Lara as the romantic idea, and what that means

One would guess that Boris Pasternak's depiction of the Russian Revolution in Doctor Zhivago stands alone in Russia, and in world, literature - a uniquely despairing even cynical view of this world-changing event. Of course he had the perspective of forty years, looking back at the events from the 1950s, but still - his portrayal of the Revolution, as seen from Zhivago's point of view, is relentlessly dark. In short, Zhivago is conscripted or impressed of maybe you could even say kidnapped - hauled away by some troops as he's on his way home and sent off to the Siberian front to be a medical doctor for some of the Red Army troops who are fighting the last remnant of the whites. We don't really see military action, but we see the behind the scenes and back in camp action - and it's unrelenting deprivation and idiocy: the commanders are crazy (one a severe cocaine addict, snorting stolen medical supplies), their objectives are unclear, in fact this whole section of the novel is kind of difficult for the reader, maybe intentionally so - very hard to distinguish among the characters, with their various aliases, the complex histories, which Pasternak relates rather sketchily - but it's easy to get at the essence, Zhivago believing that he's wasted his life, wondering and worrying about the family back home (his wife was pregnant with second child when he was abducted), and from time to time looking up in the sky and seeing visions of his mistress, Lara. It's actually amazing to me how important an emotional role she plays in his life and how little they are actually together - in fact, how seldom she appears at all in the first half of the book. Essentially, she's a vision and an ideal, a man's romantic fantasy - about how his life could be or could have been with another woman - when of course being with that woman entails none of the obligations of raising and supporting a family, dealing with the diurnal tasks, fatherhood, social obligations, professional obligations, etc. Thousands of guys have gone through this, and left their wives for the other woman - and then found that what looked like love and freedom and passion soon became something else - that essentially they were escaping or trying to escape a web of obligations and commitments, which every relationship ultimately entails, unless it dies.