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.