Doctor Zhivago Part 3: The Christmas Party at the Sventitskys' Summary

Part 3, Chapter 1

• One day, Alexander Gromeko buys a giant wooden bureau for his wife, Anna. They get a handyman named Markel to put it together. But at the last second, Anna tries to help and hurts herself.
• Shortly after this incident, Anna starts to get a lot of lung diseases. (Don't ask us. That's just how things rolled back in the Russian Empire.)
• Yup. That's the chapter.

Part 3, Chapter 2

• Anna Gromeko spends all of November 1911 in bed with pneumonia. It doesn't look great for her.
• Meanwhile, Yuri, Misha, and Tonya are all finishing up with schools in the spring. Yuri graduates as a doctor, Tonya as a lawyer, and Misha as a philologist (basically, a guy who studies language, literature, and how words develop their meanings over time).
• Yuri Zhivago spends a lot of time during his education studying corpses and trying to make himself as useful as possible as a doctor.
• Yuri thinks about writing books some day about all his interesting thoughts, which he thinks he has a lot of.
• Yuri's uncle Nikolai writes books that are very influential for Yuri and his friend Misha. Unfortunately, Yuri thinks that Misha's thinking is too flaky and too removed from reality and truth.

Part 3, Chapter 3

• Anna Gromeko's pneumonia takes a turn for the worse, which puts her on her deathbed. While she's lying in a cold sweat, she asks Yuri to tell her something reassuring. He says that according to his medical expertise, she will get better and not die. He means this when he says it, too.
• Yuri surprises himself with the spiritual speech that he ends up giving to his adoptive mother. He tells her that there's no such thing as death, just a change of consciousness.
• When he leaves the room, Yuri feels like he's turning into a quack doctor, casting spells and whatnot. Barely anything he just said to Anna was scientific. It was all just a bunch of mysticism and philosophy.
• Nonetheless, Anna starts feeling better the following day.

Part 3, Chapter 4

• Anna continues to improve but has trouble getting out of bed. So she fills her days by calling Yuri and Tonya to her bedside and telling them about the wonderful childhood she spent on her family's estate in a town called Varykino.
• During these days, Yuri and Tonya also order their very first sets of eveningwear. It turns out that there's a fancy Christmas party coming up that both of them will attend.
• Yuri and Tonya show off their clothes to Anna and make the woman proud of how good they look.
• Anna sends Tonya out of the room and talks to Yuri about his inheritance from his father's suicide. It turns out that there's a bit of money left in the Zhivago estate, but a bunch of people are coming out of the woodwork and trying to get their hands on it. Yuri ultimately decides that trying to fight for his inheritance in court would be more trouble than it's worth.
• Yuri also finds out that his father had an illegitimate son named Evgraf while he was cheating on Yuri's mother. This half-brother of Yuri's is out there somewhere trying to claim the family inheritance as well.
• Anna tells Yuri that he was wrong for refusing his inheritance. After she calms down, she goes back to telling him about her childhood years on the family estate.
• As the meeting ends, Anna falls into a coughing fit that won't stop. Yuri and Tonya both run to her side. She grabs both of their hands and tells them that if she dies, the two of them should get married.
• Before Yuri or Tonya can say anything, Anna says: "That's settled, then." She bursts into tears of joy.

Part 3, Chapter 5

• Flash back to Lara, who has now been going out with the lawyer Komarovsky for six months and has had enough of it.
• Lara realizes that the only way to get away from Komarovsky's constant advances is to get a place of her own and an income. She asks her schoolmate Nadya to help, and Nadya tells her to come work as a tutor for her younger sister Lipa. It's settled that Lara will go to live with Nadya's family.

Part 3, Chapter 6

• Lara lives with Nadya's family, the Kologrivovs, for more than three years. Komarovsky hasn't made any attempt to contact her, but neither has her mother or brother.
• Nadya's father is a wealthy man but also a big defender of working people. He even helps organize strikes at his own factories because he's so devoted to workers' rights. Lara has a deep respect for both him and his wife.
• In her fourth year with the Kologrivovs, Lara gets a visit from her brother, Rodya. It turns out that he was responsible for a bunch of money gathered by his school but went and blew it all on gambling. It's a pretty huge sum of money, and he needs Lara to go to the lawyer Komarovsky and ask for it on his behalf. In other words, he's pimping his sister out.
• Lara goes cold at this request and tells Rodya to get out of her life.
• Rodya reveals that if he doesn't get the money, he'll shoot himself. Lara says she'll ask Kologrivov, her employer, for the money. But she demands that Rodya come by the next day and give her the pistol he was going to shoot himself with.
• As it turns out, she gets the money from Kologrivov.

Part 3, Chapter 7

• By the time her pupil, Lipa, has finished school, Lara has become like a daughter to the Kologrivov family. During these years, Lara also finishes school herself with good grades.
• Without telling her friend Pasha Antipov, she sends a bunch of the money she makes to Pasha's father, who is living in exile because of his left-wing political activities. She also pays off a chunk of Pasha's monthly rent without Pasha knowing.
• Pasha, you might remember, had a big crush on Lara from the moment he met her. Lara dreams that after he has passed his university exams, they'll get married and will go live somewhere they can both be teachers.
• During these times, Lara visits the Kologrivovs' estate in the Ural Mountains. The Ural region isn't worth a ton of points on a RISK game board, but it still sounds pretty nice.
• Oh yeah, and don't forget that this family estate, Duplyanka, is the same place Yuri Zhivago sometimes stayed with his uncle Nikolai earlier in this novel.
• Lara loves it at this family estate.
• During this time, though, Lara's personality also changes for the worse. She becomes more self-conscious and petty as she gets older.
• Now that her pupil has left the Kologrivovs' house, Lara feels ashamed to take their money and eat their food for doing nothing. She wants to make her own way.
• During this time, she also gets really good at firing a gun.
• Eventually, she decides to break from the Kologrivovs and become independent. She decides that she'll get her start-up money from the lawyer Komarovsky, since in her mind, he owes her for all the misery he's caused. When she sets out to see him, she puts her brother Rodya's revolver in her pocket and vows to shoot Komarovsky if he doesn't give her the money she wants.
• Before she has even asked Komarovsky for the money, though, it sounds like she has made up her mind to fire the gun.

Part 3, Chapter 8

• Lara shows up at Komarovsky's house to find out that he's not at home. His housekeeper tells her that the lawyer is at a Christmas party, so Lara decides to go there and track him down.
• While walking in the freezing cold, Lara decides that she's going to tell Komarovsky everything about the pain he's caused her.

Part 3, Chapter 9

• Now it's time to check back in on Pasha Antipov, a guy we haven't heard from in a while. Just to refresh, this is the young dude whose dad is living in political exile and who is in love with Lara.
• We look in on him while he's trying to button up a fancy shirt. While he's half-dressed, Lara walks in. He feels embarrassed at being seen like this, but then realizes that there's something else bothering Lara.
• Lara asks Pasha to light a candle and turn out the electric lights in the room. She always likes to talk to him like this, in semidarkness.
• Cutting to the chase, Lara tells Pasha that she has difficulties in her life. She asks him to marry her as quickly as possible in order to make things right, although she doesn't tell him the real reason why.

Part 3, Chapter 10

• Yuri and Tonya are heading to the Sventitskys' Christmas party. That's the party they had bought clothes for earlier.
• Yuri and Tonya have been looking at one another differently ever since Tonya's mother told them to get married. Which makes sense…
• Yuri doesn't think it's a good idea to leave Anna sick in bed while they go to the party, but Anna has insisted that they go.
• While they're travelling, Yuri looks up to a window and sees a candle burning. He starts mumbling the phrase "a candle burned" to himself over and over, thinking that something more might come to him. But nothing comes.

Part 3, Chapter 11

• The Christmas party sounds like a rockin' good time. There are some solid musicians in the corner, and everyone is dancing up a storm.
• Instead of going into the dancing ballroom, though, Yura and Tonya head back into the hosts' private rooms.

Part 3, Chapter 12

• Yuri and Tonya spend more than half of the Sventitskys' Christmas party hanging out in the back room with a few old people who are signing Christmas cards.

Part 3, Chapter 13

• While Yuri and Tonya sit with the old folks in back, Lara hangs out in the ballroom. She's not dressed for the party and doesn't know anyone there, but try telling that to the gun in her pocket.
• Lara keeps hanging around Komarovsky, hoping that he will notice her. But he doesn't pay her any attention, which really gets her blood boiling.
• At one point, another young girl walks through the room, and Lara can see Komarovsky look after her with those same leering eyes he used to turn on her.
• Lara recognizes one of the men playing cards with Komarovsky as Kornakov, the district prosecutor who is known as a merciless man in the courtroom.

Part 3, Chapter 14

• Yuri gets a little jealous when Tonya starts dancing around the room with another young man. But as if sensing the jealousy, Tonya grabs his hand and squeezes it each time she passes by him.
• While this it going on, a gunshot rings out through the house.
• Komarovsky appears and starts asking, "What has she done?" It doesn't look like he's been hit by the gunshot, though.
• A bunch of people start yelling hysterically, not knowing what has happened. Eventually, the prosecutor Kornakov appears with a napkin pressed to his bleeding hand. It looks like Lara has missed her shot at Komarovsky and has hit Kornakov on the hand instead.
• Yuri also lets his gaze linger on the beautiful girl who has taken the shot—Lara. Lara collapses and faints in an armchair; being a doctor, Yuri rushes to see to her.
• Yuri looks at Kornakov's hand and says it's only a scratch. Just when things look like they're calming down, though, Tonya walks up to him and says there's something wrong back at home.

Part 3, Chapter 15

• When Yuri and Tonya get back home, they discover that Anna Gromeko is already dead from her lung infection. She died ten minutes before they got home.
• Tonya is inconsolable at first, crying and thrashing her arms about. The next day, though, she calms down, although she keeps having fits of grief for a while.
• The death reminds Yuri of his own mother's death when he was little. He can identify with how sad poor Tonya is.
• Yuri reacts to Anna's death very differently from the way he reacted to his mother's, though. He feels solemn, but he also thinks that he has achieved wisdom about life and death that he didn't have before. He doesn't fear death anymore, but just thinks of it as a natural part of existing.

Part 3, Chapter 16

• Yuri is so stoic and accepting of Anna Gromeko's death that he actually sleeps in on the day of her funeral. A friend of the Gromekos has to wake him in his bed while the coffin is carried out of the house.

Part 3, Chapter 17

• The funeral service is over.
• Yuri realizes that Anna's grave is in the same cemetery where his mother's grave is. In all the years since her death, he has never been to visit her grave. He whispers "Mama" as he looks toward it.
• As he walks away, Yuri realizes that the only way to really defeat death is through art. He feels the need to capture everything he sees and hears at the graveyard to make sure that the memories are preserved in all of their living energy.