Abstract

Adapted from the novel, the film is about historical events depicting the last period of Tsarist Russia, the city of Moscow between 1903-1905, when the Socialist Revolution gained strength, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, and the Russian Civil War (1917-1922), the turmoil in the postrevolutionary Soviet Union and the Second World War. An essential forty-year period in terms of political balance and social development both in the Soviet Union and in the world is described through the life of Doctor Zhivago.

Throughout the narrative, Yuri Zhivago, a bourgeois intellectual, poet, writer, and physician who lived through the times before and after the 1917 October Revolution, is traumatized by the erasure of all values belonging to the Revolution he believed in, and then, coming of a corrupted new system that follows. All these staggering developments turn his life upside down. The multilayered plot of the film is based mainly on love.

In the film, the reflections of events on the architectural space, especially the transition process from bourgeois life to socialist life, are examined through space. Pre- and postrevolutionary events are explained by stunning spatial fiction.

The director reflected almost all emotions through the space. The most important lesson to be learned from this movie is the answer to the question of how to use architectural phenomena or existing situations while expressing emotion in design. The combination of emotions and architectural space is successfully reflected in the film Doctor Zhivago. It can be said that this film has shown the ability of architecture to be successfully assembled in a cinematic structure only at this level, transforming it into a narrative element of dramatic structure.

The main instrument of the film, which constantly leans on the vitality of both the Tsarist and Soviet eras, as a tribute and satirical, is often the architecture. However, beyond that, Russia's extraordinary nature and idyllic environments, endless steppes, and snow-covered countryside are used as elements of an epic narrative, reflecting a different perception of space.