The Beatitudes

The Beatitudes are a biblical blessing whose appearance in the novel turns a church reading into a personal and political language of suffering. Heard by Lara during a service and recalled amid gunfire, they offer her a way to understand the downtrodden and deceived not as merely defeated, but as people with a claim upon the future and upon judgment.

Liturgical Setting and Words

At a church service attended by Lara, the psalmist recites the Beatitudes. The church is half empty, and the sound echoes through its new, plain interior. Outside, the gray street remains visible through an uncolored window; inside, the church warden reproves a beggarwoman in a voice as commonplace as the scene around him. The sacred words thus sound amid ordinary indifference rather than in a setting of uncomplicated devotion.

As Lara makes her way to the door, clutching pennies, buys candles for herself and Olia, and returns past the worshippers, the psalmist rapidly recites nine Beatitudes. Their familiar cadence is not presented as a lengthy explanation. Instead, the brief sequence gives Lara a phrase that suddenly seems addressed to her: the blessing of those who mourn and those who hunger and thirst after righteousness.

Lara’s Recognition

Lara starts and stands still when she hears the Beatitudes. She takes their blessing as a statement about her own condition: the downtrodden, she thinks, have something to tell about themselves and everything before them. She understands this as Christ’s judgment. The moment makes religious language more than a ritual recitation; it becomes a form of recognition for someone whose experience is marked by humiliation and distress.

That recognition is personal, but not narrowly private. Lara’s interpretation gives suffering a possible future and grants the afflicted a voice. The contrast between the words’ promise and the church warden’s treatment of the beggarwoman keeps the scene from resolving into simple consolation: the service proclaims blessing, while the surrounding world continues to enact disregard.

Recalled amid Revolution

During the Presnia uprising, Lara walks swiftly while her mother struggles to keep up. Gunshots accompany Lara’s movement through the rebel area. She recalls the blessing of the downtrodden and deceived, and imagines the bullets as aligned with her. The Beatitudes have moved from the church into a scene of political violence, where their language of the oppressed takes on an urgent, dangerous force.

The change in setting also changes the apparent scale of the blessing. In church, Lara hears words that speak to her own suffering; amid the uprising, she connects them to the insurgent moment and to the violence around her. This is Lara’s fervent interpretation of the scene, not an explicit doctrinal endorsement of the bullets. The remembered Beatitudes provide a vocabulary for her exhilaration and sense of strength, even as the surrounding revolt remains violent.

A Recurring Religious Language

Elsewhere, religious language appears in forms that extend beyond the church service. As a child grieving Maria Nikolaievna Zhivago, Yura prays for his mother’s reception into heaven and asks that she not suffer; his prayer makes inherited belief a language of intimate mourning. Anna Ivanovna Gromeko, during a coughing fit, joins Yura and Tonia’s hands and urges them to marry if she dies. These moments do not repeat Lara’s encounter with the Beatitudes, but place it within a narrative where religious feeling and ritual language accompany grief, care, and hopes for a life beyond immediate loss.

The Beatitudes’ influence also resonates with the novel’s liturgical and seasonal patterns. A passage on spring refers to Chapter Seven of Eugene Onegin, including Lensky’s grave and the nightingale’s song; the poems at the end of the book invoke the period from Maundy Thursday to the eve of Easter. Against these cycles of mourning, renewal, and sacred time, Lara’s encounter gives the Beatitudes a distinct function: they transform a familiar biblical blessing into a lens through which personal pain and revolutionary upheaval can momentarily appear connected.