Doctor Zhivago

A life pulled apart by history: a Moscow doctor and poet is carried from his family's city through revolution and famine, then east by train across Russia to the towns and forests of the Urals, where he loves Lara. The map runs from central Moscow more than a thousand kilometres to Perm, the real Ural city that stands behind the novel's Yuriatin, and to the taiga beyond it.

Yuri Zhivago

The family's Moscow, the Arbat

Part 1

Orphaned young, Yuri grows up in the cultured Moscow household of the Gromeko family, and the city's streets carry him through his studies, his first marriage and the shocks of war and revolution. Moscow is the fixed point he keeps leaving and trying to return to. The Arbat is the quarter of the intelligentsia the novel evokes.

Part 1

explicit Moscow is explicitly the novel's city, but the Gromeko house that raises Yuri is fictional and given no fixed address; sited here on Sivtsev Vrazhek, a real lane in the old Arbat district where such a professional household would have lived.

Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗