English homework help.
- What has the “class war” done to the life of the sentry at the train station?
It has taken him away from his home and his work, sadly out of place He says if he were at home he would be farming, and we see that he drags his rifle on the ground, “plough[ing] a furrow in the dust” as if it were a farm implement.
- How does Samdevyatov define Marxism? What does Yury say it is?
Samdevyatov says, “Marxism is a positive science. It is a doctrine of realty, a philosophy of history.”
Yury disagrees: “Marxism is not sufficiently master of itself to be a science. Science is more balanced…. I don’t know of any teaching more self-centered and further from the facts than Marxism…. Politics mean nothing to me. I don’t like people who are indifferent to the truth.”
- According to Samdevyatov, why was the current situation inevitable?
He says, “Gluttons and parasites sat on the backs of the starving workers and drove them to death, and you imagine things could stay like that? And what about all the other forms of outrage and tyranny? Don’t you understand the rightness of people’s anger, of their desire to live in justice, of their search for truth? Or do you think a radical change was possible through the Duma, by parliamentary measures, and that we can do without a dictatorship?”
- What is the Forest Brotherhood?
They are partisans, “the backbone of the revolutionary arm in the civil war… that arose out of the political organization that assumed leadership of the revolution [and] out of the rank and file of the army who refused to obey the old authorities once the war [against the Bolsheviks] was lost.”
This group includes peasants, unfrocked monks, sons of kulaks, German and Austrian prisoners of war. Their ideology is anarchist.
The Forest Brotherhood is one group of such partisans, led by Comrade Forester, whose real name is Liberius Mikulitsin, the son of Avercius Mikulitsin, who used to be an employee of Tonya’s grandfather at Varykino and is now the appointed manager of the property under the Bolshevik government.
- As the Zhivagos’ carriage approaches Varykino, who is firing gunshots in the distance, and why?
Mikulitsin is shooting to scare away wolves.
- Why is the Zhivagos’ first encounter with the Mikulitsins at the estate so humiliating?
They know they are not only unwelcome in the new regime as the family of a bourgeois landowner but are also putting Mikulitsin at risk of retribution from the Bolsheviks by asking him to help them. Perhaps most humiliating is that they are begging a former servant for some small space in which to live on the vast estate that recently had belonged to them.
- What is the rumor about the true identity of Strelnikov?
People say he is Pasha Antipov, the teacher from Yuryiatin. After he was killed in war, he came back from the dead as Commissar Strelinkov.
- Who enables the Mikulitsins and the Zhivagos to live at Varykino in comfort and safety? What is Yury’s guess as to why this man supports the soviet government and yet protects vulnerable people from it?
- What has Yury been dreaming about? What is his idea of where the subjects of dreams come from?
- Why does Yury prefer the writings of Pushkin and Chekhov to those of Gogol, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky?
- What is mysterious about Yevgraf?
- How does the narrator describe the appearance of the intellectuals and librarians at the public library?
- What realization about his dreams comes to Yury in the library?
- What subject has Lara been studying?
- What does Yury tell Lara about Strelnikov’s association with the Bolsheviks?
- What does Yury think of the revolutionaries now?
- Why does Lara think her attitude toward the revolution has been different from Yura’s?
- What does Lara say about Galiullin?
- What is Yury’s reaction when Lara tells him that Strelnikov is Pasha?
- What puzzles Lara about the way the Jews deal with persecution? Who else has said much the same thing?
- What does Lara believe is Pasha/Strelnikov’s reason for not contacting her and Katya?
- How does Yury intend to resolve the painful situation which has resulted from his affair with Lara?
