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Bury the Living. In strictly literary terms. Doctor Zhivago is an extraordinary novel, but it is not a great one. It is riddled by implausible coincidences, cluttered with distracting minor characters, shamelessly melodramatic. With the exception of Dr. Zhivago, none of the major characters are developed much beyond the point of abstraction. Even the doctor exists more as a luminous conscience than a physical presence; all the reader is ever told of his appearance is that he is tall and has "a snub nose and an unremarkable face." As for the novel's structure, it is like an endless railway journey in which the reader sometimes waits yawningly for the next station of the plot. Yet these defects mask virtues. Coincidence is the logic of destiny, and Dr. Zhivago has a strong sense of his destiny. The massed characters and episodes help to give the book panoramic scope. And the torrents of talk on art, religion, and life usually flow with incisive force, in what one critic calls Western Europe's "great tradition of full statement"—a tradition that has nearly disappeared in the West's contemporary fragmented, endlessly detailed and programed writing.
What raises Zhivago above technically better-made novels is that it is charged with moral passion. On the very first page, Pasternak evokes an old Russian ballad that sets the tone of the novel and suggests the elaborate symbolic substructure he has given his book. The ballad, dating from the period when being buried alive was a commonly felt terror, contains the line "Who are they burying? The living! Not him, but her." Thus in the second paragraph of Doctor Zhivago, a funeral procession is described: "Some joined in out of curiosity and asked: 'Who is being buried?'—'Zhivago,' they were told.—'Oh, I see. That's what it is.'—'It isn't him. It's his wife.'—'Well, it comes to the same thing.' " Zhivago is a name Pasternak has used to evoke the Russian words for life and vitality. His meaning may well be that, for too long, it has been Russia's fate to bury the living.
In this scene it is actually the boy Yurii Andreievich Zhivago's mother who is being buried. His millionaire father has committed suicide, and Yurii is being brought up as a ward of the well-to-do Gromeko family in a gracious world of chamber-music concerts, fancy-dress balls and lofty ideals. His teen-age partner, prim and proper Antonina (Tonia) Gromeko, is destined to be his bride.
In the meantime, the girl who is to become the great love of Yurii Zhivago's life, Larisa (Lara) Feodorovna Guishar, is being schooled in a very different way. In her mid-teens, she is seduced by a middle-aged lawyer lecher named Komarovsky. The characters are easily seen as symbols. Komarovsky plainly stands for the corruption of the old Czarist regime, while Lara may be Mary Magdalene or Russia herself. And what of Yurii Zhivago? He too stands for Russia. He also stands for martyrdom (Critic Edmund Wilson notes that Yurii means George and perhaps suggests St. George, martyred under Diocletian). Above all, Zhivago is Christlike in his suffering and in his promise of life; his story is a modern passion.