ABSTRACT
The Master and Margarita and Doctor Zhivago are very different works. Doctor Zhivago is located in the period preceding the Revolution from 1905 to 1917, the period of Civil War, and briefly that of New Economic Policy in the 1920s. The Master and Margarita takes off directly from there and deals with the 1930s, the period of Stalin's Terror and the Great Purges. Pasternak's philosophy of Life turns on three fundamental terms, History, Christianity and Art, by which reality after Christ is defined, as Angela Livingstone explains: History-Christianity-Art becomes a single compound motif with the purpose, it seems, of focusing on all reality at once. The differences between Doctor Zhivago in the novel and Doctor Zhivago in the poems thus reflect Pasternak's own sense of what he was in life, weak and incompetent, and who he was as poet, strong and empowered.
