WAR AND PEACE: Leo Tolstoy and Me
stoy
Part 1:
The 1956 release of War and Peace was the first English-language film version of the novel War and Peace by the Russian novelist and short-story writer, essayist and playwright Leo Tolstoy(1828-1910). This 1956 film was released into cinemas when I was 12, in grade 7, and responsible for the marquee at the Roxy Theatre in Burlington Ontario. I got into all the films that came into town---free---at least while I had that part-time job in my senior years of primary school.
I don’t remember ever seeing War and Peace until it was televised this afternoon.(1) War and Peace won many awards; I leave it to readers here to find out which ones. I also leave it to readers to take-in, if their interests allow, the available summaries and analyses of both the novel and of the film, of Tolstoy’s life and of any other relevant Russian literary life and history that is of interest to them.-Ron Price with thanks to (1)ABC1 TV, 12:00-3:25 p.m., 22/12/’12.
As a student and, then, teacher of English literature from the 1950s to the first years of the 21st century, I was blest with never having to either read this work or teach it as part of the curriculum. The book is one of the longest novels ever written, and one of the most famous---arguably---the most famous. I will also leave the reading of that novel to readers at some time in their lives as the internet publishing world, and the many publishing houses around the planet, pile on their reading matter for 21st century students and readers. As we all run-the-gauntlet of the print and image glut that faces us in this new and troubled age, Tolstoy requires hard yards for the KISS generations, the keep-it-simple-silly literary language of our times.
Part 2:
Tolstoy began his tertiary studies at the age of 16 in law and oriental languages at Kazan University. The year was 1844, the same year that Karl Marx published his first writings, and the year that the first message: "what hath God wrought?" went across a telegraph wire. Tolstoy was described by his teachers as "both unable and unwilling to learn". I won’t give you chapter and verse of this man’s fascinating life for that, too, you can read about at your leisure, if you have the interest. I will note here, though, one fact of interest to me, if not to you, about the dissolute university student who was Tolstoy and who, by his 40s, had transformed himself into a number of roles for which he acquired in the decades ahead---fame and renown.
One of these roles was as an educator whose school, whose learning system, was a direct forerunner to A. S. Neill's Summerhill School, a man, a school, and an educational system which I will also leave to readers to google at their leisure this summer. If readers of this prose-poem of mine here at this Literature Network Forum live in the northern hemisphere, then, they can do their googling during this winter holiday. The school Tolstoy founded in his 40s can justifiably be claimed to be the first example of a coherent theory of democratic education.-Ron Price with thanks to Wikipedia, 22/12/’12.
It helped having Audrey Hepburn
and Henry Fonda in starring roles,
but I’m glad I never had to either
read or teach this immense, great,
pastiche of a book, the 7th longest,
as far as I know.…Working on it as(1)
he was when Darwin’s Origin of the
Species hit the public in 1859…...
I’ve been working on this book for
nearly 50 years; had it on my to-do
list, but I’ve got lost in the world of
print and image-glut. I’ve put novels
down on the back-burner in a lesser
category as far back as the 1950s, a
half-century-of-life or more-ago, ago.
You said, Leo, that there was a man in
Akka who had found the key to it all.(2)
I came across this idea over 50 years
ago at the same time as a friend was
reading your writing...immersed as I
was in history and philosophy.....To read
your War & Peace was impossible for me
then and now, given my long reading lists
then, my proclivities now, and the fact that
these evenings of my life are coming at me
faster than the speed of light, as I head into
the last hours of my life-night before...dawn.
(1) Tolstoy himself, somewhat enigmatically, said of War and Peace that it was "not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less a historical chronicle”. He went on to elaborate that “the best Russian literature does not conform to standard norms” and, hence, he hesitated to call War and Peace a novel.
The book is actually the seventh longest novel ever written in a Latin or Cyrillic-based alphabet. It is subdivided into four books or volumes, each with sub-parts containing many chapters. See War and Peace at Wikipedia.
(2) See Leo Tolstoy and the Baha’i Faith, Luigi Stendardo, translated form the French by Jeremy Fox, George Ronald, Oxford, 1985, p.53.
Ron Price
22/12/’12
(final draft)