In the final scenes of Dr. Zhivago, he discovers his daughter, daughter of his pre-revolutionary romantic love Lara, playing the ancient folk instrument, the Balilaka. Unlike her mother, the daughter has no feminine grace, no nascent womanhood: she looks what we would today call “gender-neutral.” She has been raised by government officials in groups of other children her age. She doesn’t know gender roles. While she is polite, she is also mechanical and coarse: centuries of Russian civilization, emotion, reading, and human love between women and men have been wiped out by just a few years of revolution. ...
