Lent

Lent is a recurring religious time in the novel, linking private grief and communal worship to the seasons and to the disruption of war. Its meaning emerges through distinct moments rather than a continuous account of observance: a child prays for his dead mother, worshippers hear the Beatitudes in church, a woman feels ashamed that she has not fasted, and a poem places the days from Maundy Thursday to Easter within the movement of spring waters.

Prayer and private grief

After the death of Maria Nikolaievna Zhivago, young Yura kneels among fallen branches and prays that his mother be received into heaven. He asks his guardian angel to keep him on the path of truth and to tell her that he is all right; his plea makes the religious language of care and the afterlife intimate, directed toward the person he has lost. The prayer ends in anguish: he calls to his mother as though she were a saint and faints.

When he comes to, the faint has left him feeling unexpectedly light and well. He remembers that he has not prayed for his absent father, as his mother taught him, but decides to leave that prayer for another time. Lent’s religious framework thus appears alongside a child’s uneven, personal experience of devotion: mourning prompts an intense appeal for his mother, while the father he does not remember recedes from his thoughts.

Worship and the Beatitudes

At a church service attended by Larisa Feodorovna Guishar and Olia, the congregation sings a psalm beginning with praise of the Lord. The new church is half empty, and its sounds echo against the unadorned setting; outside, a gray, snowbound street carries on beyond the window. The service’s sacred language exists beside ordinary indifference: a church warden loudly rebukes a beggarwoman without attending to the worship.

As Larisa makes her way through the worshippers to buy two candles for herself and Olia, the psalmist Prov Afanasievich Sokolov rapidly recites nine of the Beatitudes. The scene sets a formal religious observance against the uneven attention and routine activity surrounding it. Lent’s significance here is carried by recognizable words and acts of worship, but the narrative also registers the gap between those words and the commonplace behavior within the church.

Fasting amid wartime anxiety

On Maundy Thursday, after briefly attending a church service, Olga Galuzina walks home through drizzle with her coat unbuttoned and kerchief over her head. The church has made her feel faint, so she has gone outside for air; she is also ashamed that, for the second year, she has not kept the Lenten fast. Her religious unease is real, but it is not the chief burden weighing on her.

A mobilization order posted that day affects her son Terioshka. As she paces near the monastery, the white patches in the darkness repeatedly remind her of the order. Her thoughts come not as a neat sequence she can resolve, but in clusters that gather around her as she walks. The calendar of fasting and holy days therefore shares the scene with the military calendar: the observance marks a sacred occasion, while mobilization makes the same night a time of immediate maternal fear.

From Holy Week to Easter in verse

The novel’s poetry gives Lent and Holy Week a seasonal scale. One poem begins with the span from Maundy Thursday to the eve of Easter and turns to waters gnawing at riverbanks and weaving through them. The days of the liturgical calendar are thus set alongside processes of erosion and formation in the natural world, rather than described only as dates or rules.

Elsewhere, spring is evoked through thaw, a sun blinking among pines, and a countryside that wakes, stretches, and falls asleep again. A reference to Chapter Seven of Eugene Onegin recalls spring, an absent owner’s deserted house, and Lensky’s grave; the nightingale and wild rose extend that literary and seasonal setting. These images place religious time within a wider pattern of return and change: Lent approaches Easter while the landscape moves through thaw and renewal, a poetic rhythm distinct from the novel’s political and military chronology.