“People Will Do Anything”—Dr. Zhivago and the Human Condition

Carlo Ponti’s epic classic Dr. Zhivago premiered in the United States sixty years ago this month. For many, it is a love story about a doctor-poet and “his” Lara. It’s more: it’s a study of the soul of man.

From the very beginning, the film warns that human life is not neat or sentimental. In medical school, the young Zhivago peers at bacteria through a microscope. His professor, Kurt, admires their beauty but turns to Zhivago’s future: research, not general practice. Zhivago insists on being a GP; he wants to see life as it is, in all its messy reality. Kurt’s observation is prophetic: “Life, he wants to see life. Well, you’ll find that pretty creatures do ugly things to people.” Zhivago’s journey is to witness precisely that—ugliness masquerading as necessity, or even virtue.

Professor Kurt is not a Calvinist but a realist, and his words are prophetic. Later, when Lara’s mother attempts suicide—having discovered her daughter displaced her in her “benefactor’s” affections and Komarovsky summons Kurt to save her—Kurt takes Zhivago along so the poet can “see a bit of general practice.” It’s there that he encounters the beautiful Lara.

Despite the poet’s lyricism, his elevated thoughts, his optimism about life, Dr. Zhivago shows us how brutal sinful man can be, how evil snowballs even as it is painted in attractive colors. Its full reality is displayed in a society in which conflict becomes the social engine: Bolshevik Russia. In the name of conflict, everything from theft to murder finds justification.

Theft is showcased in the scene where the “residents” who have taken over the Gromekos’ house are pilfering its goods, even though some do not know with what they are absconding. It’s apparent in the scene where Zhivago’s father-in-law reads the decree nailed to his former property in Varykino declaring the estate was taken “in the name of the people.” Insisting he is “one of the people, too” he proposes to retake the house, deterred only when reminded his action would constitute “counterrevolution,” for which the penalty is collective capital punishment.

Murder? Komarovsky appears for the final time, wanting to spirit Lara and Zhivago away because Lara—Strelnikov’s estranged wife—had “served her purpose” as a lure to capture the now dead Strelnikov. She and her child could now be executed anytime, anywhere. 

Moral relativism? On their way to Varykino, Zhivago witnesses a peasant village allegedly burned for having sold horses to the Bolshevik’s White enemies. When he’s dragged before Strelnikov, Zhivago comments on the event, noting that a peasant claimed the traitors were in a village over and “you burned the wrong village.” Strelnikov dismisses the claim with “what does it matter? A village betrays us, a village is burned. Point made.” Truth can hardly get in the way of political points.

Dr. Zhivago is also about plain old vanilla sinfulness, most preeminently adultery. Zhivago has a wife—“a marvelous girl,” as Kurt characterizes her—who manages to grow potatoes to survive despite being an uptown city girl. But Zhivago’s sensuality and sentimentality—his hormones and his emotions—remain with Lara.  

In ordinary times, that combination would be bad enough. Even in our morally confused age, earlier generations recognized adultery as particularly morally turpitudinous. When the young Lara goes to Confession after her growing liaisons with Komarovsky, the priest asks her whether the woman caught in adultery obeyed Christ’s injunction to “go and sin no more.” “I don’t know,” she answers, to which the priest replies: “No one does, child. The flesh is not weak. It is strong. Only the sacrament of marriage will contain it.” Unless one chooses to sin against the sacrament of marriage.

Zhivago’s Russia was passing through no ordinary times. The consequences of his sin, therefore, were magnified. When Zhivago leaves Varykino, ostensibly to tell Lara he was ending his trysts with her, it’s the last time he will see his wife, Tonya. On the way back from Lara’s, Zhivago is captured by Red Partisans who impress him into service as a medic for years. When he returns, Tonya and family are gone, deported from Russia, with little likelihood he’ll ever get an exit visa.  

When he gets back and is confronted by the new conditions, as the noose tightens around them, we’re treated to a bed scene in which Zhivago and Lara decide to leave Yuriatin for Varykino: “If our days are really numbered, we’d better live them before we are parted.” Their now unreserved adultery will lead to the conception of Tonya—the girl who frames the beginning and end of the movie—Zhivago’s daughter, lost and orphaned “in the Far East somewhere” after Zhivago sends Lara off with Komarovsky.

It’s young Tonya who speaks the truth about the human condition. Yevgraf, Zhivago’s half-brother, now a Bolshevik general, interviews her, wanting to ascertain if this is his half-niece. He presses her to explain how she came to be “lost.” She admits they were in a town under fire when the man she was running with, whom she calls her “father” (likely Komarovsky), “let go of my hand and I was lost.” Yevgraf asks rhetorically, “Your father would have done that?” Tonya’s answer is immediate: “Oh, yes. People will do anything.” 

In those six words lies a painful but true realism about sinful man that our “accompanying” Church ignores at its—and man’s—peril. It’s an answer prefigured in two Hobbesian scenes at Varykino where a pack of wolves howl around the house. Homo hominis lupus. “Oh, yes. People will do anything.” In those six words lies a painful but true realism about sinful man that our “accompanying” Church ignores at its—and man’s—peril.Tweet This

Perhaps some think it depressing to ponder such things around Christmas, the time Dr. Zhivago hit theaters. No—it is a testament to the truth of Christmas. Because “people will do anything,” they need a Redeemer whose mercy will outstrip their sins. “Where sin has abounded, grace has abounded all the more” (Romans 5:20). The sole condition is the willingness to acknowledge and surrender them.