War and Peace: The Movie(1956) and the Novel

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)

After 10 days of having the above post here at this literature forum, I though I'd add an item or two on Tolstoy since he and his writing have been in my life now, off and on, for more than half a century.-Ron Price, Tasmania
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THIS IMMENSITY

The international pioneering experience often results, for pioneers, in a rediscovery and revaluation of their homeland. Obviously, this is not a new experience or one confined to Baha'is. The pilgrimage to Europe, what was once called the Grand Tour for perhaps two centuries, provided Russians, Americans, British and many other nationalities with a device for self-definition. So much of Canada is, like Russia, a "vast and terrible" country, as one Russian writer once described his homeland. "One must look on her from afar,"1 he wrote.

In pioneering, in travelling to and living in Australia now for more than 40 years, I have certainly had this opportunity of looking on Canada from afar. The confrontation with a distant country, in my case Australia, gives to the writing of this international pioneer, and traveller now to some 100 to 200 towns and cities(I have lost count) something of its specific weight and gravity; its dignity and lightness; and perhaps more importantly at a time when the Baha'i Faith has been emerging from an obscurity that had enshrouded its history for a century and a half. -Ron Price with thanks to 1Kireevsky in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, George Steiner, Penguin Books, 1967(1959), p.37.

You move faster to that new potency:
world citizen when you embody in
yourself another land and make it home.

There may be some obscuring
idiosyncrasies and uncertainties
of taste as this vanishing frontier
becomes, so quickly, one world.

For, indeed, there is an immensity
that has emerged, it seems, since
the Guardian died, a wilderness
of defined and infinite space and
a more precise time-line going back
and back and back to time’s dawn.1

And I utter "Here am I. Here am I"
which Thy chosen ones have uttered
in this immensity and I gaze on Thy
beauty and observe what is in Thy Book.2

1 One month before the Guardian died the Russians sent up Sputnik(4/10/57) and in the last forty-five years science and astrophysics has given infinite space and time an immensely defined delineation and description.
2 Baha'u'llah, "Long Obligatory Prayer."

Ron Price
28 March 2002

ISAIAH BERLIN
1953: A VERY BIG YEAR

In 1953 Isaiah Berlin(1909-1997) published a book called The Hedgehog and the Fox. Foxes, he wrote, are people who know many things; hedgehogs know one big thing. It was in part a study of Berlin's literary hero, Leo Tolstoy(1828-1910), whom he described as a fox who wished at times that he was a hedgehog. Isaiah Berlin was perhaps also a fox, intrigued by many ideas, unendingly curious, open-minded and pleading above all for tolerance. Hedgehogs view the world through the lens of a single defining idea; for example: Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust.

Foxes draw on a wide variety of experiences and they do not boil down the intellectual world to a single idea. Such foxes include: Herodotus, Aristotle, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce, Anderson).-Ron Price with thanks to several internet sites especially Wikipedia on the topic of Isaiah Berlin.

There is little doubt that I am both
hedgehog and fox. And, like Berlin,
I find solemnity & public seriousness
to be fatal qualities after many years
of life in Australia…..In academic and
private life my thoughts go deeper &
richer and more sacred. Although I do
relate everything to a single & central
vision, still I pursue many ends, often
unrelated and contradictory ones so
prepared as I am now to fight against
whatever odds & whatever the threat
might be with swords made of words
that are sharper than blades of steel
and hotter than summer heat: such is
my aim. My view of myself as well as
the view taken by others appears to be
strangely dissimilar. For all of this I thank
Isaiah Berlin, his short runs, and1 1953, a
very big year for both Berlin & the vision-
the realization of the vision at the centre.2

1 Quotations from Isaiah Berlin on the Internet.
2 The completion of a Divine Ediface in Chicago, the Baha’i temple, and the coextensive appearance of a “most wonderful and thrilling motion in the world of existence.”-Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, Wilmette, 1957, p.351.

Ron Price
10 September 2011

THE CENTRE AND THE PERIFERY

The poet who is a Baha'i seeks his identity and his public in an international culture that is too new, too disorganized and too preoccupied with the psychological demands of a world going through a fundamental change in consciousness, a consciousness of humanity's oneness, a world that is moving through a period of social paralysis, tyranny and anarchy, the ultimate consequences of which no one on earth can foresee.(1) This theme, this struggle of the poet, also characterized the struggle of the nineteenth century poet in both the USA and Russia. The 'thinness' of the emerging international Baha'i culture is not unlike the thinness of the American and Russian atmosphere that Henry James describes.

"It takes," James argued, "such an accumulation of history and custom, such a complex of manners and types, to form a fund of suggestion"(2) for a poet, a novelist, a playwright indeed any one of the many creative and performing arts. -Ron Price with thanks to (1)The Universal House of Justice, Message, 24 May 2001; and (2)Henry James in Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, George Steiner, Penguin Books, 1967(1959), p.40.

There's another shifting now,
a migration of the mind
from the centre to the perifery
and the perifery is everywhere
and so is the centre: one,
an unprecedented project,
a wondrous result,
has just stuck its head
above the ground,
a centre for an unparalleled
world civilization,
during this momentous
transition the pain shall pass.

And the thinness of so much
of that century of light will
acquire that accumulation
of history and custom,
that fund of suggestion
that is at once dense, rich
and part of the global spectacle.

Ron Price
28 March 2002

A BALANCING ACT

I believe it is too often forgotten that self-criticism is part of the creative process. Indeed, it is essential for creative artists who must be painfully honest with themselves. Escaping from self-knowledge, seemingly part of the everyday life of everyman, must be limited for such artists. This is especially true for the autobiographer who is involved in the complex balancing of reticence and immodesty.-Ron Price with thanks to R.S. Thomas, Autobiographies, J.M. Dent and Sons, London, 1997.

In these words I say too much
and too little, performing the
impossible and complex balancing
act of reticence and immodesty
to tell a life, to play out my dreams
with my eyes wide open, defining
ever more precisely, the reality,
the dream, the gap, the something
conceived and composed in the depths
of my being. Perhaps, just perhaps,
what I have here is a work of art,
passing through me like a storm-wind,
flinging open the doors of perception,
pressing upon the architecture of my
beliefs with its transforming power
and enriching my inheritance1 in this
critical stage of an immense historical
process2 with its energy and creativity.

Ron Price
28 June 1998

1 George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoesky, E. P. Dutton and Co., NY, 1971, pp.3-4.
2 Universal House of Justice, Ridvan Message BE 153.