Zhivago’s Women & the Moral Vice of Our Time

This year marks the 60th anniversary of director David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago. Released just before Christmas in 1965, the movie went on to become a classic, still watched six decades later. Britain’s Granada TV produced a version in 2002, and Russian director Alexander Proshkin did the same — more faithful to Boris Pasternak’s novel — in 2006. But Lean’s film, starring Omar Sharif in the lead role, remains the real Doctor Zhivago for millions worldwide.

Doctor Zhivago in some ways marks the end of the film industry’s making great epics for public consumption. Lavish, big-budget, multi-hour extravaganzas about human history — from The Ten Commandments in 1956 to The Sound of Music, released the same year as Zhivago — were going away. Fiddler on the Roof, released in 1971, was among the last of these types of features.

Set in Russia in 1914-1924, Doctor Zhivago chronicles the fate of that country as it transitioned from disastrous involvement in World War I to the internal struggles that led to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and subsequent civil war. Pasternak’s book was smuggled out of the Soviet Union, where it had been banned, and published in Italy in 1957. Anybody who reads it discovers the protagonist is not the suave, romantic dude portrayed in the film. Lean turns Zhivago into a somewhat likeable character, maybe even a sex symbol. The lead woman in the film is not Zhivago’s wife but Lara Antipova, his sometime concubine (played by Julie Christie). His wife, Tonya Gromeko, largely fades away, finally disappearing into French exile. In some ways, Doctor Zhivago retains popular appeal because it embodies a vision of love, sex, and marriage that, though controversial in its day, slowly acquired a wide following. In 1965 viewers would have recognized Zhivago for what he is: an adulterer. How readily would that term come to the contemporary viewer’s mind?

Zhivago lives amid tragic circumstances. Russia, which had already been rattled by revolution in 1905, was rent by World War I. The March Revolution of 1917 forced out the czar and brought the Provisional Government to power, which in turn was forced out by the Communists that November. Ongoing war between the Communists (Reds) and everybody else (Whites) lasted through 1923, its height being 1918-1921, the years during which much of Doctor Zhivago takes place. But national political circumstances are no excuse for how Zhivago treats the women in his life. Let’s consider them.

Larissa Guishar Antipova

In the film, she occupies first place, a spot that should belong to Zhivago’s wife. It’s hard to explain everything Zhivago does to Tonya without starting with Lara.

Lara is an abused woman. When she is a child, the lecher Victor Komorovsky (played by Rod Steiger), her mother’s lover, decides to trade for a newer generational model. He “seduces” (read: rapes) Lara. Her mother attempts suicide after discovering she was the trade-in. Back then, Lara still had a conscience. Right after Komorovsky’s “seduction,” she goes to confession with an Orthodox priest.

Lara later falls in love with a student revolutionary her own age, Pasha Antipov, who is injured by Cossacks in an anti-government demonstration, during which he picks up a gun. Lara later uses that gun to wound Komorovsky at a Christmas party (perhaps the hook for the Christmastime release?) and is rescued by Pasha. He and Lara both take part in, and are separated during, World War I. She becomes a field nurse on the Ukrainian front, where she re-encounters and first falls for Zhivago. Pasha is even more radicalized by the war, eventually becoming a hardline Bolshevik (adopting the pseudonym Strelnikov), almost a proto-Stalin. The primacy of the political leads to his abandoning Lara. That’s attested to in a scene in which Zhivago, en route with his family from Moscow to a family estate in the Urals to try to escape the Red madness, is arrested and brought before Strelnikov. The two recognize each other, and Zhivago invokes “your wife” Lara to vouch for him. “Why do you call her ‘my wife’?” Strelnikov retorts. “The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it. The private life is dead for a man with any manhood.” Strelnikov was not just a proto-Stalin but proto-woke.

Abandoned by her husband, Lara manages to eke out a living for herself and their daughter, Katya, as a librarian in Yuriatin. Zhivago, who has settled with his wife and family nearby, suddenly decides to renew his library card, making regular visits to borrow bedtime reading. Returning from one of those trysts (when he ostensibly tried to break off their relationship), Zhivago is captured by Red partisans, who drag him around the country for several years. Eventually, after escaping the Partisans, an emaciated Zhivago finds his way back to Yuriatin and Lara. There he learns that his wife and family have fled the country. Sensing everyone’s time is short, Zhivago spends the rest of it with Lara, eventually impregnating her. Lean portrays her as Zhivago’s muse (the doctor earns his living by medicine but his fame as a poet).

Their relationship is cut short by the same “history” that killed the personal life. The Red Revolution is eating its own, and eventually Strelnikov is executed. Lara, still his wife, would likely share his fate but for her rapist, Komorovsky, who has a knack for reappearing in her life, sometimes at his convenience, but, in the last incident, ultimately in her interest. He gets her out of provincial Varykino and a likely execution. He promises to take her and Katya (only then does he learn of her pregnancy by Zhivago) to the Far East.

Tonya Gromeko

She is Zhivago’s lawful wife, and theirs is a quasi-incestuous relationship. Zhivago had come to live with the Gromekos after being orphaned early in life, so he grew up with Tonya in Moscow. Zhivago finds success, gaining a reputation as one of the brightest (and handsomest) young physicians just out of medical school. The Zhivago-Tonya engagement is announced during the Christmas party at which Lara later shoots Komorovsky. Zhivago attends to the wounded Komorovsky and learns something of his “little secret.” This is also the first time he sees Lara. Not long afterward, husband and wife are put asunder by war, with Zhivago serving as a field doctor in the west, where he reconnects for an extended period with Nurse Lara. The film and most commentators suggest the interlude is innocent, though that is unclear.

The war over, Zhivago returns to his family in an increasingly repressive and starved Bolshevik Moscow. The Gromeko home has been expropriated by the Party, and his old employer, Holy Cross Hospital, secularized as the Second Reformed Hospital. Disease and famine run rampant in the city, though that is denied by the Communist Party. Against this backdrop, Zhivago decides with his father-in-law to leave the capital for Varykino, an old family property in the Urals. When they arrive, the family discovers Varykino has also been expropriated “by the people,” so they settle into a nearby farmer’s cottage. As in Moscow, Tonya does her best to make a home for Zhivago. In the capital, she preserved the few rooms the “local housing committee” left to the Gromeko-Zhivago family from their entire house, turning them into a private family sanctuary. In Varykino, this upper-class city girl shows she’s adept at growing food for the family and bringing them beauty in the sunflowers Zhivago admires.

At this time Zhivago suddenly rediscovers his passion for reading. When he doesn’t return from the library, Tonya eventually takes what’s left of her family to safety in Paris. But she’s no fool: She leaves a letter to her husband with Lara, informing him they now also have a daughter, adding generously in a postscript that Lara is a “good person.” With that, Tonya disappears from Zhivago’s life.

Zhivago’s Daughters

Zhivago’s legitimate daughter also disappears into the west, along with his wife and their son, Sasha. Zhivago’s illegitimate daughter by Lara — also named Tonya — becomes the framing figure of the movie. The film opens with Yevgraf, Zhivago’s brother, interviewing a young woman who believes she is Komorovsky’s daughter. The girl bears a psychological scar because she grew up as an orphan, having lost her parents. The cause? “We were running — my father! The street was on fire! There were explosions! We were running…and he let go of my hand!” Yevgraf insists the man was Komorovsky, asking rhetorically, “Would a father have done that?” Tonya coldly replies, “Oh, yes. People will do anything.”

People will do anything. That’s obvious from the behavior of the key characters in the film: Zhivago, Lara, and Komorovsky. Their motives may sometimes be painted over with “love,” but in the end they are driven by self-interest. Whether that self-interest is basic survival or something deeper, it remains egocentric.

Though people will do anything, what is more problematic is when that self-interest is recast as “love.” That is the moral vice of our time — the idea that “love is love” and, therefore, immunized from the moral critique that could reveal that “love” isn’t always love. For Komorovsky, it’s unadulterated self-interest. For Lara, it’s surviving amid conditions that make her days “an awful time to be alive.” For Zhivago, it’s sentimentality and desire mixed with some element of moral conscience that’s set aside when the “practical” puts his wife out of reach and Lara within it. Perhaps Zhivago’s most redeeming moment is when he finally breaks off the relationship by sending Lara on a sled to the train with Komorovsky, knowing despite his words that he has no intention to follow.

Doctor Zhivago nominally showcases the great doctor and poet, and as played by Sharif, he can be an appealing character. Dig a little deeper, though, look through a moral lens, and — especially regarding the women in his life — this Zhivago comes up wanting. The real temptation, especially by downplaying the tragedy, is to make the man of desires attractive.

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