Andrei Zhivago’s Suicide

Andrei Zhivago’s suicide interrupts a train journey and becomes, for the young Misha Gordon, both a frightening public scene and the end of a troubled man whose earlier confidences had made him familiar. The passengers cannot agree on why the train has stopped, and the official response soon reduces the death to questions and paperwork. Misha’s memories of Andrei’s visits to his family’s compartment, and the box of Ural minerals he had given him, preserve a more intimate account than the explanations offered at the trackside.

The death beside the railway

Andrei’s suicide follows an extended journey on which he has repeatedly visited Misha’s father, Gordon, and talked with him for hours. At the end, he rushes into the Gordons’ compartment, takes Gordon by the hand, tries unsuccessfully to tell him something, and runs out onto the platform. He then throws himself from the express. Gordon pulls the emergency release, bringing the train to a halt; Misha recognizes that his father had acted in response to the unfolding emergency, even as the prolonged stop makes the family seem implicated in the disruption.

The body lies beside the railway embankment while a crowd of passengers and onlookers gathers around it. Andrei’s travelling companion, a lawyer, stands over him and explains the death as the act of an alcoholic suffering delirium tremens. The explanation is delivered crossly, without the lawyer turning to face those asking questions. It gives the crowd a ready cause, but Misha’s recollections of Andrei’s state and of their journey make the scene less easily contained by that single account.

Uncertainty and official procedure

No one among the passengers knows exactly why the train has stopped. They speculate that the emergency may have damaged the air brakes, that the train is on a gradient its engine cannot manage, or that the lawyer has requested officials because the dead man is prominent. The lawyer’s explanation of Andrei’s death does not settle the separate question of the railway delay. Until a handcar arrives, uncertainty circulates among the passengers in competing stories.

A doctor, two policemen, and a magistrate then reach the scene. They ask questions and take notes, while policemen and railway guards move the body up the embankment. After a peasant woman begins to wail, the passengers are told to return to their seats. The guard blows his whistle, and the express starts moving again. The sequence turns the death into an official matter to be recorded and cleared from the track, while the train’s departure carries the witnesses away from it.

Misha’s memories of Andrei

Misha had been deeply shaken and initially wept from grief and fright. Andrei had become more than a stranger encountered on a train: during the journey he had come several times to the family compartment and found relief in the moral decency, peace, and understanding he associated with Gordon. He asked Gordon detailed questions about legal matters, including bills of exchange, deeds of settlement, bankruptcy, and fraud. When Gordon answered, Andrei expressed surprise that the law could be so lenient, contrasting Gordon’s explanations with the darker view he attributed to his own lawyer.

The lawyer repeatedly took Andrei away from the compartment to drink champagne in the restaurant. Misha recalls him as a wealthy man who drank incessantly, said he had not slept for three months, and described unbearable suffering whenever he became sober. Gordon also told Misha that Andrei was a well-known millionaire, good-natured but profligate and not fully responsible for his actions. On the journey, Andrei spoke of a son Misha’s age, his late wife, and a second family he had deserted after leaving the first. As he recalled these things, he could grow pale and lose the thread of what he was saying.

Andrei showed Misha an affection that the boy understood as possibly belonging to someone else. He bought him presents at large stations, including toys and local souvenirs. After the death, Misha sits examining the small wooden box of minerals from the Urals that Andrei had given him. The object links the stopped train’s public scene to the earlier exchanges in the compartment: what remains for Misha is not an explanation of Andrei’s last act, but a gift from the relationship that preceded it.

Witness, interpretation, and aftermath

The scene is filtered in significant part through Misha’s response. His attention moves between his father’s action in stopping the train, the corpse, the lawyer’s account, the explanations passengers invent, and the mineral box he has received. The official investigation supplies procedure rather than resolution: questions are asked, notes are taken, and the body is removed, but the circumstances behind Andrei’s death remain contested or unknown to the passengers.

The suicide also exposes the distance between what can be observed and what can be confidently explained. The lawyer names alcoholism and delirium tremens as the cause; Misha remembers prolonged sleeplessness, drinking, anxious confidences, estranged family ties, and the desperate final attempt to speak to Gordon. The narrative does not provide a definitive account of Andrei’s intention in that last moment. Instead, the failed disclosure and the surviving gift leave the reader with a personal connection that the public explanations cannot resolve.