Character Analysis
Of all the characters in Doctor Zhivago, Antipov has to be one of the hardest to figure out. In the beginning, he seems like a pretty straightforward dude. He's a young man who lives in the same building as an older, beautiful girl named Lara, and he quickly falls in love with her. And as we find out in these early stages, Antipov is basically just a "bashful, laughter-prone, prissy prankster, who looked like a girl" (4.9.13).
Pasha soon forms a relationship with Lara, but doesn't realize that she has had a sexual affair with Komarovsky. It's when he marries Lara and finds out about her sexual past that Pasha seems to lose his boyish innocence.
The next time we see Antipov, he's a totally different dude. As the narrator tells us, "[the] bashful, laughter-prone, prissy prankster, who looked like a girl, had turned into a nervous, all-knowing, scornful hypochondriac. He was intelligent, very brave, taciturn, and sarcastic" (4.9.13). He has a great life with his wife Lara and their daughter Katenka, but for one reason or another, he just can't accept the normal life he has with them. In order to escape, he runs off to join the Russian army and eventually gets himself captured by the enemy.
When he finally gets freed, Antipov realizes that everyone back home in Russia thinks he's dead. So he uses the opportunity to assume the new identity of Strelnikov (the name comes from the Russian word strelok, which means gunner, shooter, or marksman), and he starts racking up a very impressive military record. From the moment Zhivago meets him, for example, "it [becomes] clear at once that this man represent[s] the consummate manifestation of will" (7.29.16).
Antipov is a very serious, very successful man who has been made bitter by his experiences and has turned from an innocent little boy into a hardened soldier. He's completely ruthless, and he doesn't care: "Strelnikov knew that rumor had nicknamed him Rasstrelnikov, 'the Executioner.' He took it in stride, he feared nothing" (7.30.8).
When it comes time to explain why her husband turned into a ruthless military man, Lara can only guess that Pasha wants to do something that will earn her love once and for all, even though he already has it: "He needs to lay all these military laurels at our feet, so as not to come back empty-handed, but all in glory, a conqueror! To immortalize, to bedazzle us! Like a child!" (9.15.12).
When he finally shows up at Zhivago's door at the end of the book, Antipov seems to confirm this. All he has ever wanted is to earn Lara's love. He's not interested in unconditional love; he's only interested in the kind of love that can be earned with great achievements. He knows that Lara's first experience was with a powerful, rich, corrupt man, and he wants to make himself bigger and better than that. What better way to do it than by attacking the rich, corrupt society that produced Komarovsky to begin with?
In the end, Antipov realizes that thinking this way has made it impossible for him to go on living in the new Soviet Russia—he's too much of an individual and too famous for the Soviets to allow him to go on living—so he commits suicide by shooting himself in the head.
Pasha Antipov's (Strelnikov's) Timeline