Coincidence

So let's get this straight.

We're in the massive, gigantic country called Russia. There are apparently only like five whole people in Russia. How do we know?

• Randomly, a kid named Misha Gordon witnesses the death of Yuri Zhivago's father.
• Zhivago's father is driven to death by Viktor Komarovsky, who seduces 16-year-old Lara, who tries to shoot him at a party in front of Yuri Zhivago himself.
• Zhivago doesn't know it, but that candle he saw burning in a window belonged to Lara and her husband Antipov; Zhivago remembers this candle, for no particular reason, for the rest of his life.
• Zhivago and Lara randomly get sent to a random hospital in a random place on the WWI front.
• Zhivago and Lara have an affair in a house that is randomly being lived in by Pasha Antipov (now Strelnikov), who is randomly back from the front after having randomly met Zhivago in a train car years ago.
• Zhivago spends his last days randomly living in Lara and Pasha's old apartment, where that candle burned, with a person he randomly met on a train years ago and randomly ran into again one day.

And we're just getting started, folks.

We're guessing you noticed how many coincidences there are in this book. We're talking like every page. Everyone is connected in a bazillion different ways, and if a character leaves the book on page 50, you can be he or she will be back in some totally random way on page 60.

What's up with that, Pasternak?

Some people think that Pasternak was just being old-fashioned. A lot of old novels have random, coincidental meetings between characters. We just roll with it, because it only happens a few times per novel.

But since it happens all the freaking time in Doctor Zhivago, it starts to seem like maybe more is going on. It's almost like there is some big, cosmic plan here that the characters don't know about: they're all connected, and they all have parts to play in each other's lives, but because they're, you know, on the ground living their own lives, they don't see the big picture they're part of.

You could call this God's plan, or Providence, or fate, or whatever you want: Pasternak doesn't really give it a name. But we totally get the sense that in this novel, there is more to life than meets the eye, and there's even a kind of magic in the background. That's what makes the image of that candle burning so great: it's like a sign that there's a deeper meaning to our lives, and that some things are actually meant to be.

And hey, how else can we explain the fact that every time Zhivago gets so far up the creek there's no way back, his half-bro Evgraf swoops in to save his sorry butt?