth of the baby Jesus. But that was before, and now it was shining on another person - Yuri Zhivago. She led him forward, confident and free, and then someone called the path traveled under this star a struggle for life.

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 towards 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.

Likewise, the main character of the work, Yuri Zhivago, does not find an answer to the question of how he should live further: what to accept and what not to accept in his new life. In describing the spiritual life of his hero, Boris Pasternak expressed the doubts and intense internal struggle of his generation. In the novel Doctor Zhivago, Pasternak revives the idea of ​​the intrinsic value of the human personality. The personal dominates the narrative. All artistic means are subordinated to the genre of this novel, which can be conventionally defined as prose of lyrical self-expression. There are, as it were, two planes in the novel: an external one, telling about the life story of Doctor Zhivago, and an internal one, reflecting the spiritual life of the hero. 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 reflects the life story of a relatively small circle of people, several families connected by relationships of kinship, love, and personal intimacy. Their destinies are directly related to the historical events of our country. The relationships of Yuri Zhivago with his wife Tonya and Lara are of great importance in the novel. Sincere love for his wife, the mother of his children, the keeper of the home, is a natural principle in Yuri Zhivago. And love for Lara merges with love for life itself, with the happiness of existence. The image of Lara is one of the facets that reflects the attitude of the writer himself to the world.

The main question around which the narrative about the external and internal lives of the heroes moves is their attitude to the revolution, the influence of turning points in the country’s history on their destinies. Yuri Zhivago was not an opponent of the revolution. He understood that history has its own course and cannot be disrupted. But Yuri Zhivago could not help but see the terrible consequences of this turn of history: “The doctor remembered the recently past autumn, the execution of the rebels, the infanticide and femicide of the Palykhs, the bloody slaughter and slaughter of people, which had no end in sight. The fanaticism of the whites and 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 did not accept it either. It was somewhere between pro and con.

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

The fate of Doctor Zhivago and his loved ones is the story of people whose lives were thrown out of balance and destroyed by the elements of revolution. The Zhivago and Gromeko families leave their settled Moscow home for the Urals to seek refuge “on earth.” Yuri is captured by the Red partisans, and he is forced against his will to participate in the armed struggle - His relatives are expelled from Russia by the new government. Lara becomes completely dependent on 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 countless general or women’s concentration camps in the north.”

Yuri Zhivago himself is gradually losing his vitality. And life around him becomes poorer, rougher and tougher. The scene of the death of Yuri Zhivago, although outwardly not standing out in any way from the general course of the narrative, nevertheless carries an important meaning. The hero is riding a tram and has a heart attack. He is eager for fresh air, but “Yuri Andreevich was unlucky. He got into a faulty carriage, on which misfortunes rained down all the time...” Zhivago dies at the tram wheels. The life of this man, suffocating in the stuffiness of the confined space of a country shocked by the revolution, ends...

Pasternak tells us that everything that happened in Russia in those years was violence against life and contradicted its natural course. In one of the first chapters of the novel, Pasternak writes: “... having woken up, we will no longer regain our lost memory. We will forget part of the past and will not look for an explanation for the unprecedented. The established order will surround us with the familiarity of a forest on the horizon or clouds overhead. He will surround us from everywhere. There will be nothing else." These deeply prophetic words, it seems to me, speak perfectly about the consequences of those distant years. Refusal from the past turns into a rejection of the eternal, of moral values. And this should not be allowed.

"Doctor Zhivago"

But we must live without impostor.

Live like this so that in the end

Attract the love of space.

Hear the call of the future.

B. Pasternak

These Pasternak lines look like an epigraph to the novel “Doctor Zhivago,” on which Boris Leonidovich worked for about a quarter of a century. The novel seemed to have absorbed his most intimate thoughts and feelings. And in his later years, the novel was completed, the final version was prepared for printing, but the novel was published only abroad. In 1958, Pasternak was awarded the Nobel Prize for it. Boris Leonidovich was not recognized in his homeland. The newspaper “Pravda” published Zaslavsky’s article “The Hype of Reactionary Propaganda Around a Literary Weed.” The author of the article argued that Pasternak allegedly never was a “truly Soviet writer” and even in his golden time “was not listed as a first-class master.” The poet was called a “traitor”, an “internal emigrant”. He was expelled from the Writers' Union. Pasternak announced that he was refusing the prize and would not leave the Soviet Union under any circumstances. He is having a hard time experiencing the sweeping accusations that have come down on him and the betrayal of some friends. These events hastened his death.

But many of the best representatives of the Soviet intelligentsia came to see the poet off on his final journey. Tvardovsky, at a meeting with Khrushchev, said: “So, compared to Pasternak, I am not too great a poet.”

Pasternak has always enjoyed worldwide fame. The novel, which had been circulating for thirty years in samizdat copies, was finally published.

In Pasternak's works, the main character is man, his soul, his fate, sympathy and understanding. Academician D.S. Likhachev believes that “Doctor Zhivago” is not even a novel, but a kind of autobiography, and convincingly argues that it is a biography of time. “In the novel, the main active force is the element of revolution.” Through the eyes of the hero we see the rampant murder and lawlessness, devastation and hunger, the inspiration of ordinary people, their hope for a better life and blood, blood, blood. The hero flees from this orgy of violence. He wants peace, an ordinary life with his family, the most primitive happiness. But he has no right to do this either. Only two colors of time dominate. There is no third. This path leads to a dead end. Why do you have to choose? Why can’t you just live, enjoy the sun and love, peace and endless happiness? There are always people who are given power, a certain right to interfere in someone else’s life and shape it according to certain standards, to please themselves, time, circumstances.

The heroine of the novel sums it all up philosophically. “Lara walked along the canvas along the path trodden by wanderers, and turned onto a meadow trail that led to the forest. For a moment, the meaning of existence was again revealed to Lara. “She is here,” she realized, “in order to understand the crazy beauty of the earth and call everything by name, and if this is beyond her, then, out of love for life, give birth to successors who will do it.”

The novel “Doctor Zhivago” was published in Russia in the nineties, and readers received it enthusiastically. Many found his style similar to Turgenev's or even Bunin's with detailed and verbose descriptions. Yes, of course, Pasternak is the heir to the traditions of Russian classics, and not only externally: in vocabulary, in the manner of expressing his thoughts. This connection is much more complex than it might seem at first glance. Pasternak is a humanist writer who continues the traditions of Russian literature in the main thing: to bring goodness, love, and justice to people. Being a brilliant poet, he has a great sense of words. Hence the refinement of his phrases, their laconicism and the inimitable beauty of the richest Russian language.

And it’s great that this work has returned to Russia; it helps to understand what is happening today, since it has not lost its relevance in the present day. Isn’t this what Pasternak dreamed of when working on the novel? He wanted to be useful to the Motherland, to be read and popular. All this came, unfortunately, late, but it came. And this is the main point!