The aim of this paper is to explore the image and significance of Aleksandr Blok in Boris Pasternak's Doktor &Zhachek;ivago. In 1947 at a reading of his novel-in-progress Pasternak noted that he had been planning an article on Blok a year earlier, but that the novel had supplanted the unfinished article: I'm writing this novel instead of an article about Blok (E. B. Pasternak and V. M. Borisov 1988, 225). Building upon previous scholarship (particularly Masing-Delic 1980, Kling 1995, and Lesnaja 1996), this paper will consider Doktor &Zhachek;ivago's overt and implied references to Blok in conjunction with the views of Blok found in Pasternak's contemporaneous I Remember and

The novel's first direct reference to Blok comes as Jurij &Zhachek;ivago, like Pasternak himself, ponders writing an article on Blok. Linking Blok to a Russian Christmas and to the Adoration of the Magi (see Masing-Delic 1980), &Zhachek;ivago proceeds to note a candle burning in a nearby window; this is, of course, the candle that lights Lara and Pa&shachek;a's conversation that evening. Out of this moment will emerge both poetry (A Candle Burned) and &Zhachek;ivago's future life path (Could [Lara] have thought that the dead man lying on the table had &ellipsis; paid attention to that candle? That from that flame the course of his life had been set?).

As &Zhachek;ivago returns home from the front during World War I, he again evokes Blok, this time in conjunction with home, family, poetry, and his own original approval of Russia's revolution. Opposed to this vision of life—and, apparently, to &Zhachek;ivago's vision of Blok—are the war, homelessness, Lara, and the Bol&soft;&shachek;evik revolutionaries. On a later return to Moscow, &Zhachek;ivago's thoughts turn again to Blok, this time as an urban, truly modern poet. The narrator links &Zhachek;ivago's poem Hamlet to &Zhachek;ivago's desire to be a city poet akin to Blok. Blok reappears at the novel's conclusion, as Mi&shachek;a Gordon recalls Blok's nightmares of Ro&zhachek;dennye v goda gluxie in a discussion of the literal horrors (contrasted by Gordon with the metaphorical terrors of Blok's poem) Russia's Soviet children have encountered. As Gordon discusses his ideas with Dudorov, the two participate in &Zhachek;ivago's poetic resurrection, reading his poetry even as they pay reverence to the holy city they see before them.

Thus Blok is connected with &Zhachek;ivago's coincidental meetings with Lara, both in life and in death, with the roots of &Zhachek;ivago's poetry, with his vision of Christ, with his stress on the everyday in life and poetry, and with the novel's final vision of resurrection and a country holy through crucifixion. My paper explores these themes and attempts to answer several questions. First, what is Pasternak's relationship to the later, revolutionary Blok of The Twelve and