War and peace
30
Aug
I read a recent commentary on Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) that another Russian
writer Ivan Turgenev claimed that knowing and reading Tolstoy is better than reading hundreds of works of ethnography and history” to know the character and temperament of the Russian people, conservatives such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) who came to be considered his successor, and Vladimir Lenin leader of the Soviet revolution who considered him one of the greatest Russian writers.
Many of his books were for the cinema, recently (2012) Anna Karenina was rewritten for the cinema, under the direction of Joe Wright, and was nominated for an Oscar and won the best costume design, but a masterpiece by Tolstoy is the book War and Peace.
From War and Peace I remember impressions and some loose phrases, and the context of the book that talks about the tsarist wars of their context and time, but which is revealing of Russian thinking about war, and that its scourges are not ignored.
The book deals with the lives of 5 aristocratic families, in the period from 1805 to 1820, in the midst of the march of Napoleonic troops and their brutal impact on the lives of hundreds of characters.
There are figures such as the brothers Natasha and Nikolai Rostóv, Prince Andrei Bolkónsky and Pierre Bezúkhov, the illegitimate son of a count whose spiritual quest serves as a kind of thread in the novel and transforms him into a complex and intriguing character of the 20th century. XIX, and whose pursuit will be a complement to peace in the midst of war.
A kind of refuge similar to the book-stealing Girl, which in this case is in the context of Nazi Germany and she will find in the books a refuge for the dark environment of the rise of Nazism in Germany.
I see a common feature in these two books, which is this “refuge”, something between the spiritual and the reader, but both manage to create, in a suffocatingly hateful environment, gaps and spaces of peace and spiritual elevation.
If war comes, what will be our refuge, at what level of spiritual life and knowledge do we want to put our lives that will be at risk, I believe these are contemporary readings.
TOLSTOI, L. (1889) WAR AND PEACE, transl. Nathan Hskell Dole, NY: Ed. Thomas V. Crowell & Co.
