When Yurin, uncle Nikolai Nikolaevich moved to St. Petersburg, care for him, at the age of ten left an orphan, was taken by other relatives - Gromeko, in whose house there were interesting people on Sivtsevoy Vrazhka, and where the atmosphere of the professor's family completely contributed to the development of Yurin's talents.

The daughter of Alexander Alexandrovich and Anna Ivanovna (nee Kruger) Tonya was a good friend to him, and classmate at the gymnasium Misha Gordon was a close friend, so he did not suffer from loneliness.

Once, during a home concert, Alexander Alexandrovich had to accompany one of the invited musicians on an urgent call to the rooms where his good friend Amalia Karlovna Gishar had just tried to reconcile her life. The professor yielded to the request of Yura and Misha and took them with him.

While the boys stood in the hallway and listened to the victim’s complaints that she was pushed by such terrible suspicions, which luckily turned out to be only the fruit of her frustrated imagination, a middle-aged man came out from the partition into the next room, waking the girl sleeping in an armchair.

She responded to the man’s views with a wink of an accomplice, pleased that everything had worked out and their secret was not disclosed. There was something frighteningly magical about this silent conversation, as if he were a puppeteer, and she was a puppet. Yura's heart sank from the contemplation of this enslavement. On the street, Misha told a friend that he had met this man. A few years ago, he and his dad rode with him on the train, and he soldered on the road Yurin's father, who at the same time threw himself from the platform onto the rails.

The girl she saw was the daughter of Madame Guichard. Larisa was a gymnasium student. At sixteen, she looked eighteen and somewhat weighed down by the position of the child - the same as her friends. This feeling intensified when she succumbed to the courtship of Viktor Ippolitovich Komarovsky, whose role with her mother was not limited to the role of an adviser in business and a friend at home. He became her nightmare, he enslaved her.

A few years later, already a medical student, Yuri Zhivago again met with Lara under unusual circumstances.

Together with Tonya Gromeko on the eve of Christmas, they rode a Christmas tree to the Sventitsky along Kamergersky Lane. Recently, a long and painful Anna Ivanovna joined their hands, saying that they were made for each other. Tonya really was a close and understanding person. So at that moment she caught his mood and did not interfere with admiring the frosty windows glowing from the inside, in one of which Yuri noticed a black thaw through which was visible the fire of a candle facing the street with almost a conscious look. At this moment, the lines of unformed verses were born: “The candle burned on the table, the candle burned ...”

He did not suspect that outside the window Lara Guichard was speaking at that moment to Pasha Antipova, who had not hidden her adoration since childhood, that if he loves her and wants to keep her from death, they should get married immediately. After that, Lara went to the Sventitsky, where Yura and Tonya had fun in the hall, and where Komarovsky was sitting at the cards. Around two in the morning, a shot rang out in the house. Lara, shooting at Komarovsky, missed, but the bullet touched a fellow prosecutor of the Moscow Court of Justice. When Lara was led through the hall, Yura was stunned - the very one! And again the same grayish that had to do with the death of his father! To top it all, having returned home, Tonya and Yura did not already find Anna Ivanovna alive.

Through the efforts of Komarovsky, Lara was saved from trial, but she fell ill, and Pasha was not allowed to visit her yet. However, Kologrivov came, brought the "award". More than three years ago, Lara, to get rid of Komarovsky, became the teacher of his youngest daughter. Everything went well, but then her empty brother Rodya lost public money. He was about to shoot if his sister did not help him. The Kologrivovs helped out with money, and Lara handed it to Rode, selecting a revolver from which he wanted to shoot himself. Kologrivov did not succeed in repaying the debt. Lara secretly from Pasha sent money to his exiled father and paid extra money to the owners of the room in Kamergersky. The girl considered her position with the Kologrivovs to be false, did not see a way out of it, except to ask for money from Komarovsky. Life disgusted her. At the Sventitsky ball, Viktor Ippolitovich pretended to be busy with cards and did not notice Lara. He turned to the girl who entered the hall with a smile, the meaning of which Lara understood so well ...

When Lara got better, she and Pasha got married and left for Yuryatin, in the Urals. After the wedding, the young talked until the morning. His guesses alternated with Larina's confessions, after which his heart fell ... In a new place, Larisa taught at the gymnasium and was happy, although she had a house and three-year-old Katya on it. Pasha taught Latin and ancient history. We celebrated the wedding and Jura with Tonya. Meanwhile, war broke out. Yuri Andreevich was at the front, not having time to really see the born son. Otherwise, Pavel Pavlovich Antipov fell into the heat of battle.

Relations with his wife were not easy. He doubted her love for him. To free everyone from this fake for family life, he graduated from officer courses and ended up at the front, where he was captured in one of the battles. Larisa Fedorovna entered her sister on a medical train and went off to look for her husband. Second Lieutenant Galiullin, who had known Pasha since childhood, claimed that he had seen him die.

Zhivago witnessed the collapse of the army, the atrocities of anarchist deserters, and returning to Moscow, he found even more terrible devastation. What he saw and experienced made the doctor review a lot in his attitude to the revolution.

To survive, the family moved to the Urals, to the former Kruger estate of Varykino, near the city of Yuryatin. The path ran through the snowy spaces dominated by armed gangs, through areas of recently pacified uprisings, with horror repeating the name of Strelnikov, crowding the whites under the command of Colonel Galiullin.

In Varykin, they stopped first with the former manager Kruger Mikulitsyna, and then in the annex for the servants. They planted potatoes and cabbage, put the house in order, and the doctor sometimes took patients. The unexpectedly announced half-brother Evgraf, energetic, mysterious, very influential, helped to strengthen their position. Antonina Alexandrovna seemed to expect a child.

Over time, Yuri Andreyevich got the opportunity to visit the library in Yuryatin, where he saw Larisa Fedorovna Antipova. She told him about herself, that Strelnikov was her husband Pavel Antipov, who returned from captivity, but hid under a different name and did not maintain relations with his family. When he took Yuryatin, he bombarded the city with shells and never inquired whether his wife and daughter were alive.

Two months later, Yuri Andreevich again returned from the city to Varykino. He deceived Tonya, continuing to love her, and was tormented by this. On that day, he was driving home with the intention of confessing to his wife everything and no longer meeting with Lara.

Suddenly, three armed men blocked his path and announced that the doctor had since been mobilized into the unit of Liveria Mikulitsyn. The doctor’s work was full of pain: in the winter - a rash, in the summer - dysentery and at all times of the year - wounded. Yuri Andreevich did not conceal it to Liverius that the ideas of October did not inflame him, that they were still so far from implementation, and that only sea talk had paid for it, so that the end did not justify the means. And the very idea of ​​remaking life was born of people who did not feel its spirit. Two years of bondage, separation from the family, deprivation and danger ended in escape.

In Yuryatin, the doctor appeared at the moment when the whites left the city, passing it in red. He looked wild, unwashed, hungry and weakened. Larisa Fedorovna and Katya were not at home. In the key cache he found a note. Larisa with her daughter went to Varykino, hoping to find him there. His thoughts were confused, fatigue drove him to sleep. He melted the stove, ate a little and, without undressing, fell asleep soundly. When he woke up, he realized that he was naked, washed and lying in a clean bed, that he had been ill for a long time, but was recovering quickly thanks to Lara's cares, although there was nothing to think about returning to Moscow until full recovery. Zhivago went to serve in the provincial health, and Larisa Fedorovna - in the province. However, the clouds above them were gathering. The doctor saw a socially alien, under Strelnikov, the soil began to fluctuate. An emergency raged in the city.

At this time, a letter came from Tony: the family was in Moscow, but Professor Gromeko, and with him her and the children (now they, except their son, have a daughter Masha) are sent abroad. The grief is that she loves him, but he doesn’t. Let him build his life according to his own understanding.

Suddenly Komarovsky showed up. He is invited by the government of the Far Eastern Republic and is ready to take them with him: both of them are in mortal danger. Yuri Andreyevich immediately rejected this proposal. Lara had already told him about the fateful role that this man played in her life, and he told her that Viktor Ippolitovich was the culprit in the suicide of his father. It was decided to take refuge in Varykin. The village was abandoned long ago by the inhabitants, wolves howled around at night, but the appearance of people would have been more terrible, but they would not have brought weapons. In addition, recently Lara said she seems to be pregnant. It was no longer necessary to think about yourself. Then Komarovsky arrived again. He brought the news that Strelnikov was sentenced to death and that Katya should be saved if Lara doesn’t think about herself. The doctor told Lara to go with Komarovsky.

In the snowy, forested solitude, Yuri Andreevich slowly went crazy. He drank and wrote poems dedicated to Lara. Crying for a lost beloved grew into generalized thoughts about history and man, about revolution as a lost and mourned ideal.

One evening, the doctor heard a crunch of footsteps, and a man appeared in the doorway. Yuri Andreevich did not immediately recognize Strelnikov. It turned out that Komarovsky deceived them! They talked almost all night.

About the revolution, about Lara, about childhood on Tverskaya-Yamskaya. They settled down in the morning, but, waking up and going out for water, the doctor found his interlocutor shot himself.

In Moscow, Zhivago appeared already at the beginning of the NEP emaciated, overgrown and run wild. He walked most of the way. Over the next eight to nine years of his life, he lost his medical skills and lost his writing skills, but nevertheless took up his pen and wrote thin books. Lovers appreciated them.

The daughter of the former janitor Marina helped him with the housework; she served in a telegraph line on a foreign line. Over time, she became the wife of a doctor and they had two daughters. But one of the summer days, Yuri Andreevich suddenly disappeared. Marina received a letter from him that he wants to live alone for a while and not to be looked for. He did not inform that the brother Evgraf, who had appeared again from nowhere, rented a room for him in Kamergersky, provided him with money, and began to bother about a good job.

However, on a stuffy August day, Yuri Andreevich died of a heart attack. Suddenly many people came to say goodbye to Kamergersky. Among those saying goodbye was Larisa Fedorovna. She went into this apartment from an old memory. Here once lived her first husband Pavel Antipov. A few days after the funeral, she suddenly disappeared: she left the house and did not return. Apparently, she was arrested.

Already in the forty-third year, at the front, Major General Yevgraf Andreevich Zhivago, inquiring of the clothes-maker Tanka Bezorechova about her heroic friend scout Khristina Orletsova, inquired about her fate, Tannina. He quickly realized that this was the daughter of Larisa and brother Yuri. Fleeing with Komarovsky to Mongolia, when the Reds approached Primorye, Lara left the girl at the railway junction as the guard Marfa, who ended the days in a madhouse. Then homelessness, wanderings ...

By the way, Evgraf Andreevich not only took care of Tatyana, but also collected everything written by his brother. Among his poems was the poem “Winter Night”: “Chalky, chalky across the earth / To all limits. / The candle burned on the table, / The candle burned ... "