Have you experienced pain and confusion when you read Boris Pasternak’s great novel «Doctor Zhivago» at the end, how his hero passes away? Yuri Andreevich dies of a heart attack while getting off the tram. The routine and absurdity of this death is a brilliant point in his psychological portrait.
«Tuguldy-Uldy». In one of the books I came across this phrase in a language unknown to me, it was translated simply: «lived and died.» Is it all? Is this how heroes die?
The trouble is that the formation of Zhivago took place at a time of large-scale changes, which killed any germs of the heroic in him. After all, in order to be a hero, you need to be at least a little crazy. But he is normal, and he did not manage to go crazy along with the environment.
Subtly feeling, believing in the possibility of «creating beauty», the Russian intellectual, the young doctor is full of hopes and illusions, but his thoughtful idealism roughly grinds the millstones of the revolution and the Civil War.
In Yuri Zhivago there is nothing earthly, simple, consistent, animal, he is not embraced by grandiose ideas. In other words, there is no psychotic or borderline in his character, which sometimes helps to survive in crazy times.
He is an ordinary neurotic, that is, not mentally ill, but a healthy person, tormented by painful love and guilt before his wife, looking for himself, solving complex moral dilemmas within himself.
He is soft, intelligent and receptive, his subtle mental organization does not allow him to become either a noble revolutionary, or a partisan, or, in the end, a hero. The violence that is happening around is not accepted by his healthy mental nature. He turns out to be the wrong person for a heroic time. An inscription could be left on his tombstone: «He was looking for his place in this great redistribution, but did not find it.»
Living among us
Yuri Zhivago lives in every Russian intellectual. In everyone who is ready to heal, but is not able to kill. Who does not tolerate global changes, thinks about the high and does not know how to find a “warm place” for himself. Who writes poems about the Motherland on the train taking him to the Stalinist camps. Who could become Russia’s golden fund if the country knew how to take care of its «non-heroes», whose unwillingness to participate in violence is combined with high intelligence, earthly unsuitability and everyday absent-mindedness.
There is a Zhivago in everyone whose youth came to change the world order. Here is our generation — those born in the USSR experienced not only a change of regime, we had to change consciousness, adapt to a new life. And not everyone succeeded. Because in addition to sensitivity and spirituality, vitality and stability are also needed in order to survive during historical catastrophes.