The final subchapter of the prose text of Doctor Zhivago takes the narrative, at least by implication, beyond the Stalin era. In these last four brief paragraphs of the epilogue,1 lurii Zhivago’s surviving childhood friends, Misha Gordon and Nika Dudorov, now at the twilight of their lives, are reflecting on Zhivago’s literary legacy and on what lies ahead for Russia in the 1950s. In the first paragraph they are shown sitting at a window overlooking Moscow as a summer dusk slowly settles. They are reading from an album of Zhivago’s writings that his half brother Evgraf had compiled some years previously.