Alexander Zhivago

Alexander Zhivago, affectionately called Sashenka or Sasha, is the son of Yurii Andreievich Zhivago and Antonina Alexandrovna Gromeko. Born while Yurii was away at the front, he is at first known to his father through a cry and photographs. Their eventual meeting turns the imagined child into a wary toddler: Sasha clings to his mother and strikes the unfamiliar, unshaven man who has come home. His brief appearance gives concrete form to the family intimacy that mobilization and war have interrupted.

Identity and Background

Yurii had been mobilized almost as soon as Alexander was born and scarcely knew his son. While Antonina was still in hospital, Yurii came to see her in uniform, shortly before leaving Moscow, but arrived at feeding time and was not permitted into the nursery. From the waiting room he heard a chorus of ten or twelve babies crying. One voice seemed deeper and more deliberately hostile than the others, and he imagined that it belonged to his child, whom he had decided to name Alexander in honor of his father-in-law.

The impression proved accurate: the cry Yurii had singled out was Sasha’s. It became the first thing he knew about his son, an early, fragile recognition formed at a distance rather than through touch or conversation. Later, photographs sent by Antonina showed a cheerful, handsome, chubby child with a cupid’s-bow mouth, standing on a blanket with his fist raised as if dancing. The pictures recorded his first attempts to walk; by the time Yurii returned, Sasha was two and beginning to talk.

The First Meeting

When Yurii entered the room, the child looked less handsome than in the photographs but strongly resembled Yurii’s mother, Maria Nikolaievna Zhivago—more strikingly, the narration notes, than any of her portraits. Antonina lowered the crib’s net so that Yurii could kiss and pick up his son, presenting the returned father to a child who had never seen him.

Sasha let the unshaven stranger bend close, then abruptly jerked upright. Gripping the front of his mother’s dress with one hand, he swung the other and slapped Yurii in the face. Frightened by his own boldness, he immediately threw himself into Antonina’s arms and burst into bitter tears. The gesture is at once a toddler’s defensive reaction and the scene’s plainest measure of their separation: the father had imagined and recognized his son from afar, but the son could not yet recognize him.

Family Relations and Significance

Antonina tried to correct Sasha, telling him not to strike his father and urging him to kiss Yurii instead. Yurii stopped her from pressing the child, reassuring her that Sasha’s response was natural because he had never seen him. He expected that, after a day to look at one another, father and son would become inseparable. The scene ends with that hope still prospective; the evidence establishes neither their later closeness nor the outcome of their relationship.

Sasha’s introduction also stands beside the novel’s account of a household altered by war. Yurii’s news from Moscow includes the fact that Gordon and Dudorov have published his book without permission, alongside reports of political discontent and imminent upheaval. Yet the most immediate personal fact for him in Moscow is his little boy. Alexander’s first cry and first encounter with his father make that priority visible, while the slap resists any easy fantasy that a family bond can simply resume after absence.