Is literature in contradictiion?

[cacian]

comsider
War and Peace Tolstoi
and
Le Rouge et Le Noir Stendhal
in both which the Napoleonic era highlights success and a failure.

[Danik 2016]

One of the good things about literature IMO is, that it permits different points of view. In your example one difference that springs to mind immediatelly is that the Napoleonic Era is depicted from a Russian and a French point of view.

[Pompey Bum]

Danik is correct that literature permits various points of view, and no doubt nationalism has some effect on it. But the examples Cacian cites are somewhat more nuanced. I have never read The Black and the White, but my understanding is that its nostalgia for Napoleon plays out in the context of a satire of reactionary Bourbon Restoration society. So it could be seen as an anti-French polemic, too, in a certain way.

And Tolstoy's vision encompasses more than mere nationalism. In War and Peace, Napoleon is a vain and ultimately impotent figure who does not understand that his supposedly masterful orders are not even reaching the men in battle. While Kutuzov is less ridiculous (he is pathetic instead), he is equally ineffectual and only marginally less clueless. But Kutuzov at least knows that he is caught in a web of events greater than his own will; and he weeps before an icon of Mary when he understands that fate (or Tolstoyan fate anyway) has finally given him the means to destroy Napoleon. But it's not because the Russians are better than the French.

[ennison]

What weird questions you ask. Like an insomniac who has just woken from a dream and expects me to agree that no you didn't sleep a wink again last night and yes we were swimming with dolphins.

[ennison]

Remember that the murderous little Frog militarist had invaded Russia bringing the usual death and misery of war but in lovely France he had settled some of the outstanding post-revolutionary problems and created a settled state. So there is no real contradiction. Unless it is contradictory of the Jewish writer Vonnegut to condemn Dresden's bombing and Gunter Grass to have actually been an SS soldier. Cacian a ghraidh, are you just asking questions for the helluvait?

[Pompey Bum]

ennison me auld beauty! Well met! :)

[ennison]

Thanks Pompey. I've been really busy with "real" life but now I'm on holiday and oh - very intoichicated. Only joking - not. Cacian is lovely ain't she. I imagine her like that pic by her posts - all long hair and swirling sweeping femininity. But she's probably some old boot with a beard (Joke Cacian - honest!)

[Pompey Bum]

Cacian's the best.

Great to see you in form again, Ennison. :)

[ennison]

I apologise for being rude Cacian. I was drunk. But I am by nature a bit rough and ready.