Doctor Zhivago Part 2: A Girl from a Different Circle Summary

Part 2, Chapter 1

• At this point, Russia is at war with Japan. (Yes, that really happened.) This means that it must be sometime between 1904 and 1905, when the Russo-Japanese War happened.
• The narrator tells us that while this war was happening, though, the real fighting was going on inside Russia itself.
• Around this time, a woman named Amalia Karlovna Guichard moves to Moscow with her two children, a son Rodion and a daughter Lara. She sends her daughter Larisa to a girls' high school, the same one attended by Nadya, who fell out of the boat in Part 1, Chapter 8.
• To make some money, Amalia Guichard buys a small dressmaking business. She does this based on the advice of her lawyer, Komarovsky, who was a friend of her deceased husband.
• It sounds like Komarovsky is romantically involved with Amalia. But he also likes to cast long, lingering gazes on her daughter, Lara. Awkward? Yep. And it's gonna get even more awkward.

Part 2, Chapter 2

• All we find out in this chapter is that Amalia Guichard is a very... erratic woman. She has a tendency of running from one man to another. We also find out that in the three months before she finds a place to rent, she stays in a hotel with her children.

Part 2, Chapter 3

• The lawyer Komarovsky spends a lot of time visiting Amalia and her family. And by family, of course, we mean Lara.
• Amalia is always fretting about her business, so these visits seem justified.
• Komarovsky tends to come around with a bulldog named Jack that everybody hates. The seamstresses working in the dress shop even think about ways to kill it without anyone knowing it was they who did it.

Part 2, Chapter 4

• Lara opens the chapter by wondering why her mother's suitor, Viktor Komarovsky, spends so much time staring at her and trying to seduce her.
• One day, Komarovsky invites Amalia to a dance. She can't go, though, and she tells him to take Lara instead. Can you say "bad idea"?
• Lara feels like she's swept up by things beyond her control. Komarovsky grabs her during the party and waltzes with her. He kisses her shamelessly, and she wonders how he has the guts to do it so openly.
• Lara goes along with it out of pride. She wants to show that she's a big girl.

Part 2, Chapter 5

• In the fall, a bunch of railway workers in Moscow decide to go on strike. Unfortunately, they can't all agree on a day to begin the strike. So everyone is just waiting around for it to start.
• Meanwhile, a foreman named Pavel Antipov complains to the railway management that the materials for their train tracks are totally unsafe. The management ignores him.

Part 2, Chapter 6

• After being ignored, Antipov returns to the train station with a friend named Tiverzin. They seem to be scheming about something. After some smack talk, they just turn and go their separate ways.
• As he walks toward Moscow, Tiverzin passes a bunch of railway workers who've just been paid.
• Tiverzin sees the wife of one of the railway's managers sitting in her carriage and looking at a group of workers as if they're nothing to her. This snobbery angers Tiverzin.
• As he walks, Tiverzin is called over by a group of people. They ask him to save a boy named Yusupka from his boss, Khudoleev, who keeps beating him for a minor mistake he's made in his work.
• Tiverzin steps through the crowd and demands that Khudoleev stop what he's doing. Khudoleev already doesn't like Tiverzin all that much, so he's more than ready to throw down and fight him.
• Each of the men grabs a heavy metal weapon and lunges at the other. But the crowd separates them before they manage to kill each other.
• Finally, Tiverzin breaks away from the people holding him and escapes through the nearest door.
• The more he walks, the angrier he becomes with the injustice of the world and the terrible ways that the rich treat the poor.
• Tiverzin marches to a nearby depot and sets off an industrial strength steam whistle that brings everyone away from their work. It looks like Tiverzin has had enough, and the big railway strike has begun.
• It is only years later, the narrator tells us, that Tiverzin realizes that people had already decided to strike before he sounded the whistle. For many years after this, he goes on to think that he was the sole person responsible.

Part 2, Chapter 7

• Two days after the start of the railway workers' strike, Tiverzin comes home sleepy and unshaven. It looks like he's been rabblerousing for 48 hours straight.
• When Tiverzin gets home, though, a neighbor advises him to go somewhere else, since the cops have come by looking for him.
• Tiverzin goes to take leave of his mother. She cries at the knowledge of his leaving and tells him to take care of himself.
• Tiverzin tells his mother that his buddy Antipov, a fellow railway striker, has been arrested. Tiverzin imagines that he or his mother will have to take Anitpov's son, Pasha, and raise him for his father.
• The chapter closes with Tiverzin's mother saying that the Russian tsar has signed a manifesto saying that the people who work the land are now on the same social level as the rich. Now, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but you can already see the political direction that Russia is going to head in for the rest of this book.

Part 2, Chapter 8

• Antipov's son Pasha comes to live at the Tiverzins' house. He is a nice young boy and easy to get along with.
• Soon after, Tiverzin's mother Marfa takes the little Antipov boy to go watch the demonstrations that a bunch of striking workers are making in the streets. There's an air of political unrest everywhere, and only after the trouble starts does Marfa think that it might be a bad idea to hang around.
• Eventually, a group of men on horseback shows up and attacks the workers. The workers scatter, and the streets quickly empty out. During the kerfuffle, Marfa becomes separated from little Pasha.
• While all of this is happening, one of the young men on horseback whips Marfa in the back. She curses and shakes her fist at the soldiers, asking how they would dare whip an old woman.
• Soon enough, Pasha sees Marfa and comes running back to her.
• When she gets home Marfa blames her son Tiverzin for what happened in the streets that day. Tiverzin has to remind her, though, that he's one of the good guys, not one of the ones who whipped her.

Part 2, Chapter 9

• From a high window, Yuri Zhivago's uncle Nikolai watches the demonstrations and violence in the streets of Moscow and wonders if his nephew Yuri is in the thick of the violence.
• We learn that Nikolai has come to Moscow to write a book because he thought the city would be a peaceful place to sit and reflect. Now he wishes he could take off for Switzerland and work in the mountains.
• Nikolai has brought his nephew Yuri to Moscow and introduced him to a bunch of very well-off families.
• Yuri bounced around a couple of these families before staying with one called the Gromekos.
• Yuri lives in the Gromekos' house with two other young people: his schoolmate Misha Gordon and the Gromekos' daughter Tonya.
• Nikolai thinks that this family might badly influence Yuri by teaching him the importance of sexual purity.
• For Nikolai, sexual desire is a natural instinct that should be encouraged and channeled into productive activities. Then again, Nikolai is very progressive for his time.
• The chapter ends with Nikolai telling a visitor named Nil to enter his room.

Part 2, Chapter 10

• A visitor enters Nikolai's room. We can tell from the man's scraggly clothes that he is an intellectual whose head is always in the clouds.
• The man has come to ask Nikolai to speak at a benefit for political exiles—people who've been forced to leave their countries because of their political beliefs. Nikolai eventually agrees.
• The two men then reminisce about their radical political activities when they were younger.
• Nikolai waxes philosophical on how music is the ultimate truth of human existence because it isn't confused by words. It's just naked truth to him.
• When his acquaintance has left, Nikolai sits down and starts writing out his thoughts about human history as a whole. For him, human history begins with the birth of Jesus Christ, since this was the first time—according to Nikolai—that people ever thought about treating one another with kindness and compassion.

Part 2, Chapter 11

• We peek in on the life of the lawyer Viktor Komarovsky. The guy has a very luxurious apartment, which is kind of bad because a lot of people are starving in the streets of Moscow.
• There is an older woman who works as a sort of housekeeper for him. Out of respect for her, Komarovsky tends to avoid bringing women back to his apartment.
• We also find out that Komarovsky likes to go out for leisurely walks with his bulldog Jack, although we already knew this from an earlier chapter.
• Basically: Komarovsky is a wealthy dude with a lot of free time on his hands.

Part 2, Chapter 12

• We look in on a woman who is walking home in a fancy dress. She is worried about what her mother will do if she "finds out" what has happened. The young walking woman scolds herself for being so stupid.
• We quickly realize that this young woman has had sex with somebody, that she is now officially a "fallen woman" according to the morals of 1905 Russia.
• And at the very end of the chapter, we find out that it's Lara we've been following. It sounds like she has succumbed to the seductions of the lawyer, Komarovsky. No wonder the guy was in such a good mood in the previous chapter.

Part 2, Chapter 13

• Now we're back to Komarovsky, who is running around his apartment and tearing his hair out at how beautiful Lara is. He can't stop mentally returning to the sex they've had together. He imagines it over and over. Rather than being totally superficial like we might expect, the guy sounds like he's actually obsessed with Lara. Apparently, this wasn't some cheap one-night-stand for him.
• Komarovsky thinks about running into friends who will want to tell lewd jokes about his sex with Lara. At this moment, though, he grows a conscience and realizes that this is all disgusting to him. He wants to be a decent dude, despite the fact that he's had sex with his lover's sixteen-year old daughter.
• As he goes downstairs, Komarovsky realizes that his dog Jack doesn't like Lara because he wants everything to stay the way it's always been. Out of anger, the lawyer blames his dog for all of his sins in the past, and he starts beating Jack with his stick.
• The next thing we know, days and weeks have gone by without Komarovsky seeing Lara.

Part 2, Chapter 14

• At the beginning of this chapter, we realize that even though Lara feels wrong for sleeping with Komarovsky, she's not totally repulsed by him. Things are a bit more complicated than that.
• In fact, Lara actually goes along with the relationship for a while, because she wants to prove that she's a grown woman who can do bad things if she likes.
• Over time, though, Lara eventually becomes horrified at herself and what she's doing.

Part 2, Chapter 15

• Lara's come around, and she hates Komarovsky. She also hates that her mother is financially dependent on him because of his involvement with the dressmaking shop.
• Lara decides that she's not Komarovsky's slave. It's the other way around. By using her sexual attractiveness, she plans to make him do whatever she wants. She also knows that she can ruin both herself and Komarovsky if she ever exposes them.
• Lara concludes this chapter by deciding how unfair it is that awful people like Komarovsky tend to hold power over good people like herself.

Part 2, Chapter 16

• Lara is so desperate that she even wonders about getting married just to get rid of Komarovsky. She wonders how the man can do what he does without dying of shame, or at least asking to marry her.
• But Lara keeps going on dates with Komarovsky to secret restaurants, where she feels humiliated by the eyes of the people watching her with him.
• When Lara goes to sleep one night, she has a really weird dream about missing most of her body and living underground, with people nearby singing and telling her not to let her friend cross the river.
• Yup, it all seems pretty random.

Part 2, Chapter 17

• Lara's not a religious person, but sometimes she needs to believe that there's some hidden "music" to the world that gives it meaning. For this reason, she goes to a church service with an older lady named Olya.
• The older woman won't shut up, though. Lara just wants peace and quiet from the church.
• While in the church, Lara freezes when she hears a psalm talking about how lucky are the people who are downtrodden, because they have something interesting to tell about themselves. She finds this a cold comfort, to say the least.

Part 2, Chapter 18

• Now there's talk about a people's militia forming in Moscow and creating a sort of army base for themselves. It sounds like the political violence is ramping up.
• Lara spends time watching the other people who live in her building. One of these people is a boy near her own age named Antipov. And yes, this is the same little Pasha Antipov we've read about in earlier chapters, the one who lives with Tiverzin's mother Marfa.
• It doesn't take long for Lara to realize that the boy has a crush on her.
• Being experienced in the world of seduction, Lara decides to take advantage of Antipov's attraction to her whenever she can.
• We also find out, though, that Pasha Antipov is already getting involved in political stuff in a way that could end up getting him hanged someday.
• On many days, Lara can hear people shooting pistols in the streets. She thinks they sound like little boys playing with toys.

Part 2, Chapter 19

• Eventually, Lara and her family have to leave their apartment because the fighting between the workers and the Russian government has come to their neighborhood.
• Lara's mom bursts into tears when her seamstresses walk out on her one day to go on strike. They tell her it's nothing personal. The orders are for everyone to go on strike.
• Lara and her mom pack up a few things and leave their apartment to stay in a nearby hotel that's away from the violence.
• Lara can't believe her luck. Leaving her apartment means that she won't have to run into Komarovsky for weeks.

Part 2, Chapter 20

• We look in on a house that belongs to people called the Gromeko brothers—Alexander and Nikolai. It's rough, but don't confuse this Nikolai with the one we met earlier. This is a different guy.
• This family seems to be pretty well off.
• It's in this house that Yuri Zhivago has come to live. A girl named Tonya Gromeko, the daughter of Alexander Gromeko, lives in the house, too.
• It turns out that the cultured Gromekos love themselves some classical music, and they like to host parties at their house so that people can come over and listen to it. The narrator decides to give us an account of one of these concerts.
• The concert doesn't go all that well at first, since the first piece is pretty boring.
• In attendance at this concert are Yuri Zhivago, Tonya Gromeko, and Misha Gordon. Remember this last guy? He was the young man sitting on the train who saw someone jump out and commit suicide in an earlier chapter.
• It turns out that these three young people are pretty close friends, and that Misha Gordon spends a lot of time at the Gromeko house hanging with Yuri and Tonya.
• Suddenly, one of the Gromekos' old servants comes up to Alexander and tells him that he's urgently needed. The man waves her away, though, and tells her to wait until the music has finished.
• Apparently, something bad has happened at the Montenegro Hotel, the same place that Lara and her mother have gone to after leaving their apartment in the previous chapter. It sounds like someone at the hotel is dying, and this person needs Alexander Gromeko's help.
• Alexander Gromeko doesn't want to leave until the concert is over. Nice guy, right?
• When the piece is finally over, Alexander Gromeko asks everyone to stay while he pops out for a half hour to see what the trouble is at the Montenegro.

Part 2, Chapter 21

• When he reaches the Montenegro Hotel, Alexander Gromeko finds out that a woman named Amalia Guichard is having her stomach pumped because she tried to poison herself. And yes, this is Lara's mom. So we might suspect at this point that she's found out that her lover, Komarovsky, is sleeping with her young daughter.
• Komarovsky is actually at the hotel, pacing up and down the hallway outside Amalia Guichard's room. We also find out that Yuri Zhivago and Misha Gordon have accompanied Alexander Gromeko to the scene. The boys also hang out in the corridor while Alexander tends to Amalia.
• The woman is nauseated and speaking mostly in babble when Alexander reaches her.
• Seeing that the woman is all right, Alexander turns away and gets ready to leave. He doesn't like being away from his party.
• While he's there, young Yuri Zhivago notices a girl (Lara) exchanging glances with an older man (Komarovsky) in the hallway, and he realizes that something is going on between them.
• When he's back in the presence of Misha and Tonya, Yuri tells them what he saw and talks about how inappropriate he found it.
• Misha Gordon recognizes Komarovsky as the same lawyer who got the man on the train drunk and basically drove him to suicide. We now find out that this man who committed suicide was none other than Andrei Zhivago, Yuri's dad. In other words, the lawyer Komarovsky is responsible for driving Yuri's father to his death, in addition to being responsible for Amalia Guichard's attempt to poison herself.
• It's not going too far to say that Komarovsky is turning out to be one of the bad guys in this book.