Reading Maps

Journeys from fiction drawn on the real world

Boris Pasternak · 1957 · rail

Boris Pasternak's 1957 epic. The physician-poet Yuri Zhivago is swept up in the Russian Revolution and civil war, fleeing starving Moscow with his family on a long eastward train journey to the Urals, where he loves Lara in the frozen house at Varykino. Conscripted by partisans, separated from everyone he loves, he makes his way back across a broken country to Moscow.

  1. 1
    Moscow

    Zhivago's home city, where he returns from the front to find the revolution remaking everything, hunger and cold driving the family to flee east for survival.

  2. 2
    Yuriatin

    The Urals town (drawn from Perm) near the Varykino estate, where Zhivago and his family take refuge and where he rekindles his love for Lara amid the civil war.

  3. 3
    Varykino

    The remote frozen estate where Zhivago writes his Lara poems in isolation, before partisans seize him and carry him deeper into the chaos of Siberia.

  4. 4
    Moscow

    After years lost to war and wandering, a broken Zhivago finds his way back to Moscow, his family gone abroad, to live out his last years among strangers.

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Doctor Zhivago Map: Boris Pasternak's Journey