Prince Andrei in a state between life and death in Sergei Bondarchuk’s 6.5 hour EDITED movie version of War and Peace.  

It’s a fantastic film and inferred that one has read the novel before watching the film.  A few of my classmates got together and watched the film on one looong Saturday (picture taken at that time).

“”Yes, that was death.  I died-I woke up.  Yes, death is an awakening.”  Clarity suddenly came to his soul, and the curtain that until then had concealed the unknown was raised before his inner gaze.  He felt the release of a force that previously had been as if bound in him and that strange lightness which from then on did not leave him.”

- Prince Andrei, War and Peace, Volume IV, Part One, XVI by Leo N. Tolstoy (Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation)

I haven’t made any new posts for a year, so thanks for staying around.  Here are a couple pictures of books I slam against my forehead in hopes of absorbing all the text within, so that I may produce a scholarly work to be read by other scholars and ignored by the public.  It has been working well for the past year and the welts are a good look for me.  

A sampling of the Soviet-era postcards from Russia (1960s) that I picked up today.

Three Soviet-era postcard sets from the 1960s.  One has Pushkin on the cover and contains fairy tale images.  The one with an alligator contains amusing ones with animals and men doing bizarre things.  The last one appears to have folk tale images.  

I picked these up at the annual Russian book sale on my university campus.  Every book was $1 each.  

Russian writer Ivan Goncharov at age 74 in 1886 (via Wiki).

His sufferingly long novel, Oblomov, is his most famous.  It created a phrase in Russian (Oblomovism) to describe an “illness” of the gentry: laziness, basically.

“Everything in the village is quiet and sleepy: the doors of the silent cottages are wide open; not a soul is to be seen; only the flies swarm in clouds and buzz in the stuffy air.  On entering a cottage, you will call in vain in a loud voice: dead silence will be your answer; very seldom will some old woman, who is spending her remaining years on the stove, reply with a painful sigh or a sepulchral cough; or a three-year-old child, long-haired, barefoot, and with only a torn shirt on, will appear from behind a partition, stare at you in silence, and hide himself again.”

- from the chapter “Oblomov’s Dream”

Sergei Aksakov (via russianlife.com).  He was a Russian psycho-realist writer (1791-1859) and his novel The Family Chronicle (1856) is reminiscent of the French Naturalist, Emile Zola, and his series of books revolving around the Rougon-Macquarts family.

“… But however infamous this unbridled debauchery and boundless tyranny were, something still more horrible developed in Mikhail Maximovich’s disposition - an ever-increasing instinct of cruelty and lust of blood.  To torture men became an obsession with him.  When he had no victim to flog, he grew peevish, restless, even ill… “

- the narrator of The Family Chronicle discussing the faults of Mikhail Maximovich Kurolesov.

Andrei Platonov, via russia-ic.com.

“…A gust of wind blew from some unknown place, to stop people from suffocating, and a dog on the edge of the town let it be known in a weak, doubting voice that it was on guard.

‘The dog’s bored.  It’s like me - it only lives because it was born.’

Voshchev’s body grew pale with exhaustion; he felt the cold on his eyelids and then closed them over his warm eyes.”

- Andrey Platonov’s The Foundation Pit, 1920s or early ’30s.  A novel that wasn’t published in Russia until the 80s.

Robert Chandler said that, “like Waiting for Godot, [this novel is] one of the great nihilistic fables of all time.”

Isaac Babel (via http://www.dannymorrison.com/?p=1290 )

“… And in the stillness I could hear the far-off breath of groaning.  The smoke of secret murder strayed around us.

‘Someone is being killed,’ I said. ‘Who is it?’

‘The Poles are crazed with fear,’ the peasant answered. ‘The Poles are killing the Jews.’

The peasant transferred his gun from his right hand to his left.  His beard flapped over to one side as he looked at me affectionately and said, ‘These nights on the line are long. There’s no end to them.  And a man sort of gets a longing to have a talk with someone else, but where’s one to get someone else, I’d  like to know?’

The peasant made me light a cigarette from his. ‘The Jews are to blame for everything, on our side and yours.  There’ll be mighty few of them left after the war.  How many Jews are there in the whole world?’

‘Ten million,’ I answered, putting the bridle on my horse.

‘There’ll be only two hundred thousand left,’ cried the peasant, and touched my hand, afraid I would go.  But I got into the saddle and galloped off to the spot where the Staff had been… “

- from “Zamoste” in Red Calvary by Isaac Babel, late 1920s.  

A little disturbing, a little prophetic statement from the peasant.

Mikhail Vrubel, The Duel Between Pechorin and Grushnitsky, (1890-91); via http://www.macalester.edu/~hammarberg/russ251/lerm/lermhero.html

“In the meantime, the captain had loaded his pistols; he handed one to Grushnitsky, whispering something to him with a smile; the other he handed to me.

I took my stand at the apex of the platform, bracing my left foot firmly against the rock and leaning forward a little, so as not to fall backward in the case of a light wound.

Grushnitsky stationed himself opposite me and at a given signal began to raise his pistol.  His knees shook.  He was aiming straight at my forehead.

Ineffable fury flared up in my breast.

Suddenly, he lowered the muzzle of his pistol and, going as white as a sheet, turned toward his second:

‘I can’t,’ he said in a hollow voice.

‘Coward!’ answered the captain.

The shot rang out.  The bullet grazed my knee.  Involuntarily, I took several steps forward so as to get away, as soon as possible, from the brink… .”

- Pechurin, the “superflous man,” describing the beginning of his duel with Grushnitsky from Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time, excerpt from the “Princess Mary” section.

Mikhail Lermontov would later have his own duel that resulted in his death before he turned 30.  At least it was a heroic, romantic way to die and not simply consumption, I guess.

Karolina Pavlova, Russian 19th century writer.  photo from wiki:

“Русский: Портрет Каролины Яниш (1820-е гг.) работы В. Ф. Бинемана Источник: http://az.lib.ru/p/pawlowa_k_k/ ”

“And it must be said, too, that so much is forgotten in life, the years change and reshape us so strangely!  So many young, inspired dreamers in time become tax farmers and distillers.  So many carefree young idlers become owners of Siberian gold mines.  So many flighty scoundrels become merciless punishers of every kind of passion.  Time is a strange force!”

- Pavlova, from A Double Life (1848)

One of the few(?) great women literary forces of the Russian 19th century, but I’m no expert.

Backflipping Soviet Russian with Ax? Mystery photo from http://blog.dembro.org/2009/06/05/in-soviet-russia-axe-flips-you/

“Russian culture also tends to alternate between long periods of passivism and brief, violent rebellions.  Their folktale character Ivan will sleep warming himself atop the stove for seven years, then awaken, get drunk, swing his ax around indiscriminately, and finally relapse again into quiet sleep.”

- George Gibian, PhD, from his introduction to The Portable Nineteenth-Century Russian Reader

fuckyeahrussianliterature:

Chekhov statue at Taganrog.

“He could not help feeling that he had had enough bitter experience to have the right to call them as he pleased, but all the same without the lower breed he could not have existed a couple of days.  He was bored and ill at ease among men, with whom he was reticent and cold, but when he was among women he felt at ease, he knew what to talk about with them and how to behave; even when he was silent in their company he experienced no feeling of constraint.”

- the narrator regarding Dmitri Dmitrich Gurov in Chekhov’s story, The Lady with the Dog 

Alexander Herzen, Russian writer.  (photo by Maikki Friberg)

“There is nothing on earth more individual and more diversified than the biographies of ordinary people, especially where no two people ever share the same idea, where each person develops in his own way without either looking back or worrying about where it will lead… . For this reason I never avoid biographical digressions.  They reveal the full splendor of the universe.  The reader who so wishes may skip over these episodes, but in doing so he will miss the essence of the story.”

- Herzen, from Who Is to Blame?

This is said before the narrator tells the life story of a minor character.  Some of the best 19th century Russian authors loved to delve into the individual and had terrific psychological insight of them.

Kazimire Malevich, Black Square, 1915.

The link will take you to a Kazimir Malevich page and his Suprematism Manifesto.