Female images in Doctor Zhivago. Female images in the novel Doctor of Living Parsnip essay. "Doctor Zhivago" main characters

In the novel “Doctor Zhivago,” Boris Pasternak depicted amazing love stories intertwined in the life of the main character, Yuri Andreevich Zhivago.
The theme of love in the work is certainly associated with female images. It is noteworthy that at first Doctor Zhivago was called Boys and Girls. Indeed, from the very first episodes, in addition to boys, girls appear here - Nadya, Tonya. The second part of the novel opens with the chapter “A Girl from Another Circle” - Larisa Guichard appears. At the end we are introduced to another image - Zhivago's third wife, Marina.
Tonya Gromeko became the hero's first wife. We know that they grew up together and have been friends since childhood. But at one fine moment, Yuri suddenly discovered that “Tonya, this old comrade, this clear, self-explanatory obviousness, turned out to be the most inaccessible and complex of all that Yura could imagine, turned out to be a woman.”
Tonya was simple, touching, familiar and dear. She seemed destined for Zhivago by fate itself. We remember that before her death, Anna Ivanovna, Tony’s mother, blessed Yuri and her daughter for marriage: “If I die, don’t separate. You are made for each other. Get married. So I slandered you..."
Perhaps it was these words that made Yura, and Tonya too, treat each other in a new way. Attraction and love flared up between them. This was the first feeling in the lives of the heroes: “The scarf gave off a mixed smell of tangerine peel and Tonina’s heated palm, equally enchanting. It was something new in Yura’s life, never experienced and sharply penetrating from top to bottom.”
We see that Zhivago's first perception of Tony was more sensual than emotional. I think that this is exactly the attitude of the hero towards his wife and remained throughout their entire life together.
Yuri's love for Tonya was quiet, pure and, to some extent, grateful. After all, this woman, kind, understanding, sincere, was the life support of Yuri Zhivago. However, with all his love for this woman, the hero experiences a feeling of guilt. We can say that his bright feeling was overshadowed by one heaviness - guilt for his love for another - Larisa Guichard, Lara.
“Lara was the purest creature in the world,” the author says about this heroine. She was brought up in a poor family, so she was forced to give lessons, look after her mother, and endure the caresses of the arrogant rich man Komarovsky.
For a long time, Larisa and Zhivago meet only fleetingly, casually, by chance, without noticing each other. Moreover, each new meeting takes place at a new stage in the heroes’ lives.
But time passes. Having already matured, the heroes meet again at a party. A significant moment is when, in a snowy, frosty winter, Yura sees a candle in an unfamiliar window and cannot take his eyes off it. This was Lara's room. And the candle will subsequently become a symbol of their love - a sign of eternal spiritual, saving fire, the sacred passion of two souls.
During a meeting with Lara at the ball, Yura is shocked by her action: the exhausted girl shoots not only at Komarovsky, whom she hates, but also at the hated existence imposed from the outside.
Fate brings the heroes together during terrible trials - revolution and civil war. Both heroes are not free: Yuri has his own family, children whom he loves dearly. Lara is married. But their connection is inevitable, their souls are drawn to each other in search of salvation from the horrors and disasters of a terrible world.
Lara gives the hero light, supports him, burns without going out, like the candle he saw many years ago. This woman appears before Yuri Andreevich, either in the form of a swan or a mountain ash, and, in the end, it becomes clear that for the main character Lara is the embodiment of nature itself: “It was as if the gift of a living spirit entered his chest like a stream, crossing his entire being and the wings came out from under the shoulder blades...".
For Zhivago, Lara is the embodiment of femininity, the embodiment of his ideal, a symbol of Russia. This woman is good, according to the hero, “with that incomparably clean and swift line with which she was all circled from top to bottom by the creator in one fell swoop.” For the protagonist of the novel, Larisa Fedorovna is “a representative of life itself, existence itself.”
But inside the heroine there lives a tragedy, a breakdown: “I am broken, I am cracked for life. They made me a woman prematurely, criminally early, introducing me to life from the worst side.”
Larisa is not only a loving woman. She is also a caring mother. When the heroine begins to feel an imminent arrest, she first of all thinks about the fate of her daughter: “What will happen to Katenka then? I'm a mother. I have to prevent misfortune and come up with something.” Perhaps this is what makes the woman flee to the Far East with Komarovsky.

In the novel “Doctor Zhivago,” Boris Pasternak depicted amazing love stories intertwined in the life of the main character, Yuri Andreevich Zhivago.

The theme of love in the work is certainly associated with female images. It is noteworthy that at first Doctor Zhivago was called Boys and Girls. Indeed, from the very first episodes, in addition to boys, girls appear here - Nadya, Tonya. The second part of the novel opens with the chapter “A Girl from Another Circle” - Larisa Guichard appears. At the end we are introduced to another image - Zhivago's third wife, Marina.

Tonya Gromeko became the hero's first wife. We know that they grew up together and have been friends since childhood. But at one fine moment, Yuri suddenly discovered that “Tonya, this old comrade, this clear, self-explanatory obviousness, turned out to be the most inaccessible and complex of all that Yura could imagine, turned out to be a woman.”

Tonya was simple, touching, familiar and dear. She seemed destined for Zhivago by fate itself. We remember that before her death, Anna Ivanovna, Tony’s mother, blessed Yuri and her daughter for marriage: “If I die, don’t separate. You are made for each other. Get married. So I slandered you..."

Perhaps it was these words that made Yura, and Tonya too, treat each other in a new way. Attraction and love flared up between them. This was the first feeling in the lives of the heroes: “The scarf gave off a mixed smell of tangerine peel and Tonina’s heated palm, equally enchanting. It was something new in Yura’s life, never experienced and sharply penetrating from top to bottom.”

We see that Zhivago's first perception of Tony was more sensual than emotional. I think that this is exactly the attitude of the hero towards his wife and remained throughout their entire life together.

Yuri's love for Tonya was quiet, pure and, to some extent, grateful. After all, this woman, kind, understanding, sincere, was the life support of Yuri Zhivago. However, with all his love for this woman, the hero experiences a feeling of guilt. We can say that his bright feeling was overshadowed by one heaviness - guilt for his love for another - Larisa Guichard, Lara.

“Lara was the purest creature in the world,” the author says about this heroine. She was brought up in a poor family, so she was forced to give lessons, look after her mother, and endure the caresses of the arrogant rich man Komarovsky.

For a long time, Larisa and Zhivago meet only fleetingly, casually, by chance, without noticing each other. Moreover, each new meeting takes place at a new stage in the heroes’ lives.

But time passes. Having already matured, the heroes meet again at a party. A significant moment is when, in a snowy, frosty winter, Yura sees a candle in an unfamiliar window and cannot take his eyes off it. This was Lara's room. And the candle will subsequently become a symbol of their love - a sign of eternal spiritual, saving fire, the sacred passion of two souls.

During a meeting with Lara at the ball, Yura is shocked by her action: the exhausted girl shoots not only at Komarovsky, whom she hates, but also at the hated existence imposed from the outside.

Fate brings the heroes together during terrible trials - revolution and civil war. Both heroes are not free: Yuri has his own family, children whom he loves dearly. Lara is married. But their connection is inevitable, their souls are drawn to each other in search of salvation from the horrors and disasters of a terrible world.

Lara gives the hero light, supports him, burns without going out, like the candle he saw many years ago. This woman appears before Yuri Andreevich, either in the form of a swan or a mountain ash, and, in the end, it becomes clear that for the main character Lara is the embodiment of nature itself: “It was as if the gift of a living spirit entered his chest like a stream, crossing his entire being and the wings came out from under the shoulder blades...".

For Zhivago, Lara is the embodiment of femininity, the embodiment of his ideal, a symbol of Russia. This woman is good, according to the hero, “with that incomparably clean and swift line with which she was all circled from top to bottom by the creator in one fell swoop.” For the protagonist of the novel, Larisa Fedorovna is “a representative of life itself, existence itself.”

But inside the heroine there lives a tragedy, a breakdown: “I am broken, I am cracked for life. They made me a woman prematurely, criminally early, introducing me to life from the worst side.”

Larisa is not only a loving woman. She is also a caring mother. When the heroine begins to feel an imminent arrest, she first of all thinks about the fate of her daughter: “What will happen to Katenka then? I'm a mother. I have to prevent misfortune and come up with something.” Perhaps this is what makes the woman flee to the Far East with Komarovsky.

But, in my opinion, Lara never forgave herself for this act. Perhaps this is why, having returned from Irkutsk and learning about the death of Yuri Zhivago, she suddenly speaks of her terrible guilt: “There is no peace for my soul from pity and torment. But I don’t say, I don’t reveal the main thing. I can’t name it, I don’t have the strength. When I reach this place in my life, the hair on my head stands out in horror. And even, you know, I can’t guarantee that I’m completely normal.”

The ending of this heroine's life is terrible. Once leaving home, Larisa never returns: “Apparently, she was arrested on the street, and she died or disappeared somewhere unknown... in one of the countless general or women’s concentration camps in the north.”

But there was another woman in Zhivago’s life - his third wife Marina. Love for her is a kind of compromise between the hero and life: “Yuri Andreevich sometimes jokingly said that their rapprochement was a novel in twenty buckets, as there are novels in twenty chapters or twenty letters.”

Marina was distinguished by humility and complete subordination to the interests of Yuri Andreevich. She forgave the doctor all his oddities, “by this time the quirks that had formed, the whims of a man who had fallen and was aware of his fall.”

In some ways, this heroine resembles Agafya Pshenitsyna from Goncharov’s novel “Oblomov”. Pshenitsyna also supported Oblomov in the last years of his life, giving him the comfort and warmth that Ilya Ilyich so needed. Of course, this was not holy love, but just a comfortable existence. But sometimes it is most necessary.

Thus, throughout the entire novel “Doctor Zhivago” there are three female images associated with the figure of the main character - Yuri Zhivago. Tonya, Lara, Marina... So different, but each able, in their own way, to support the hero, give him her love, and become his companion at a certain stage of life.

Antonina

Antonina is the wife of Yuri Andreevich Zhivago and the mother of his two children; daughter of Alexander Alexandrovich and Anna Ivanovna Gromeko. Yura and Tonya have been friends since childhood. When his parents died, his uncle N.N. Vedenyapin gave him to be raised by the intelligent and decent Gromeko family. So he grew up side by side with Tonya, and eventually married her, since he could not imagine any other life for himself. During her lifetime, Anna Ivanovna joined their hands and blessed them for a strong union. However, as you know, we propose, but God disposes. Marriage of Doctor Zhivago

with Antonina he turned out to be so calm and measured that soon the positive charges began to repel each other.

The young people moved away, despite the fact that they already had a son. Yura began to reach out to the woman with whom fate had encountered him more than once in Moscow, Larisa Guichard (Antipova). Her personal life also did not work out, since her husband Pavel believed that she married only out of compassion for him and his “childish” love. This is how two love triangles were formed in Pasternak’s novel, although in reality there were more of them. Tonya quickly found out about Larisa’s relationship with her husband, but did not interfere. She still continued to love Yura and tried to guess his fleeting desires and whims. If he needed to be alone, she sympathetically accepted it. If he wanted to be silent and think, she never bothered him.

So one evening, when he and Tonya were heading to the Christmas tree with friends, the lines were born in his head: “The candle was burning on the table, The candle was burning...” Later they formed the basis of his poem “Winter Night”. In Larisa, Tonya saw her complete opposite. If she was born to simplify life and look for the right way out, then Lara had a friend’s mission to complicate her life and lead her astray. This is how she saw the situation and was right in some way. Yuri Andreevich never saw his daughter from Tony, since she emigrated to France with her children. Before leaving, she wrote him a letter in which she promised to raise her children with full respect for their father.

History of creation

The novel was created over the course of a decade (from 1945 to 1955), the fate of the work was surprisingly difficult - despite worldwide recognition (its pinnacle was receiving the Nobel Prize), in the Soviet Union the novel was approved for publication only in 1988. The ban on the novel was explained by its anti-Soviet content; in connection with this, Pasternak began to be persecuted by the authorities. In 1956, attempts were made to publish the novel in Soviet literary magazines, but, naturally, they were not crowned with success. The foreign publication brought fame to the prose poet and resonated with unprecedented resonance in Western society. The first Russian-language edition was published in Milan in 1959.

Analysis of the work

Description of the work

(Cover for the first book, drawn by artist Konovalov)

The first pages of the novel reveal the image of an early orphaned little boy, who will later be sheltered by his uncle. The next stage is Yura's move to the capital and his life in the Gromeko family. Despite the early manifestation of a poetic gift, the young man decides to follow the example of his adoptive father, Alexander Gromeko, and enters the medical faculty. A tender friendship with the daughter of Yuri’s benefactors, Tonya Gromeko, eventually turns into love, and the girl becomes the wife of a talented doctor-poet.

The further narrative is a complex interweaving of the destinies of the main characters of the novel. Shortly after his marriage, Yuri falls passionately in love with the bright and extraordinary girl Lara Guichard, later the wife of Commissioner Strelnikov. The tragic love story of the doctor and Lara will appear periodically throughout the novel - after many ordeals, they will never be able to find their happiness. A terrible time of poverty, hunger and repression will separate the families of the main characters. Both lovers of Doctor Zhivago are forced to leave their homeland. The theme of loneliness is acute in the novel, from which the main character subsequently goes crazy, and Lara's husband Antipov (Strelnikov) takes his own life. Doctor Zhivago's last attempt at marital happiness also fails. Yuri gives up attempts at scientific and literary activity and ends his earthly life as a completely degraded person. The main character of the novel dies of a heart attack on the way to work in the center of the capital. In the last scene of the novel, childhood friends Nika Dudorov and…….. Gordon read a collection of poems by the doctor-poet.

Main characters

(Poster for the movie "Doctor Zhivago")

The image of the main character is deeply autobiographical. Through him, Pasternak reveals his inner self - his reasoning about what is happening, his spiritual worldview. Zhivago is an intellectual to the core, this trait manifests itself in everything - in life, in creativity, in profession. The author masterfully embodies the highest level of the hero’s spiritual life in the doctor’s monologues. Zhivago’s Christian essence does not undergo any changes due to circumstances - the doctor is ready to help all those who suffer, regardless of their political worldview. Zhivago's external weak-will is actually the highest manifestation of his internal freedom, where he exists among the highest humanistic values. The death of the main character will not mark the end of the novel - his immortal creations will forever erase the line between eternity and existence.

Lara Guichard

(Larisa Fedorovna Antipova) is a bright, even in some sense shocking, woman with great fortitude and a desire to help people. It is in the hospital, where she gets a job as a nurse, that her relationship with Doctor Zhivago begins. Despite attempts to escape from fate, life regularly brings the heroes together; these meetings each time strengthen the mutual pure feelings that have arisen. Dramatic circumstances in post-revolutionary Russia lead to the fact that Lara is forced to sacrifice her love to save her own child and leave with her hated former lover, lawyer Komarovsky. Lara, who finds herself in a hopeless situation, will reproach herself for this act all her life.

A successful lawyer, the embodiment of the demonic principle in Pasternak's novel. Being the lover of Lara's mother, he vilely seduced her young daughter, and subsequently played a fatal role in the girl's life, deceiving her by separating her from her loved one.

The novel “Doctor Zhivago” consists of two books, which in turn contain 17 parts, numbered consecutively. The novel shows the whole life of a generation of young intelligentsia of that time. It is no coincidence that one of the possible titles of the novel was “Boys and Girls.” The author brilliantly showed the antagonism of two heroes - Zhivago and Strelnikov, as a person living outside what is happening in the country, and as a person completely subordinate to the ideology of the totalitarian regime. The author conveys the spiritual impoverishment of the Russian intelligentsia through the image of Tatyana, the illegitimate daughter of Lara Antipova and Yuri Zhivago, a simple girl who bears only a distant imprint of the hereditary intelligentsia.

In his novel, Pasternak repeatedly emphasizes the duality of existence; the events of the novel are projected onto the New Testament plot, giving the work a special mystical overtones. Yuri Zhivago’s poem notebook, which crowns the novel, symbolizes the door to eternity, this is confirmed by one of the first versions of the title of the novel, “There Will Be No Death.”

Final conclusion

“Doctor Zhivago” is the novel of a lifetime, the result of the creative search and philosophical quest of Boris Pasternak; in his opinion, the main theme of the novel is the relationship of equal principles - personality and history. The author attaches no less importance to the theme of love; it permeates the entire novel, love is shown in all possible forms, with all the versatility inherent in this great feeling.