Misha Gordon Timeline and Summary

At the start of the novel, Misha Gordon is just a little boy riding a train.
The train stops when a man jumps off and commits suicide. Misha is overwhelmed by how horrible this is, since the man who killed himself spent a lot of time in the past few days hanging out with Misha's father.
Misha grows up to become close friends with Yuri Zhivago, the son of the man who leaped from the train. As a young boy, Misha is clever and surly, just the way Zhivago likes him.
As he grows older, though, Misha starts to lose his ability to think for himself. Like many young men, he gets totally caught up in the Bolshevik Revolution and slowly becomes distant from Zhivago as their thinking takes them in different directions.