An incredibly sorrowful ending : Doctor Zhivago

Whatever else you might feel reading through Doctor Zhivago, there's no doubt that the ending (I'm not quite there yet) is incredibly sorrowful - even though, as I've posted several times, I think the Zhivago-Lara relationship is a little sketchy and, on Zhivago's part, also exploitative - or at least self-indulgent and a betrayal of his wife and family, by the end it's clear that they are deeply passionate about each other, that in another world or another life (or another novel?) they would have found each other in life much earlier and, most of all, that their love is doomed by the powerful forces of a brutal and ruinous society that throw obstacles in their path at every turn: another instance of the inside-out nature of this novel - the socio-political background is so powerful that it crushes and extinguishes the relationships in the foreground. In the more typical romantic epic, the characters are finally united - but this is a tragic, rather than a "comic" epic - it's a romance more on the lines of Wuthering Heights, or of the "sad" ending to Great Expectations - a love that could never endure. Z and Lara are living in pastoral poverty, really almost on the verge of starvation - great imagery of the wolves howling at night and creeping ever closer to their tiny, isolated house - when the man who'd abuse L. when she was a child turns up once again and convinces them that there's a death sentence out on both of them, that L's estranged husband and protector has been killed. We know it's a lie, and I'm surprised Dr. Z took this info on faith, but it appears that's what he does - he ships L off to K, apparently (maybe there's a surprise in the epilogue) never to see her again, then learns he's been duped, her husband is still alive. In the final chapter (before epilogue and poems), he travels once again through great hardship into Moscow, looking like one of the many ruined war veterans haunting the city, ghostlike. Whatever our views of Pasternak's politics and objectivity, we feel for Z as a character - he has endured so much in his passage through history, suffered his whole life, and to what cause, for what end? At the end, he is alone and forsaken, having accomplished nothing - except for the poems that bejewel the final chapter.