the primary character of Zhivago is not a political man. He may try to avoid any commitment to a political ideology, but he cannot avoid the sweep of history. The importance of history is emphasized early in the novel when Nikolai Vedenyapin asks what history is, and he links the issue directly to questions of religious belief:
What you don't understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know whether God exists, or why, and yet believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, and that Christ's Gospel is its foundation (10).
Nikolai also provides an answer for what history may be:
It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with a view to overcoming death (10).
This view of history is a very individual view, for death refers to the death of the individual and to the individual's desire to achieve immortality. Such immortality is offered through the Church and through Christ and his teachings. This preliminary statement of the meaning of history is important in a novel set in pre-revolutionary Russia because history is a central preoccupation of the Bolsheviks, based on Marxist doctrine. For Marx, though, history is not a matter of the individual but of social classes, and death in Marxist thought would be the death of a society rather than an individual. Pasternak is here beginning his novel with a clear statement of the centrality of the human being, a centrality supported by religious doctrine. Pasternak's concept of religion places the human being at the center. While Marxism is also seen as man-centered because it does not recognize God, it has a very different emphasis, seeing human beings more en masse as a class than as individuals. One of the conflicts in the novel is within Yurii, between his sense of a relationship between himself and God and his hope that Bolshevism means mo...