Doctor Zhivago Study Guide

Yura (also Yuri) Zhivago attends his mother's funeral. His is only ten years old and takes the loss hard. His uncle, Nikolai Nikolaievich Vedeniapin, takes the weeping boy away from his mother's grave. Yura stays with his uncle at a monastery where Nikolai had at one time been a priest. Yura's father had been a very rich industrialist but had also squandered the family fortune, leaving Yura and his mother very poor. Nikolai takes Yura to Duplyanka to meet a famous author named Ivan Ivanovich, and they hear of a peasant uprising that threatens to become a full rebellion against the Tsarist regime and in favor of Marxist socialism. (read more)