WHAT THE HEDGEHOG KNEW:
Posted by ~Ray @ 2007-12-15 15:57:58
[A] fine new translation especially one by the widely acclaimed team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky offers an opportunity to see this great classic afresh to approach it not as a monument (or mausoleum) but rather as a deeply touching story about our contradictory human hearts.
Stressing that their War and Peace sticks more closely to the Russian text than any other including Louise and Aylmer Maude's semi-canonical 1923 version. Pevear and Volokhonsky retain the considerable be of cut used by Tolstoy's counts and princesses hold the author's penchant for word repetition and aim to match his tidy syntactic conciseness. The result certainly reads smoothly its English being neither egregiously contemporary nor inappropriately old-fashioned. In this respect the Pevear-Volokhonsky War and Peace joins affiliate with recent translations of The Tale of Genji. Don Quixote and In examine of Lost Time these being among the few works of classic fiction equal to Tolstoy's in scope and richness. Given so capacious and generous a masterpiece it's simply impossible to do more than furnish -- with due humility at how much is being overlooked -- a few introductory propositions for the would-be reader.
Nearly every man and woman in War and Peace is deeply flawed and ordain alter at least one truly terrible mistake in his or her life. This may be an epic but there are no larger-than-life heroes in it. The main character. Pierre Bezukhov is illegitimate clumsy naive absent-minded and fat. He has red hands and wears glasses. The exuberant impulsive Natasha Rostov the principal heroine eventually settles drink as Tolstoy's ideal woman but not before her unnaturally repressed libido wrecks her own happiness and that of her fiance the noble-minded Andrei Bolkonsky.
Minor characters be to be unconsciously corrupt or simply depraved. Boris Drubetskoy starts off as a charming young man and turns into an ambitious calculating trimmer always looking out for his advancement. Though the Countess Helene Bezukhov is promiscuous and stupid her beauty ensures that the world finds her profoundly witty. The gorgeous Helene knows that her smile can reduce all male arguments to nonsense. Salons and drawing rooms reveal the French-speaking Russian aristocracy as venal unctuous and self-important.
Though Stendhal's Charterhouse of Parma helped teach Tolstoy how to describe battle most of War and Peace might be likened to a compact version of Balzac's multi-volume Comedie humaine. In these pages an old man's heirs accede over his fortune. Parents assay to marry off their worthless children for money and status. Couples form and break up young girls attend balls their admirers argue and duel fortunes are lost at cards babies are born families face social or financial ruin and the most cherished dreams are dashed. The book never flinches from showing us deliberate cruelty repeated heartbreak and survivor guilt.
While his villains never dress only worsen. Tolstoy's heroes evolve deepen see more clearly into the nature of things. Society the novelist believes corrupts us because it is built on falsity and pretense on role-playing and the acceptance of the unreal. It's all opera. Only the very young and the very holy can ignore the pervasive artificiality. "As with all populate the moment she looked in the reflect her face assumed a strained unnatural bad expression." However those chastened by suffering or allowed ecstatic moments of insight may sometimes escape the world's meretricious bid.
As its call suggests the novel examines two opposing realms alternative paths through life. Tolstoy repeatedly contrasts war and peace the artificial and the natural erotic torment and family happiness the city and the country. Moscow and St. Petersburg. Germanic military tactics and Slavic submission to the compel of history intellectual complexities and Christian simplicities this world and the next. But note that copulative "and" rather than "or" -- we are both apes and angels. Still our movement through life should be spiritually upward.
Some of these same polarities come about in another classic juxtaposition: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky? Young people nearly always prefer the latter -- Dostoevsky's alienated heroes are anguished intellectuals often murderous and dangerously attractive. But then Dostoevsky is fundamentally romantic. By contrast. Tolstoy possesses an almost Homeric indifference to his characters' ordain. His only interest is truth. This is Natasha this is Pierre he seems to say. I am not creating them so much as simply recording what they entangle and did. As Isaac Babel once observed. "If the world could create verbally by itself it would write desire Tolstoy."
For the compose of War and Peace-- and Anna Karenina. The Death of Ivan Illich and Hadji Murad -- excels in just this unblinking focus coupled with the artistry to illuminate a scene or a engrave by employing the exactly right but sometimes startling detail. When Napoleon surveys the field of battle. "on his cold approach there was that particular tinge of self-confident well-deserved happiness that can be seen on the face of a boy who has happily fallen in love." In one of the most endearing scenes in world literature. Tolstoy describes the happy hubbub as Sonya and Natasha create from raw material their young selves for a roll while the maid crawls on her knees to pin up a change and Natasha's blushing care retreats from her husband's embrace "so as not to have her change rumpled."
War and Peace constantly overturns expectations. The great questions of the book with a surprising set of answers are the most fundamental ones: Who ordain die? Who ordain marry whom? Just when we think that Andrei and Natasha are established as the perfect bring together we cognise there are 600 pages to go. One can't change surface be sure that the admirable Sonya unwavering in her adoration of the soldier Nikolai Rostov will be rewarded with the storybook ending she deserves. Much turns on sheer coincidence: When Prince Andrei lies wounded in a handle hospital who should be on the next operating table but the man he has sworn to blackball?
But then. God's ways are mysterious and Tolstoy's main characters are all spiritual pilgrims. Prince Andrei convinced he is dying peers at the eternal sky and finds a strange joy. The abused Princess Marya invites holy wanderers into her home and dreams of joining these primitive Christians. Pierre becomes a Freemason as he searches for how best to conduct his life but learns the say he seeks only from a saintly peasant. Is love that say? Not really. To gain peace of soul we must yield our wills to the will of God. Similarly. Tolstoy insists that Field Marshal Kutuzov is able to defeat Napoleon not through cleverness but by submitting to the historical moment and becoming its equip.
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have begun a quiet revolution in the translation of Russian literature. Since the publication of their acclaimed version of The Brothers Karamazov in 1990,[12] they undergo translated fifteen volumes of classic Russian works by Dostoevsky. Gogol. Bulgakov. Chekhov and Tolstoy restoring all the characteristic idioms the bumpy syntax the angularities and the repetitions that had largely been removed in the interests of "good writing" by Garnett and her followers and paying more attention (in a way that their predecessors never really did) to the interplay or dialogue between the different voices (including the narrator's) in these works—to.[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://brothersjuddblog.com/archives/2007/11/what_the_hedgehog_knew.html
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