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Life as Sacrifice. Zhivago's Uncle Kolia, a kind of fellow traveler of Christianity, enunciates one of the book's major themes: "What you don't understand is that . . . history as we know it now began with Christ, and that Christ's Gospel is its foundation. Now what is history? It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death. That's why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, that's why they write symphonies . . . The two basic ideals of modern man —without them he is unthinkable—[are] the idea of free personality and the idea of life as sacrifice."
Sacrifice begins for Zhivago when World War I wrenches him from his wife Tonia and his infant son. He is wounded, and cared for by Lara, who has become a nurse, while her husband has seemingly perished at the front. Their grand love affair begins, but Pasternak treats it with a circumspection that Russians have dubbed "the Turgenev approach" after the Russian Victorian novelist. Though they spend years intermittently living together in adultery, Yurii and Lara never even kiss in the pages of Doctor Zhivago.
Russia in Flames. When the Revolution breaks out, almost everyone Dr. Zhivago knows is enraptured by the profoundly Russian messianic dream: "There arose before the eyes of the world the vast figure of Russia bursting into flames like a light of redemption for all the sorrows and misfortunes of mankind." But Zhivago soon sickens of "the savagery of daily, hourly, legalized, rewarded slaughter." Moscow is like a looted city, its empty windowpanes stare blindly at Zhivago; it is another one of the living whom the Revolution has buried. Typhus and near-starvation force the doctor to pack himself and family off to the Urals—but the old life is still so near that they go into exile with a nursemaid for the children. This train journey is one of the book's great set pieces, with matchless descriptions of sky, snow and forest, and a haunting image of all Russia, restless, uprooted and on the move.
During the journey, Zhivago meets Lara's husband Antipov, now called Strelnikov, "The Shooter." His task is to destroy recalcitrant peasant villages for the Bolsheviks in the civil war that has broken out between the Whites and Reds. Emphasizing yet again Zhivago's inner quest for the truth of his own being, Pasternak settles the doctor in a town that is his symbolic namesake, Yuriatin. Inevitably, Lara is there; and despite his remorse, Yurii is once more unfaithful to his wife. On a horseback ride back from Lara's. Physician Zhivago is kidnaped by a band of Red partisans, and for the next couple of years he is their captive medic in the White-Red struggle in Siberia.