Tag Archives: War and Peace

#5!

Posted on by

Diary
13 August 2010 (Written after midnight)
Basement, My Parent’s Home, Winnetka, IL, USA

Got quite a late start today after the sun had reached its midpoint following a fascinating evening punctuated by a meteor shower. Decided even though I should feel guilty about starting so late, either way work needed to be done, so I got going. Reminiscent of the beginning of those special days last October. Gerald_G_Cartoon_Cat_Sleeping

Did some writing and grooming then set about the day’s key task: publishing Issue 5 of The Uncertainty Principle on “Popcorn”. Was a very different experience to go about the whole process just in one building, as opposed to jumping around Anqing. Streamlined it exquisitely. The piece de sweetness was the binding, where instead of staples I used a hole punch and then sealed it with those intense plastic ties that you slide down and which Richard Gere used to kill the bad guy in that awful film he starred in recently.

If you’d be interested in ordering, drop an email to order@theup.biz … There are only 9 copies this time, so move fast.

On the subject of films after I was finished I watched a surprising one about Leo Tolstoy’s last days with my parents. Overlooking the fact it was about Russians staring non-Russians and all in English, I enjoyed myself. Star was not Tolstoy, but a young writer trying to live by Tolstoyian ideals, but clashing with the bureaucracy involved in establishing those to a wider audience and physical love. As someone who is no monk, but spent most nights the past year laying down in bed next to a book, my journal or my computer, it gave a swell perspective. Problems with idealistic movements it exposed reminded me of some things I observed at the recent Wikimania. Was fun to hear them talk about some characters in War and Peace and know who they’re talking about.

To close, here is today’s lesson plan, and for those of you who don’t tune in every day, here’s the context for said plan.

Image: Cartoon Cat Sleeping by, rejon / Gerald_G from The Open Clip Art Library, public domain.

War and Peace book review Part II

Posted on by

War & Peace book review Part II
Read Part I

[NOTICE: SPOILERS COMING. DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU PLAN ON READING WAR & PEACE AND WANT TO BE SURPRISED]

Photo: Count Tolstoy, with hat.jpg from the Wikimedia Commons
Copyright: Public Domain

Continuing on with where I left off last entry, another character whom the fitting-into-the-adult-world-in-the-way-you-were-expected-to-but-its-okay-because-as-a-kid-you-didn’t-necessarily-understand-it-all thing happens to is the heroine Natasha.

As a young girl she and the eventual kiss-ass-corporate-ladder-climber Boris Drubetskoys promise they will marry. It does not happen, partially because they are both in positions where they need to marry for money. It also doesn’t happen because Natasha simply sees through Borist to the boring person he is.

She then falls in love with Andre, only to squander it all for a trist with Anatole that was thwarted. Following the humiliation she looks to lead a life of ruin for the rest of her days, when she runs into Andre again! They make up, he dies, and she marries the guy she should’ve been with all along, Pierre.

She marries the one with the most money as her mother would’ve had it, but he also was by far the one who truly loved her the most. The thing with Andre was nice, but he wasn’t man enough to stand up to his dying father for her, so he wasn’t really worth it. She also had her rebellious time with Anatole, planning to give up everything for “love” and run away.

Yet, despite literally choosing to throw everything she’s been given away, she was prevented and at the end of the novel seems better for it.

What is Tolstoy trting to say with all these inevitable eventualities for strong minded youths? I imagine it connects up with the close of the second epilogue, relating to the “false sensation of freedom” and accepting a “dependence that we cannot feel.” (Page 1358, Penguin 2006 Red Classic Edition)

book review: War and Peace

Posted on by

War & Peace book review

[NOTICE: SPOLIERS COMING. DO NOT READ THIS IF YOU PLAN ON READING WAR & PEACE AND WANT TO BE SURPRISED]

Photo: War and Peace Cover Image from Goodreads
Copyright: Within Fair Use Guidelines
This is the edition I read.

I bought War and Peace at a fabulous English bookstore in Zurich in the summer of 2007. I started reading it with a moderate level of consistency on July 31st, 2008. I to Epilogue, Pat II in May or June of 2009, and then stalled because it was so dense. I finally finished it in September of 2009.

To begin a review of the book I will spend ten minutes or so free writing whatever struck me.

Andre was my favorite main character. He is arrogant, self-centered and uncaring at times, but he is also an acting intellectual. In that he is the type of person who thinks deeply about things and does things, as opposed to many [e.g. Pierre for most of the book] who merely think and talk.

It does require a bit of a suspension of disbelief to get over his muliple near-deaths and miraculous recoveries, but those all pay off with his spectacular death. The dream sequence Tolstoy relates as Andre hangs in limbo is absolutely beautiful.

Something that struck me time and again as I was reading was how precise Tolstoy was in his description of the subtleties of human life. He was able to micro-analyze the captivating eyes of Princess Marya who cannot recognize their own beauty because when she looks into the mirror she sees nothing. Because, as he says, when we look for these traits in ourselves we cannot see them, it is only others who can.

He does that, then is able to go macro and discuss the movements and strategies of multiple armies encompassing thousands of men with a proportionately engaging level of detail. I do not really know how he is able to achieve such extremes and hold them within the same novel.

I would also really like to commend Anthony Briggs for his excellent translation. I guess I do not really know if it was good or not, but most of the time I felt like I was reading English, not Russian translated, speaks to the excellence of Briggs’s work.

Photo: WarAndPeaceCharacterTree.jpg from The Wikimedia Commons
Author: Amynumber6 Copyright:
CC ASA

One of the recurring ideas of the book is how characters inevitably fall into what was expected of them. Andre becoming the war hero after resisting for so long. Pierre marrying Natasha and becoming an importat good man in the morally bankrupt aristocracy. Nikolay Rostov saving his family’s good name by marring Marya, going back on his childhood promises to Sonya. They all resisted and wandered in their youth, thinking of doing other things and chasing what they then believed to be ideals, but with time, they filled the roles placed out for them by their parents and society, and this was not a failure or a hypocrisy to their youthful selves and ideas.