Dr. Z, part 2 - Winter

Following the post at reference 1, the Sharif-Christie film has now been completed, complete with overtures, entr'acte and intermission. All very old fashioned.

Furthermore, the library copy of the book itself has now turned up, a new translation from Vintage, and after a slow start, I am now chugging through, having reached around page 150. As so often, one is quite startled about how much is left out of the films. More on them in due course, but the first impression is that the first film is something of a fairy tale, drawn from the book, while the second film has tried to stick to the text a bit more.

Today my interest is in the winter, one of the things given the fairy tale treatment in films, not to say the 'Narnia' treatment, but thinking here particularly of 'War and Peace' and 'Anna Karenina'.

In the present book we are in a corner of what had been Zhivago's in-laws' house in Moscow, in the winter of 1917. Winter is coming and fuel is running short. The ordinary machinery of city life is breaking down. 

It seems that in those days all the houses and apartments were heated by wood fired stoves. Giving rise to all kinds of ventilation problems: getting enough air into the fire and getting the smoke out without filling one's rooms with the stuff. Problems which I remember in a more benign form from our own days with a coal burning stove. It took a bit of practise and it seems that in Moscow knowing a good stove man was an important part of a housewife's duties. You also needed a supply of putty - if necessary knocking the stuff up yourself with linseed oil and chalk - with which to seal up all the windows against the cold draughts. And that caused condensation and damp. And then there were all the fumes - probably much worse if you had the money and could get hold of some coke.

Heating the huge flats which figure among the rich families which populate Tolstoy's novels must have been a constant battle - needing, apart from anything else, a steady supply of fuel to be hauled in from the wood shed or up from the cellar. While in the ordinary families which one does not see so much of, it must often have been a losing battle, a battle in which many people succumbed to one or other cold related ailment.

It all sounds a bit grim. No wonder so many of them took to vodka.

PS 1: I remember something of this sort of thing from the Simenon book at reference 3, set in the winter, in a large town in war time, occupied Belgium. They had stoves too and a lot of people did not have anything like enough coal. A time when people lined their thread-bare coats with old newspapers.

PS 2: I also remember all the condensation in our north London bedsit in the winter of our first year of marriage. Condensation which was made worse by our very efficient paraffin fire (from Aladdin) pumping out the water along with the heat. Condensation which rotted the wallpaper behind the wardrobe. These being the days of free-standing, brown wood wardrobes, with the brown wood in question here having possibly been high gloss, walnut veneer. A heritage item now, should it have survived.

Reference 1: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/10/dr-z-part-1.html.

Reference 2: Dr. Zhivago - B. L. Pasternak - 1957.

Reference 3: La Neige était Sale - Simenon - 1948.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/05/dirty-snow-part-1.html. Part 2 rather overdue now.