Poetics of palimpsest in “Doctor Zhivago”

The article analyzes one of the intertextual characteristics of Pasternak's novel. Numerous details and particularities of Yuri Zhivago's life history date back to Russian religious poems (dukhovnie stikhi) and epic poems (bylinas) about Egoriy the Brave whose literary source was St. George of Cappadocia's hagiography. The origin of the hagiography can in its turn be traced back to the deep-rooted mythopoetical structures in the Indo-European tradition of myths about dragon slaying. These palimpsest connections are found not only in the poem “Fairy Tale”, where they are explicitly shown but also throughout the text of the novel.