Doctor Zhivago Characters

Marya Nikolaevna Zhivago is the mother of Yuri Zhivago and sister of Nikolai Nikolaevich Vedenyapin. Abandoned by her dissolute, alcoholic husband, Marya Nikolaevna dies of the hereditary heart condition shortly before the novel begins.

Ustinya is a resident of the Meliuzeevo hospital, where she worked as the cook when the hospital was an aristocrat’s palace before the war. Though she is uneducated and ignorant, Ustinya becomes a fierce supporter of the revolution during the summer of 1917.

Gintz is an army commissar and supporter of the Provisional Government sent to Meliuzeevo to suppress the uprising in Zybushino. Gintz believes that he can convince the rebels to surrender and refuses to call in Cossacks to suppress them. Ultimately, he is killed by Pamphil Palykh.

Pogorevshikh, who is deaf, is an aristocrat and self-styled anarchist or nihilist revolutionary whom Yuri Zhivago meets on the train from Meliuzeevo to Moscow. Pogorevshikh is in fact the same deaf man who, by faking divine inspiration, helped spark the uprising in Zybushino.

Masha is the daughter and second child of Yuri and Tonya Zhivago. Masha and her father never meet, as she is born after he is taken by the partisans and deported with her family before he returns to Yuriatin.

Khudoleev is a railroad engine master. Khudoleev brutalizes his apprentice Yusupka Gimatzedin (Galliulin), only to be brutalized himself years later when Galliulin is his commanding officer during World War I.

Shura Schlesinger is Anna Ivanovna’s best friend. An elderly unmarried woman, Shura undergoes a political conversion in 1917 and becomes a fervent supporter of the Bolsheviks.

Pritulyev is a labor conscript on the train to Yuriatin who is joined onboard by his two mistresses, Pelageya Tyagunova and Ogryzkova.

Kostoed-Amursky is an elderly, non-Bolshevik revolutionary and labor conscript on the train to Yuriatin. Kostoed stays on board when the other labor conscripts escape and later reappears as a converted Bolshevik lecturing the local partisans in Krestovozdvizhensk on the preferred policies of the central committee.

Olya Demina is a worker in Madame Guichard’s dressmaker’s shop who after the revolution becomes the chairwoman of her district soviet.

Pelageya Tyagunova is Pritulyev’s mistress. After escaping the train to Yuriatin, Pelageya travels with Vasya Brykin. She is also Galuzina’s sister.

Ogryzkova is Pritulyev’s second mistress and the bitter rival of Pelageya Tyagunova.

Voroniuk is a Red Army soldier assigned to guard the labor conscripts on the train to Yuriatin. Sympathetic to his captives, Voroniuk deserts and escapes with them.

Elena Proklovna Mikulitsyna is Mikulitsyn’s second wife.

Avdotya Tuntseva is one of Mikulitsyn’s sisters-in-law and the Yuriatin librarian.

Glafira Tuntseva is one of Mikulitsyn’s sisters-in-law and a laborer in Yuriatin.

Simushka Tuntseva is one of Mikulitsyn’s sisters-in-law. A close friend of Lara, Simushka is a Christian mystic and philosophical admirer of Nikolai Vedenyapin.

Galuzina is the wife of Vlas Galuzin, mother of Terenty Galuzin, and sister of Pelageya Tyagunova.

Terenty Galuzin is the son of Vlas Galuzin and Galuzina. Terenty escapes conscription into the White Army and joins the partisans only to be sentenced to death as a moonshiner, but he survives his execution and goes into hiding.

Vlas Galuzin is a merchant and White Army supporter in Krestovozdvizhensk, a town on the Siberian highway. He is Galuzina’s husband and Terenty Galuzin’s father.

Vdovichenko is an anarchist in an uneasy alliance with Liberius’s partisans against the Siberian White Army. Vdovichenko is executed along with the conspirators and moonshiners because he is a threat to Liberius’s power.

Pamphil Palykh is a depressed and emotionally unstable partisan who eventually murders his family to save them from the White Army. He is also the soldier who shot Gintz in Meliuzeevo.

Marina is Markel’s daughter and Yuri Zhivago’s final romantic partner before his death. Although Marina is the mother of Yuri’s last two children, the couple never marries, as Yuri is still technically married to Tonya.

Tanya is the daughter of Yuri Zhivago and Lara Antipova. Left with a peasant family by Komarovsky, Tanya grows up unaware of her origins until her chance encounters with Evgraf Zhivago, Gordon, and Dudorov many years later.

Kubarikha is a peasant woman and folk healer who takes up with the partisans.