The last chapter of Boris Pasternak's novel Doctor Zhivago consists of a cycle of twenty-five poems…. These poems express the quintessence of Zhivago's life experience and the insights he has reached in the course of events described in the prose part of the novel. Whereas in the prose Zhivago's life is narrated and forms a part of a larger context, in the poetry it is he himself who, in his capacity of poet, is the sole "central intelligence." This does not mean that Zhivago's existential attitudes are immediately and directly revealed in the last lyrical chapter, in spite of the formal simplicity of the poems. Their meaning is hidden in certain key images and concepts, and in the very structure of separate poems and the cycle…. The main principle which unifies the Zhivago poems into a cycle containing a closed system of thought, is both structural and philosophical...