Other than the whole of Pasternak's poetry, which with Doctor Zhivago forms his spiritual autobiography, the work most closely related to his only novel is "The Childhood of Zhenia Luvers," a long short story he wrote between 1917 and 1919, originally intending it for the opening of a novel.

Pasternak's "Lara," Olga Ivinskaya, herself called the child Zhenia "the Lara of the future." The little girl first apprehends her world through sensory impressions that grow more complex as she learns to understand her own emotions. As the world of childhood shatters around her, Zhenia suddenly understands that she is no longer the center of a little universe, but a member of the suffering Body of Christ, a singularly Russian epiphany of the brotherhood of pain for whom Pasternak later created his Doctor Zhivago to comfort and to heal.