Part 15, Chapter 1
- In case we were in suspense, the narrator opens Part 15 by telling us that Zhivago lived for another eight or nine years after his time alone in Varykino. During these years, he just sort of wasted away and stopped taking care of himself.
- For the most part, Zhivago spent these years depressed and doing nothing. For short periods, though, he'd rouse himself and write a lot. During these years, though, his genetic heart sickness continued to get worse.
- He eventually leaves Varykino and returns to live in Moscow. But not alone. No, he arrives with a young male companion at his side. But who, we ask?
Part 15, Chapter 2
- During his travels to Moscow, Zhivago sees a bunch of fields of wheat and rye totally abandoned. The Communists, you see, wanted to move everyone to the cities. But as you can imagine, this left the country with no one to farm all the food. Zhivago thinks it's cruel and unnatural to leave such vast fields of food unharvested when people are starving.
Part 15, Chapter 3
- One day on his travels, Zhivago enters a burnt-down village. The place seems to be deserted.
- When he's wandering around, he meets with a young man who offers him a drink. The young man turns out to be Vasya, the young labor conscript Zhivago met on the train to the Urals way back in the day. It turns out that Vasya is the only one left living in this village.
Part 15, Chapter 4
- Vasya tells Zhivago a story about how he tried to help a woman hide her potato crop so it wouldn't all get seized and distributed by the Communists. He dug a pit for her and hid the potatoes.
- Shortly after, though, there was a robbery at this woman's house. The woman disappeared. A while later, a dog started digging at the dirt floor of the house (where the potatoes were) and dug up the woman's body.
- The local leaders used this big story to show people what happens when they try to hoard their crops.
- Shortly after that, the government sent Red Army soldiers to the village. Vasya knew they would be after him for skipping out on his labor conscription, so he hid beneath a house's floorboards while the whole village burned down. Many of the people in the village burned down with their houses.
Part 15, Chapter 5
- We come back to the moment when Zhivago and Vasya arrive in Moscow. It's 1922, and a new economic policy is brought into Russia. It's a bit less harsh than the stuff that's been going on up to this point. The Communists lift their ban on private businesses and let a little bit of that stuff go on.
- Zhivago and Vasya live together creating art. Zhivago writes poems during the day and Vasya works on typesetting and printing in order to publish them.
- Zhivago's books contain all kinds of thoughts about philosophy, history, medicine, and evolution. The little books start to sell well.
- Eventually, Zhivago's relationship with Vasya starts to cool off. Vasya starts to become more and more convinced by Communist ideas, while Zhivago thinks that this just shows how ignorant and easily swayed the boy is.
- Meanwhile, Zhivago goes around trying to secure the right for his family (Tonya and company) to come back to Moscow from Paris. If that isn't possible, he'd like a passport so he can go to them in Paris. The thing is, he makes these efforts without much energy. It's almost as if he wants to fail. Vasya thinks that this is cruel to Zhivago's family, who deserve better.
- Eventually, the relationship falls apart, and Zhivago moves out of the apartment he shares with Vasya.
Part 15, Chapter 6
- We look in on a dinner held by the Schapovs, a family headed up by a guy named Markel who used to be Zhivago's handyman when he lived in Moscow at the start of this book.
- Zhivago pops in with two buckets, needing water.
- At first, Markel offers him everything he needs. But each time Zhivago comes back for more, Markel gets a little more annoyed. Eventually, he can't stand the sight of Zhivago, who's become such a moocher.
- Eventually, the Schapovs send their daughter Marina to go help Zhivago take care of his laundry and his house. Marina is a compassionate girl who doesn't like how people make fun of Zhivago.
- One day, Marina decides to stay at his place and never go home. From this point forward, she basically becomes Zhivago's third (unofficial) wife, even though he's technically still married to Tonya.
- Marina sticks with Zhivago throughout all his poverty and craziness. She's basically a saint for putting up with him so well.
Part 15, Chapter 7
- It's 1929, seven years since Zhivago first arrived back in Moscow. Zhivago and Marina have had two daughters together.
- Zhivago has reconnected with his old friends Gordon and Dudorov. One day, they sit together chatting.
- Zhivago is constantly disappointed by how little his friends tend to think for themselves. They've all drunk the Communist Kool-Aid, and they all totally buy into it.
- Eventually, Zhivago has to get up and leave because he's too frustrated with his friends. He tells them he'll probably be dead soon from his genetic heart disease.
- Before he leaves, Gordon and Dudorov ask Zhivago if he ever plans on leaving behind his stubbornness and blending in with his community a bit better. But Zhivago can't do it. He's too much of an individualist.
- Zhivago reveals that his family, after seven years, has also started to write to him from Paris again. He feels that they will return to Moscow sometime soon. But we're wondering what that'll mean for Zhivago's new "wife" Marina and the two daughters he's had with her.
- The next day, Marina comes running to Gordon, asking if he's seen Zhivago. It looks like the guy has totally disappeared.
Part 15, Chapter 8
- Gordon and Dudorov try to help Marina find Zhivago. But he sends two letters saying that he plans on returning and doesn't want to be found until then. Apparently, he has some stuff he wants to work on without being distracted. He also sends Marina money so that she can hire a nanny to look after the children.
Part 15, Chapter 9
- Here's the story behind Zhivago's disappearance. Shortly after leaving Gordon's house in Part 15, Chapter 7, he ran into his half-brother Evgraf, who has grown up to be a real bigwig with the Communists. Evgraf is the one who gives Zhivago all the money he needs to write from this point on.
Part 15, Chapter 10
- During his time in his rented apartment, Zhivago looks over all his old writings and starts putting them together into an organized manuscript.
- Everything he writes eventually boils down to one subject: the city.
Part 15, Chapter 11
- This chapter gives us a selection of an essay that Zhivago writes about "the city." He says that he plans on writing a bunch of poems about Moscow, specifically, but as the narrator tells us, no such poems were ever found among his papers.
Part 15, Chapter 12
- One morning in late summer, Zhivago hops on a streetcar and heads to a new job he's gotten in a nearby hospital.
- Unfortunately, a car breaks down on the tram tracks and holds up traffic. It's really super hot inside the tram, and Zhivago feels like he needs to get out into the fresh air. The crowd at the back of the tram, though, is too tightly packed. They kick and snarl at him as he pushes his way through.
- He finally climbs down onto the street pavement. But he doesn't make it four steps before he collapses on the sidewalk.
- The narrator tells us that Zhivago has died from heart failure.
Part 15, Chapter 13
- Now we're at Zhivago's wake. He's been laid out on the same desk where he's done most of his most recent writing. Since the Communists don't look kindly on religion, Marina decides not to give Zhivago a Christian funeral and instead gives him a civil cremation.
- A bunch of strangers come to the funeral service because they're fans of Zhivago's writings.
- The chapter ends with a strange meditation about how Mary Magdalene didn't recognize Jesus at first when he rose from the dead.
Part 15, Chapter 14
- At the funeral, it's almost impossible for Zhivago's friends Gordon and Dudorov to console Marina. She really, really loved him.
- Two strangers, a man and a woman, come into the room and gain the attention of everyone around them. When they walk in, everyone else seems to exit the room so that the couple can be alone with Zhivago's body.
- We find out that the man is Zhivago's half-brother Evgraf. A telephone rings in the hallway, and Evgraf goes to see who it is. This leaves just the woman alone with Zhivago's body.
- Soon enough, Evgraf comes back and addresses the woman as Larisa Fyodorovna. Yup, it's Lara, who has somehow found a safe way to come to Moscow.
- It turns out that Lara was actually just passing through Moscow and trying to find Zhivago to say hi. But during her visit, she found out that he had died.
- But how did she find Zhivago when no one else could? Well, here's a coincidence for you. The room Zhivago was renting is the same room that used to be home to Lara's husband Antipov. She was just visiting the place for old times' sake. She was surprised enough to find out that Zhivago had rented it, and doubly surprised to find him dead inside it.
- Evgraf goes to let the mourners back into the room. Lara suddenly feels ill and gets up to leave. She knows now that both of her greatest loves—Zhivago and Antipov (Strelnikov)—are dead.
- Lara thinks back to the time when she and Pasha Antipov were sitting at her window talking over a single candle. She wonders whether Zhivago would have been passing by and whether he would have seen the candle. If we go way back earlier in the book, we know that this is true, and that it inspired a poetic line ("a candle burned") in Zhivago's head. At the time, though, he didn't know what to do with this line.
- Lara cries and leaves, leaving many of the people to wonder who she was.
Part 15, Chapter 15
- Alone again, Lara shakes with sobbing. The narrator gives a long poetic speech about how much she loved Zhivago and how much he loved her. It was as if the whole world, the trees and animals and snow, wanted them to be together.
Part 15, Chapter 16
- Lara takes one last opportunity to talk out loud and say goodbye to Zhivago. She forgives him for tricking her into leaving with Komarovsky without him. But she swears she'd never have gone if she'd known he wasn't coming with her.
- When Lara looks up, she realizes that she's still in the middle of the funeral room. People look at her with confusion, wondering who she is and why she's saying these things.
- A few men go over to the coffin and start carrying it out of the room.
Part 15, Chapter 17
- At Evgraf's request, Lara sticks around for a few days after Zhivago's funeral and helps to sort through all of his papers and unfinished manuscripts. One day, though, she leaves Zhivago's apartment and never comes back.
- We hear from the narrator that shortly after leaving Zhivago's, Lara was arrested on the street and sent to a concentration camp, where she died. She was basically killed for coming back to Moscow and attending Zhivago's funeral.
- Just in case you thought Communist Russia was a just place to live, Pasternak throws in this last detail to change your mind.