Doctor Zhivago

Under the tsarist regime, Saint Petersburg was the capital city of Russia. After the Russian Revolution and the founding of the Soviet state, the capital was switched to Moscow. As such, the city becomes an important symbol of social change throughout Doctor Zhivago. At the beginning of the novel, the city functions as a diagram of social inequality under the tsarist regime. The rich and the poor live side by side, but their quality of life is vastly different. The palatial houses of the bourgeoise stand right next to the run-down slums of the proletariat. Every day, the poor people of Moscow are reminded of this social inequality, which fuels their desire for change when the revolution begins. In this sense, the inequality in Moscow provides a vindication for the people who join the revolution. At the same time, the bourgeoise living in Moscow barely recognize their privileged position. They are content to mire in the inequality of the city, happy to perpetuate the suffering of others if it allows them to enjoy their luxurious lifestyle.

During and after the Russian Revolution, Moscow becomes a very different place. The streets of the city are the first place where Yuri sees violence firsthand, symbolically bringing the reality of the revolution to his doorstep. Yuri then flees the city, fearing for the safety of himself and his family. When he returns, he discovers that Moscow has transformed. The old buildings which once belonged to the rich have been taken over and repurposed. His own house is now home to government offices, while his family has been relegated to a few rooms and a far smaller staff. The Soviet state is not yet formed, but the physical changes to Yuri's house symbolize the extent to which the social order has been radically reshaped. The old infrastructure remains in the form of the buildings, but now they serve very different purposes. The Gromekos' ball room becomes an outpost of the Agricultural Academy, for example, bringing the practicalities of rural research into the palatial decadence of Moscow's urban elite. The changes Yuri notices in his numerous returns to Moscow allow him to chart the social changes brought about by the revolution. The city is a map of social upheaval, and every change Yuri witnesses moves him away from the old world and into the new.

At the end of the novel, Yuri returns to Moscow. The city—now fully fledged as the capital of the Soviet state—is markedly different from the place where he was raised. Nevertheless, he decides to focus his poetry on the city itself. Yuri's decision to write about Moscow rather than everything else he has experienced indicates his belief that beauty can endure even the harshest of circumstances. Furthermore, the decision to write about the city (a large, populous body of people and the symbolic center of the communist world) is important for Yuri, often considered an arch individualist who could not be tolerated by Soviet society. These poems functions as a synthesis of the old and the new, an indication that the nostalgia and beauty of the past can co-exist with this new, different future. Yuri blends together the individual of the singular city, Moscow, with the collective idea of what the city represents to so many people. In doing so, his final works suggest that he was moving toward accepting the reality of the revolution, which he could not quite comprehend in his early adulthood. The poems about Moscow are an acceptance and endorsement of what has changed and what cannot be undone.