Pamphil Palykh's psychosis

Pamphil Palykh’s psychosis turns the violence of war and revolution inward: the partisan’s fear that his family will be punished for his actions becomes so overpowering that he kills his wife and three children, then disappears from the camp. The episode is framed not as an isolated private disturbance but as an illness Zhivago believes is bound to the upheavals of their time, where political loyalties and military reprisals invade the most intimate obligations.

Diagnosis in a Camp at War

While discussing the camp’s medical service with Lajos, Yurii Andreievich Zhivago proposes preventive psychiatry and describes contemporary insanity as a form of psychic illness that is spreading with the upheavals of the age. He identifies Pamphil as a case requiring examination: a former private in the Tsarist army, strongly responsive to class divisions and devoted to the revolution, whose distress centers on what might happen to his family if he is killed and they fall into White hands. Zhivago believes the family may be among those approaching in a convoy of wives, children, and older people. Lajos knows Pamphil from the army soviet and remembers him as a harsh advocate of extreme measures; he agrees to help investigate.

The concern takes shape amid broader strains in the partisan camp. There is unrest over the expected punishment of vodka brewers, while some partisans refuse to leave before their families arrive. Pamphil’s fear is therefore anchored in a real military danger, but it has become more than a practical calculation: he anticipates his own death and imagines his family’s future as a continuation of violence visited upon him. Zhivago recognizes the threat as both individual suffering and a symptom of collective upheaval.

Fear, Memory, and the Family

In conversation with Zhivago, Pamphil recounts a life repeatedly redirected by political and military events: family life and field work gave way to conscription, war, revolutionary conversion, and service with the partisans. He now believes that the Whites are gaining the advantage and may surround the camp. His central anxiety is not for his own survival but for his wife and children if he dies and they are left exposed. The imagined prospect of their suffering, he says, is enough to make a person lose his mind.

Pamphil contrasts this fear with the period when he was away from his family and did not know where they were. Their anticipated reunion does not reassure him; instead, the worsening military situation makes their presence seem to sharpen the danger. His dread is intensified by his own history of killing. He tells Zhivago that he has killed many officers and other people identified with the bourgeoisie without remembering their names, but one young man remains lodged in his memory: Pamphil says he killed him on a whim, though the youth had made him laugh. The remembered killing disrupts his former claim that violence had no lasting effect on him.

When Zhivago asks whether this fear accounts for the visions Pamphil has reportedly been seeing, Pamphil admits that he has withheld a more important part of his story. His account links a private burden of guilt to the larger fear of retaliation, though the evidence does not establish a single cause for his mental illness. His changing emphasis—from the danger to his family to the young man he cannot forget—reveals a mind struggling to contain both anticipated loss and the consequences of past violence.

The Crime and Its Aftermath

After a dying man’s words and a threatening inscription circulate through the camp, Pamphil’s fear of what will happen to his family reaches a new climax. He imagines them handed over to prolonged suffering and, in a desperate attempt to prevent that imagined future and end his own anguish, kills his wife and three children. The act destroys the very family whose safety had dominated his thoughts. The contrast between his earlier use of the same sharp ax to carve toys for his children and its use against them makes the reversal especially stark: an object associated with care becomes an instrument of the catastrophe he believed he could avert.

Pamphil does not kill himself immediately. While Zhivago, Liberius, and members of the army soviet debate what to do, he wanders around the camp and is avoided by the others. Some suggest lynching him, but the proposal is not acted upon. The narration presents his condition as a clear case of insanity and stresses the absence of any future he can see for himself after the killings. At dawn, he vanishes from the camp, fleeing rather than remaining among those who must decide his fate. His departure gives no resolution or recovery; it leaves the consequences of his psychosis in the wake of the destroyed family.

Narrative and Thematic Significance

Pamphil’s episode gives concrete form to Zhivago’s diagnosis of an illness tied to historical upheaval. Military danger, revolutionary allegiance, and the prospect of reprisals have entered family life so completely that Pamphil interprets killing his family as protection. That reasoning does not lessen the horror of the act; it shows how fear has distorted the distinction between care and harm until an imagined future becomes more commanding than the lives before him.

The sequence also unsettles any simple division between political violence and personal guilt. Pamphil had regarded many killings as forgettable, yet one young victim remains in his mind; now the fear that others will harm his family drives him to commit an irreversible act himself. His story thus joins the violence he has participated in to the violence he fears, without making them equivalent or presenting his fear as an excuse. The family’s arrival, anticipated as a reunion, becomes the point at which his terror culminates, and his flight at dawn closes the episode without restoring either the family or the life he had feared losing.