you discover that the effort has
easily been worth it.
Longevity
One big question that always hangs in
the air in the case of board games that depict individual battles concerns
longevity. After all, if what you get is a set number of historically accurate
battles, how many times can you play through them without the act becoming
repetitive? Similarly, since many of the battles included in “Ran” are quite
lob-sided in that one side is heavily favored to win from the outset, how
interesting can such games be for the players?
Since I have only had a couple of
weeks with “Ran”, I am obviously not entirely qualified to answer this
question. However, since one battle will take you an evening to play –
especially if you count in the time that you will spend afterwards discussing
the battle and showing your friend relevant scenes from “Kagemusha” and “Ran” –
you have at least seven evenings worth of brand new material in “Ran”.
Fourteen, if you play once on both sides.
I also doubt that the battles will get
repetitive already after two plays. After all, both the “chaotic” (this in a
good sense) turn system used in the game and the individual combat system
should guarantee that weird and wonderful events will unfold in the midst of the
battle when you least expect them to. I would, in fact, even be ready to
suggest that the game has a lifespan somewhat longer than your average game
that depicts historical battles.
“Ran” is also surprisingly well suited
for solitaire use, if you (like me) enjoy simply watching a battle unfold
before your eyes. It is therefore one of those games that you can safely
purchase to get your war gaming fix even if you have no friends to play with.
Closing remarks
I admit that my experience with “Ran”
has been quite brief, as I have not yet had the opportunity to try all of the
battles included. What I have played, however, I have really liked, and can
certainly recommend the game to war game aficionados, as well as those
interested in the hobby.
As a Kurosawa item, “Ran” is more of a
namesake of a distant cousin than anything else. Yet, as I mentioned before,
while a direct connection between the director and the game is totally lacking,
people liking one may very well find the other worth checking out. You never
know, maybe you will discover something that will stay with you for the rest of
your life.
Availability and more information
Ran is available directly from GMT
Games, as well as from or through your local board game shop.
As always with board games, if you are
interested to learn more, check out the relevant Board Game Geek page.
Ggggggggg
Population growth in several of the
fastest-growing states is slowing -- in Arizona, Florida and Nevada, in
particular -- in a trend both reflecting and fueling the housing-market malaise
in those areas.
"This is our first chance to see
what has been the migration impact of the housing-market slowdown, and it's
showing up in these highflying states," says William Frey, a demographer
at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
• The Census Shows: Growth in several of the fastest-growing
states has slowed.
• What It Reveals: Malaise in the housing market is changing
the way Americans relocate.
• Bottom Line: The West and South continue to gain residents
from the Midwest and Northeast.
• Home-Price Declines Accelerate1
The Census Bureau's annual estimate of
state population changes covers the 12 months that ended July 1. It shows that
people continue to flee the Midwest -- especially Michigan, one of two states
to lose people -- and that the Mountain states in the West continue to post
large population gains as people arrive from California and elsewhere.
Arizona, Florida and Nevada are still
among the fastest-growing states in the country, by percentage. Nevada saw an
increase of 2.9%, or 72,955 people, tallying births, deaths and migration from
inside and outside the U.S.
That was less than the previous year's
3.5% increase and lower than the 3%-plus growth rate for the six previous
years. Arizona, the second-fastest-growing state, saw its population increase
2.8% in the most recent period, compared with a 3.6% rise in the previous year.
Florida, which has suffered heavily in
the housing bust, saw the sharpest falloff in population growth. Florida grew
1.07%, slightly faster than the U.S. growth rate of 0.96%. During the year,
35,301 people moved to Florida from another state, 134,798 fewer than in the
previous year. That is the slowest rate of domestic migration into Florida
since at least 1990, the year the Census Bureau began publishing annual
estimates of migration between states.
Pain in the manufacturing sector,
especially auto manufacturing, continued to purge residents from the Midwest.
Michigan lost 30,500 residents, a 0.3% decline. Ohio was essentially flat,
gaining 3,404. Besides Michigan, the only state to lose population was Rhode
Island.
Broadly, people in the Northeast and
Midwest continue to leave for the West and South. Utah and Idaho were the
third- and fourth-fastest-growing states, respectively. Colorado and Wyoming
were eighth and ninth, respectively. Both states saw their rate of growth
increase.
Residents of California, on the other
hand, continue to leave: In the most recent period, 263,035 people left
California for another state. The state's 0.8% population growth was mostly
because of births.
In the South, states including Georgia
and North Carolina have taken the fast-growing mantle away from Florida, while
Texas continues to suck up new residents. Georgia and North Carolina grew 2.17%
and 2.16%, respectively. Texas grew 2.12%. Those states also are among the
biggest gainers in absolute terms. Texas gained 496,751 residents, more than
any other state. Georgia had the third-largest increase, with 202,670, and
North Carolina was fifth, with 191,590.
Following the exodus of residents
after Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana added about 50,000 people in the year to
July 1. There is still a ways to go, though: From July 2005 to July 2006, the
state lost about 220,000 residents.
gggggggggg
TEHRAN, Iran -- Russia is preparing to
equip Iran with a powerful new air defense system that would dramatically
increase its ability to repel an attack, Iran's defense minister said
Wednesday.
The S-300 anti-aircraft missile
defense system is capable of shooting down aircraft, cruise missiles and
ballistic missile warheads at ranges of over 90 miles and at altitudes of about
90,000 feet. Russian military officials boast that its capabilities outstrip
the U.S. Patriot missile system.
The S-300 is an improvement over the
Tor-M1 air defense missile system. Russia delivered 29 Tor-M1s to Iran this
year under a $700 million contract signed in December 2005.
"The S-300 air defense system
will be delivered to Iran on the basis of a contract signed with Russia in the
past," Iranian Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar said, according to
state television.
Mr. Najjar didn't say when or how many
of the S-300 anti-aircraft missile defense systems would be shipped to Iran,
and Russian officials declined to comment.
The Tor-M1 is capable of hitting
aerial targets flying at up to 20,000 feet.
"While Tor-M1 missiles can hit
targets at low altitude, S-300 missile have an extraordinary performance
against targets at high altitude," Mr. Najjar said.
Russian officials wouldn't comment on
the Iranian statement. Russian officials have consistently denied they were
selling the S-300 to Iran. Iranian media reports have claimed the S-300 missile
systems could inflict significant damage to the U.S. or Israeli forces, were
they to attack Iran.
The U.S. had said in the past that it
would not rule out military action as a way to halt Iran's nuclear enrichment,
claiming it was using it as cover for weapons development. But earlier this
month, Washington reversed course, concluding in an intelligence assessment
that Iran stopped direct work on creating nuclear arms in 2003 and that the
program remained frozen through at least the middle of this year.
Israel says Iran remains a strong
threat, but most analysts think any Israeli military operation is unlikely at
this point.
Teams led by Mikhail Dmitriyev, head
of the Russian Federal Service for Military and Technical Cooperation, and
Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi, regarded as the father of Iran's missile
program, held talks in Tehran this week on ways to step up defense cooperation.
http://louis1j1sheehan.us/ImageGallery/CategoryList.aspx?id=36f0e6c9-8b8a-4f0a-8630-e5d3b879fad4&m=0
http://louis2j2sheehan.us/ImageGallery/CategoryList.aspx?id=14218f60-0cb6-4fa5-beba-5ee65da4b5e1&m=0
A military expert speaking on
condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject said that the
Russian team included experts who had installed the Tor-M1 in Iran.
Dmitriyev told the Russian Itar-Tass
news agency Wednesday said air defense and radar systems were priorities in
Russian-Iranian defense discussions.
Russia has provided Iran with
Kilo-Class submarines, MIG and Sukhoi military planes and bombers in recent
decades.
Iran-Russia ties increased after a visit
here by Russian President Vladimir Putin in October.
999999999
In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway
recalled sitting at the Café Lilas with the poet Evan Shipman and discussing
the Constance Garnett translation of War and Peace. "They say it can be
improved on.... I'm sure it can although I don't know Russian," Shipman
said. "But we both know translations. But it comes out as a hell of a
novel, the greatest I suppose, and you can read it over and over." Shipman
was right, and most people who have read the novel in English would have agreed
with him: despite the flaws in the translation, which may be numerous, War and
Peace comes out as one of the great novels in any language.
Reading certain books in translation
brings to mind Dante's encounter with Adam, the first man and the originator of
language, who, enveloped in light, appeared like an animal moving inside a
sack: you get a sense that something is trying to break out, something amazing,
but it is all so muffled and tangled that it is impossible to make out what. In
the case of War and Peace, the cat has always been out of the bag: Tolstoy's
immense story of Napoleon's invasion of Russia has never awaited the final,
saving translation that would at last reveal its previously inaccessible and
infinite-hearted humanity. It was one of the greatest books from the start.
The new English version by Richard
Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is wonderful, a milestone of translation--but it
should be taken more like a newly restored 35mm print of a film, with brighter
colors and sharper sound. The sights and sounds are meant to be spectacular in
this version: the rustle of a white gauze dress during a waltz, the unnatural
thud of a cannonball digging into the ground at Borodino, a troika race through
the midnight snow at Christmas, the scar left on a soldier's face by a Turkish
bayonet.
The novel is famously, almost
impossibly, enormous. It feels like a cosmos unto itself, a complete ecosystem.
The book is an entire library: within this volume is a dictionary of received
Russian ideas of the nineteenth century, a study in psychosomatics
(particularly as manifested in the human face), a pamphlet on historiography
(with a supplemental treatise on the philosophy of history), an encyclopedia of
Russian military regalia, and several albums of pictures, most notably showing
the Russian landscape in all the seasons, and a series of portraits of the
Russian aristocracy frontally and in profile.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/ImageGallery/CategoryList.aspx?id=a1206a74-5f7f-443f-97f5-9b389a4d4f9e&m=0
The action of War and Peace (action in
this instance meaning almost the entirety of human life) centers on the fates
of two families loosely based on Tolstoy's own ancestors--the impractical,
soulful Rostovs, associated with Moscow, and the dignified, elegant Bolkonskys,
associated with St. Petersburg (and both families with the countryside)--and
depicts something like the transition from the generation of Tolstoy's
grandparents to that of his parents, who are children at the start of the novel
and adults in the midst of family life at its end. Borne on by the grand
currents of the Napoleonic wars, the protagonists witness the Russian defeat at
Austerlitz, the victory at Borodino, and the burning of Moscow; they catch
glimpses of the adored Aleksandr I and of the reviled and admired Napoleon. At
the same time they pursue ill-fated and later beautiful love affairs, lose
money, dream of the future, act and react without thinking, and face death.
They live in history but not by it, laughing off its minor catastrophes and
trying to evade its major ones.
Unsatisfied by the distant accounts of
historians and the imperfect reminiscences of individuals, Tolstoy chose to
write the story of his origins himself, and War and Peace is in a sense a
reconstruction of his family's world before his arrival in it. His grandfathers
Ilya Andreivich Tolstoy and Nikolai Andrei-vich Volkonsky, whose portraits hung
on the wall of his study, lent their features and qualities to Count Rostov
(the lax charm, the generosity with money) and the elder Prince Bolkonsky (the
severity, the discipline); and the figures of Nikolai Rostov and Princess Marya
are based on the writer's own parents. The two remaining male protagonists,
Prince Andrei and Pierre Bezukhov, appear to have been modeled on a single
historical personage, but of a later generation: Leo Tolstoy himself.
According to his own account, Tolstoy
"spent five years of ceaseless and exclusive labor, under the best
conditions of life" writing War and Peace, from about 1863 to 1869, when
the book was published in its entirety in six volumes. In September 1862, when
he was thirty-four, Tolstoy had married the eighteen- year-old Sonya Behrs. She
was the second of the three daughters of Lyubov Behrs, a childhood sweetheart
of the writer, whom he had once pushed over a balcony in a jealous fit. By the
time of their courtship, Tolstoy was already a literary celebrity, having
published his autobiographical trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, as well
as his Sevastopol Sketches, based on his experiences during the campaign
against the French in the Crimea, which appeared in the prestigious journal The
Contemporary, founded by Pushkin. The young Sonya, who remembered meeting
Tolstoy in his military uniform at the age of ten, knew entire passages from
his books by heart and had copied out several lines from Childhood, which she
hid as a charm under the waistband of her skirt.
Much of Natasha Rostov was perhaps
modeled on Tanya Behrs, Sonya's youngest sister: her ability to dance in the
Russian style, as Natasha does at Uncle's house in the forest; her singing
voice; her dazzled reactions to a ball (Leo accompanied her to one). During one
of her visits with the Tolstoys when Leo was writing War and Peace, Tanya
suggested that her presence had become a nuisance, to which the writer
reportedly replied: "Surely you don't suppose you are not paying for your
keep? Why, you are posing for your portrait, my dear."
Before his marriage, Tolstoy had lived
an alternately wild and secluded life, swinging between fits of physical desire
and impassioned attempts at selfcontrol. Night after night he went out
carousing with gypsies and--like Pierre early in War and Peace, in the company
of the troublemakers Anatol Kuragin and Dolokhov--making trips to
"***," the unnameable three-star establishment of nineteenth-century
Russian prose. Following one of these visits, Tolstoy wrote in his diary:
"Girls, silly music, girls, mechanical nightingale, girls, heat, cigarette
smoke, girls, vodka, cheese, screams and shouts, girls, girls, girls!"
After a series of evenings like this one, he would return to his estate and
castigate himself, and plan countless projects for self-improvement--music
composition, gymnastics, a school for peasant children, religious devotion,
literature.
Tolstoy's decision to travel with his
brother Nicholas to the Caucasus, his first experience of military life, was in
part an attempt to avoid the temptations of the city, particularly the thrill
of gambling. He was a compulsive gambler, frequently signing promissory notes
for his losses and writing in desperation to his brothers for assistance. At
one point, fearing he would not have the money to pay off his debts, he was
forced to dismantle and sell the central building of his ancestral home, which
was reassembled twelve miles away and later completely demolished for firewood.
He experienced firsthand the panicked sensation felt by Nikolai Rostov, during
the game with Dolokhov, at the sudden and inexplicable loss of money he did not
have.
After they were married, Tolstoy and
Sonya settled into family life on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana (the model for
Otradnoe, the Rostov estate, in the novel), where Tolstoy had spent the first
years of his life, and which he had inherited at the age of nineteen when the
family property was divided between the five Tolstoy children, four brothers
and a sister. Thanks to his marriage, Tolstoy experienced a dream of family
life of a kind that he had never known as a child. He was only twenty-three
months old when his mother died, and only nine at the death of his father, and
by the time he began War and Peace he had lived through the death of his
paternal grandmother, who cared for him after his parents, and of two of his
brothers. Settled peacefully at home with Sonya, Tolstoy was able to work
without interruptions for the first time in his life. This was in no small part
owed to Sonya's abilities at managing the estate, running back and forth with a
giant ring of keys, overseeing all the tasks, keeping distractions away from
her husband.
http://louis1j1sheehan.us/ImageGallery/CategoryList.aspx?id=36f0e6c9-8b8a-4f0a-8630-e5d3b879fad4&m=0
http://louis2j2sheehan.us/ImageGallery/CategoryList.aspx?id=14218f60-0cb6-4fa5-beba-5ee65da4b5e1&m=0
As early as 1856, Tolstoy had begun to
contemplate a novel that would depict the return from Siberian exile of one of
the Decembrists, a group of young idealistic noblemen, mostly army officers,
who, having pursued Napoleon back to Paris after the campaign of 1812, returned
to Russia to find its social inequality, and especially its institution of
serfdom, unworthy in their eyes of the country's newly won military glory. The
movement came to a head in 1825, on the eve of Czar Nicholas I's coronation,
when its members revolted on the Palace Square in St. Petersburg. The revolt
was suppressed, its leaders were hanged, and the remaining participants were
sent into exile. Tolstoy originally planned a trilogy composed of three
stand-alone but related novels: the first set in 1812, the year of the decisive
Russian defeat of Napoleon; the second in 1825, the year of the Decembrist
revolt; and the last in 1856, the year of the exile's return after the pardon
announced by the new czar, Alexander II.
Vestiges of Tolstoy's original plan
for the trilogy can be seen in War and Peace in Pierre's philosophical argument
with Nikolai at the end of the novel, in which he employs what would have been
recognized as Decembrist rhetoric. The reader's recognition of the political
disaster awaiting Pierre, and most likely Prince Andrei's son Nikolenka, lends
War and Peace a sense of dramatic irony somewhat like that of The Republic, in
which the discussion is electrified by the reader's awareness that not long
afterward Socrates will be imprisoned and executed.
After writing the first few chapters
of the final volume, set in 1856, Tolstoy put the book aside and began to
contemplate the earlier history of his character. He then jumped back in time,
first to 1825, then to 1812, then to 1805--finding, like one of his hated
historians, that the events were comprehensible only when they were related to
what came before. But he could not go back indefinitely: in fixing upon this
period, Tolstoy selected an age to which he was, through his parents and his
grandparents, connected. Later, after completing War and Peace, he tried to
write another historical novel, about the period of Peter the Great, but found
himself unable to penetrate the heads of his protagonists, settling in the end
on the theme of contemporary married life, out of which Anna Karenina took
shape.
The decision to set the novel fifty
years before the present also defied the literary fashion of the time,
championed by Turgenev and Nekrasov, the editor of The Contemporary, which
sought to fashion literature into a medium of social change addressing the
injustices of its own day. By 1861, the serfs had been liberated by the decree
of Alexander I, marking the end of an aristocratic lifestyle that had lasted
for more than a century, and so Tolstoy's depiction in 1869 of the relationship
between landowner and serf, particularly in the account of Nikolai Rostov at
the end of the novel, was self-consciously anachronistic. For readers in our
own time, the social world of War and Peace sometimes seems, especially in the
terrible context of the revolutionary twentieth century, irreversibly remote, a
distant pastoral dream of a life long ago lost; but it is worth remembering
that even for Tolstoy the world portrayed in his novel was already gone, and
almost mythical. In this sense, both the writing of this book and his life at
Yasnaya Polyana were efforts to persist in a tradition that was showing clear
and insistent signs of obsolescence.
Between 1863 and 1866, Tolstoy wrote
and published the first few chapters in The Russian Herald, under the title
"The Year 1805." Along the way the vast scope of the final version
began to take shape, and Tolstoy's colossal ambition for the work is evident in
an entry in his diary on September 30, 1865, written while composing the novel
(Braddon is the English novelist Mrs. Braddon, and The Hunting Ground is an
early work by Tolstoy):
A novelist's poetry is contained (1) in the
interest of the combination of events--Braddon, my Cossacks, my future work;
(2) in the picture of manners and customs based on a historic event--The Odyssey,
The Iliad, 1805; (3) in the beauty and cheerfulness of the
situations--Pickwick, The Hunting Ground, and (4) in the characters of the
people--Hamlet, my future works....
After the publication of the first
several sections, Tolstoy continued his work on the novel, drafting the final
chapters and planning at first to serialize the entire book. In a letter to the
poet Afanasy Fet, Tolstoy wrote that he hoped to complete the whole book by
1867 (he actually finished two years later) and that the final version would be
titled All's Well That End's Well. On Sonya's advice, Tolstoy decided not to
serialize the final chapters, and so these sections did not appear until the
complete book was published in 1869. For three years, Tolstoy wrote the last
chapters of the final version of the novel and substantially revised the
earlier chapters, most notably altering the plot to include the deaths of two
of the central characters and adding the numerous discourses on the philosophy
of history.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/ImageGallery/CategoryList.aspx?id=a1206a74-5f7f-443f-97f5-9b389a4d4f9e&m=0
http://louis1j1sheehan.us/ImageGallery/CategoryList.aspx?id=36f0e6c9-8b8a-4f0a-8630-e5d3b879fad4&m=0
War and Peace: Original Version is a
translation of what is purportedly Tolstoy's first complete draft, beginning
with the sections published in the Russian Herald, before the three-year period
of revisions. In the 1980s the Russian scholar Evelina Zaidenshnur
reconstructed the later chapters of this "original" draft from
Tolstoy's notoriously indecipherable drafts, and published the version in an
academic journal, including the variations on single lines and an elaborate
apparatus of explanatory notes. In 2000, Igor Zakharov, an ex-philologist
turned publisher, pruned the scholarly version of its notes and its variations,
and "massaged" the text with elements of several different existing
versions of the book, and published it as Tolstoy's original manuscript,
purportedly unknown for decades: "half as long and twice as
interesting," and without any of the intrusive philosophical meditations
or incomprehensible French. The book was harshly criticized in the Russian
press for its misleading presentation and its editorial methods. Upon hearing
that his version would be translated into English, Zakharov reportedly declared
that he "felt like Napoleon."
Although the "original
version" is a far cry from the final version of the novel, Andrew
Bromfield's translation is extremely good and has many beautiful moments,
particularly in the descriptions of landscape. But the circumstances and the
presentation of the book in its American incarnation are dubious. For a start,
there are the three quotations on the back jacket from Woolf, Flaubert, and
Mann, praising Tolstoy. But not one of them ever read the so-called original
version, because Tolstoy never published it. Turgenev, on the other hand, who
did read the first sections in the Russian Herald, called the book
"positively bad, boring, and unsuccessful"; it was only later, after
the publication of the complete novel, that he judged Tolstoy to be the
greatest writer in Russia. The introduction to the "original
version," by Bromfield and Jenefer Coates (who edited the volume),
provides no clear account of how the book came into being, hinting only vaguely
at the backstory of the Russian edition, and presenting itself more like a
newly discovered director's cut than a scholarly supplement to a different and
more significant text.
A family drama of love and
renunciation interspersed with several impressive military set pieces,
Tolstoy's first draft ends after the battle of Borodino, rather like a problem
play, with a double wedding at the Rostovs' estate attended by, among others,
Prince Andrei and Petya Rostov. At the end of the final version, however,
neither character has survived the battle. The writer's decision to depict
their deaths was, along with the addition of numerous digressions on the
philosophy of history, the central development of Tolstoy's three-year period
of revisions, and enabled the transition to the sprawling meditation on
happiness and causality in the final version of the novel.
Episodes and characters from the final
version flash by in a few lines in the early draft, appearing suddenly and then
dissolving into the crowd. In the old soldier who, marched to his execution
outside of Moscow, remarks that "it's all the same in the end," we
glimpse the beginnings of Platon Karataev, the peasant soldier who re-ignites
Pierre's soul during his imprisonment by the French. Many of the elaborations
seem to grow out of the increasing complexity of Tolstoy's philosophical
positions. The transformation of Kutuzov into the massive, cautious, bear-like
representative of the Russian military soul; the disquisition on the fluidity
of partisan warfare; the pragmatic Platon Karataev--each echoes Tolstoy's
growing sense of the inability to know anything fully, the impossibility of
making reliable predictions or identifying true causes.
In an early scene depicting a
strangely calm moment between the two overwhelming situations of war and peace,
Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, having reported to Prince Bagration just before the
battle of Schongraben, passes a camp in which a sergeant is pouring vodka into
the soldiers' canteen caps:
The soldiers, with pious faces, brought the caps
to their mouths, upended them, and, rinsing their mouths and wiping them on
their greatcoat sleeves, walked away from the sergeant major with cheered
faces. All the faces were as calm as though everything was happening not in
view of the enemy, prior to an action in which at least half the division would
be left on the field, but somewhere in their home country, in expectation of a
peaceful stay.
Less than half a page later, Prince
Andrei witnesses a man being whipped "crying out unnaturally" and
sees
a young officer, with an expression of
perplexity and suffering on his face, walk[ing] away from the punished man,
looking questioningly at the passing adjutant.
Finally, he rides along the frontline:
Our line and the enemy's stood far from each
other on the left and right flanks, but in the center, where the envoys had
passed that morning, the lines came so close that the men could see each
other's faces and talk to each other.
Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation
is the only one in which the word "face" is used to denote all the
visages in this sequence, all five times, exactly as in the Russian text. Their
version is especially admirable for its attention to such a feature of
Tolstoy's style. The example may seem prosaic, but in fact it demonstrates a
regular method of Tolstoy's novelistic composition. Such repetition heightens
the effects of Tolstoy's battle scenes: conditions of hunger or unease over
uncertain terrain, tides of morale and enthusiasm, and experiences of danger
are all depicted by means of expressions on the faces of individuals. Soldiers
are frequently sketched in this way--registered almost like an assemblage of colored
diodes, which light up in different hues depending on their state: terror,
triumph, piety, confusion, fervor.
In a typical reversal of the senses,
Tolstoy describes Rostov's attempt to cross the field during the battle of
Austerlitz: "Having drawn even with the infantry guards, he noticed that
cannonballs were flying over and around them, not so much because he heard the
sound of the cannon, but because he saw the uneasiness on the soldiers' faces,
and on the officers' an unnatural military solemnity." This sort of
observation, obliquely empirical and not reported directly by the senses, jars
the reader into a fresh recollection of the humanity of the soldiers. For
Tolstoy, humanity is contagious, and it is most readily transmitted through the
face. At the end of the scene with Prince Andrei, laughter erupts when one of
the Russians, considered an expert in French, speaks a few garbled phrases.
With the soldiers close enough to see one another's faces, ironically at the
very point of greatest tension, the battle seems ridiculous: "Peals of
such healthy and merry guffawing came from among the soldiers that it crossed
the line and involuntarily infected the French, after which it seemed they
ought quickly to unload their guns, blow up their munitions, and all quickly go
back home."
In their introduction to War and
Peace: Original Version, Bromfield and Coates announce their decision to vary
Tolstoy's repetitions "in the name of stylistic euphony," explaining
that while the "hammering" effect works in Russian, English
"abhors repetition of this kind." This seems to have been the view of
many translators of the novel, and Pevear is right to note his predecessors'
tendency in his own introduction. But such "euphony" is in fact a
misrepresentation of Tolstoy's style. Tolstoy's device of repeating one word
many times in a single passage, or repeatedly employing an entire phrase word
for word, is striking and jarring in the original Russian. The effect is
deliberate: it is not that Tolstoy could not think of another word, but that he
wanted us to be unable to think of another one.
Tolstoy's contemporaries criticized
him for the repetitions, and implored him to clean up and harmonize his
sentences. The writer Konstantin Leontiev suggested that Tolstoy "throw
out of [War and Peace]" all the repetitions: "strange, strange,
hands, hands, hastily, hastily, sob, sob, rich lip, rich lip." The
repetitions in the novel's philosophical sections, as the Russian formalist
Boris Eikhenbaum pointed out, play a role similar to the repetitive digressions
that mark new chapters of the Iliad, reinforcing the novel's epic quality.
Tolstoy's repetitions have the ironic effect of linking him to both the highest
and the lowest forms of literary language--to the Homeric and the homely. The
repetitions additionally imbue the novel with a sense of what it may have been
like to listen to Tolstoy speak, as in Gorky's observation that "one must
have heard him speak in order to understand the extraordinary, indefinable
beauty of his speech; it was, in a sense, incorrect, abounding in repetitions
of the same word, saturated with village simplicity."
No comments:
Post a Comment