Must-watchInterwar · Film · 1965
Doctor Zhivago
A Moscow doctor and poet is torn between his family and the woman he loves as world war, revolution and civil war carry him from the old capital to the snowbound Urals.
Where it happened
Follow the story across 3 places.
Stop 1: Moscow
Raised by the Gromeko family, Yuri becomes a doctor and poet, while young Lara is drawn into the orbit of a powerful older man.
Stop 2: Moscow under the Bolsheviks
Back from the front, Yuri finds his family home requisitioned and shared with strangers, and his poems suspect in the eyes of the new regime.
Stop 3: Yuriatin (Perm), the Urals
Key location
The family takes refuge near the frozen estate of Varykino, and in the town of Yuriatin Yuri meets Lara again as the civil war closes in.
What really happened
Based on Boris Pasternak's novel, which could not be published in the Soviet Union until 1988, the film spans the collapse of Tsarist Russia: the First World War, the two revolutions of 1917 and the Russian Civil War of 1917-1922, in which Red and White armies fought across the Urals and Siberia while terror, famine and epidemics killed millions.
David Lean compresses and romanticises those years. Strelnikov is a composite of ruthless Red commanders, and Yuriatin is a fictional town that Pasternak modelled on Perm, where he had lived in 1916. Filming in the USSR was impossible, so Moscow and the Urals were recreated mainly in Spain, with winter scenes shot in Finland and Canada.
Where to watch
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Full details
- Original title
- Doctor Zhivago
- Directed by
- David Lean
- Countries
- United States, Italy
- Languages
- English
- Released
- 1965
- Period
- –
- Theaters of war
- Eastern Front
- Themes
- Civil war
- Romance
