On the question of poetics of the juvenile theme in “Doctor Zhivago”

The given article analyzes the system of characters in B. Pasternak’s novel from the perspective of the juvenile poetics. As a result of analysis it was found out that B. Pasternak does not only rely on the literary tradition in depicting characters of the children heroes (for example, a number of heroes go through such a stage of growing up as a trial of experiencing the parent’s death), but also makes it inverse. As a result of it, the system of characters is built up in such a way that the traditional understanding of the juvenile theme stops being relevant (the age borders are blurred, the biological relationship is replaced by the spiritual one), and thus additional individual authorial meanings are actualized. The constructive principle of combining the opposite substances is realized in the novel in the ambivalent category of the juvenile: it simultaneously includes “childishness”, innocence and naturality as already grown-up heroes’ personal state and “adolescence”, utopian blue-sky projects and unnatural maximalism. This quasiopposition is projected onto the system of oppositions: life, nature, history, mythological consciousness - and interference in the natural course of events (revolution), social history (and the new socialistic myth) and discoursive (individualistic) consciousness. The guidepost in this system of values is the category of incompleteness as one of the potential interpretations of the notion “juvenile theme”. The novel “Doctor Zhivago” with its open beginning and ending, absence of the hierarchy in the system of characters and abundance of crossing and neo-synchetically uniting points of view, highlighted with the literary, fairy-tale and mythological and Christian codes can be named the novel-child, or the novel-adolescent.