Posted on 09/09/2014 6:58:32 AM PDT by Borges
...Anna Karenina, is brought to life by Google with an image of Anna and Vronsky as they first meet
...His epic novel, War and Peace, is illustrated with Pierre Bezukhov, looking up at the great comet of 1812:
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
I agree ... although I liked Princess Dolly best. Unfortunately, oversincere Levin and ditzy Kitty, poor Dolly and her wastrel husband ... they all get it in the neck from the Bolsheviks in just a few years.
I felt he same thing too. In the back of your mind you know these characters or their descendants and their world would be utterly destroyed in a few decades.
I read it last year in the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation. I had read a severely abridged version in High School decades ago. I found the complete version fascinating. Yes, it is easy to abridge by leaving out the many pages of the characters' thoughts and Tolstoy's commentary on history. I found most of it fascinating. I loved Tolstoy's imagery, such as when he described Moscow at the time of the French invasion as a dead beehive.
I decided to read the complete novel after watching the Russian film version again. I was struck by how the story did not seem to have a definite beginning. It just sort of crept up with a couple of parties that introduced various people. It is not obvious who the main characters are going to be at the outset. I wondered if the book would be the same way, and found that it pretty much was.
I recommend that anyone who has not read it see the Russian film first (in the widescreen version in 4 parts). Unless one is quite familiar with early 19th century fashions, military formations, uniforms, warfare, etc, it is almost impossible to properly imagine the settings and characters of the novel. The movie is quite faithful to the novel, but the novel is so much more detailed.
Most fiction from that time period is as if in the shadow of a volcano, by no intention of the authors’. If it’s not the Russian Revolution, it’s World War I going to get them all.
We were discussing Mary Poppins on a thread recently ... that cute but annoying little boy, he’ll be barely out of high school, a spit-shined Second Lieutenant, dead in the first month of World War I.
I will definitely look for that, thanks! I guess because so much of the book takes place in the characters’ minds, it’s hard to find a film that does it justice.
Oh, dear! The poor young man!
There’s another great movie, “Fiddler on the Roof,” where the watcher gets that horrible “shadow of the volcano” feeling knowing that most of the characters will be doomed, through no fault of their own, by the frightful history that is to follow.
I’ve got at least a thousand books in my house, but my tastes run in other directions than yours.
From the article:
“He gazed joyfully, his eyes moist with tears, at this bright comet which, having travelled in its orbit with inconceivable velocity through immeasurable space, seemed suddenly – like an arrow piercing the earth – to remain fixed in a chosen spot, vigorously holding its tail erect, shining and displaying its white light amid countless other scintillating stars,” wrote Tolstoy. “It seemed to Pierre that this comet fully responded to what was passing in his own softened and uplifted soul, now blossoming into a new life.”
Sounds very metrosexual to me!
I recently read a collection of stories by Sholem Aleichem, whose characters are in “Fiddler on the Roof.” It’s all just a generation, two at most, prior to the Holocaust. Very spooky.
Best music to come out of Russia in a long time. Lol
North Korea can get a cast of 100,000 to put on a show in a stadium for a handful of commie officials and a few tourists...
and if anyone messed up, they’d probably vanish along with their entire family
Some of Sergei Eisenstein's Stalin-era propaganda films have some of the best soundtracks in all of film history, thanks to Sergei Prokofiev (Alexander Nevsky, etc. The regime could force its most talented people to apply their genius to projects that ought to have been given to hacks.
I would have hoped at least a few would have eventually made it to the US.
Tolstoy is one of those writers, like Homer and Shakespeare, that transcend personal taste. And if you know anything about the man he was the anti-Metrosexual. :)
Eisenstein’s relationship with Stalin was acrimonious. His 20s films were subject to re-editing to remove references to purged Party members like Trotsky. And his ‘Ivan the Terrible’ films were actually a burlesque of Stalin’s secret police.
Lots did, including Sholem Aleichem and much of his family.
Chaim Potok, whose parents left Poland for the U.S. in the interwar period, has written several novels about emigres of that time. "In The Beginning" seems to have been largely suggested by his own family's experience.
The local Rabbis there would tell their congregants to not go to America because it was virtually lawless. That advice cost a lot of people their lives.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.