Twentieth-Century Russian Literature. Selected Papers from the ...

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12. RESURRECTION
* Tanya and Evgraf Zhivago (XVI,3:494)
Lara is eliminated by the state, and, outside the LC, Yurii diagnoses his heart disease as the
direct consequence of the 'constant, systematic hypocrisy' which is required by the new regime
(467). They are unable to survive in the Bolshevik state, and the latter is to be blamed for their
deaths. However, two members of their family who did survive emerge in the epilogue, : their
daughter Tan'ka Bezocheredeva meets Yurii's half-brother Evgraf. One can see this meeting as a
posthumous contact of Yurii and Lara, since both surviving Zhivagos resemble Yurii and Lara;
Tania smiles like Yurii, while Evgraf, in the end, is identified with Lara.
The meeting of Tania and Evgraf hints at a tentative resurrection 13 and reunion of the heroes.
Two contrasting versions of their adjustment to the new state are suggested here: the power of
the half-brother, exotic, elusive and manipulative, who emerges on the top of the new elite as a
Soviet general, and the misery of the semi-literate daughter, barely subsisting at the bottom of
Communist society. As bleak and unattractive as this resurrection is, it is still the future, still a
beacon to survival, maybe the only possible one.
3 The Line of Motives
It may be concluded that the structure of the LC has proved to be far from chaotic. A unique
compositional trait of LC lays in the unusually persistent isomorphic conjugation of two different
types of textual structures: a chronologically aligned event structure, and an iterational motivic
structure in which the manifestations of each motive are adjacent. 14
The alternation of strong and weak events in Table 1.1, is, in fact, nothing less than
organized pulsation within the motivic groups. Along the LC, the pulsation follows an 'echo'
pattern, except for some deviations starting in the middle of the LC. At the same point, the
motivic groups grow in size, and then, when the pulse returns to the original pattern, shrink
again. It will be demonstrated below that the pulsation changes its rhythm in concert with the
general composition. In this section, the succession of motivic groups along the LC will be