#tolstoytogether

[jennifermittonart]

#WARANDPEACE #Tolstoy #Tolstoytogether #grouptherapy #onlythelonely #somuchpotential #ohshesdead #lovetheoneyourewith #crisishotline #theresagreatbook As I quietly come unhinged and at the same time realize that must be fate or God, I imagine returning to group therapy. Oh yeah #grouptherapy. https://www.instagram.com/p/CVzK5n5rOXO/?utm_medium=tumblr

[shannybasar]

End of #TolstoyTogether

Dear Friends, We’ve done it! Like the bees, we have foraged and shared, built together and supported one another. The world is far from friendly to bees and flowers, but may we go onward and upward, without fatigue, without impatience. Gratefully yours, Yiyun pic.twitter.com/rOdy66iAxe

— apublicspace (@APublicSpace) June 10, 2020

[shannybasar]

#TolstoyTogether: Day 85

Day 85 | June 10 - Epilogue, Part II, ix-xii (THE END). From "For the solution of the question of freedom and necessity" to "it is just as necessary to renounce a nonexistent freedom and recognize a dependence we do not feel."

Tolstoy returns to linking the micro and the macro:

The further back I transport myself in memory, or, what is the same, ahead in my judgement, the more questionable my argument about the freedom of the act will become. 

In history we find exactly the same progression of convincingness about the portion of free will in the general affairs of mankind.

The final words:

it is just as necessary to renounce a non-existent freedom and recognize a dependence we do not feel.

I will be bereft without my daily reading of War and Peace which has been an anchor during the lockdown. Aurelia Drake has written a lovely piece on reading the book with A Public Space: 

Even when I wanted to read ahead, I was strict about sticking to the chapters assigned for that specific day. This kept me interested in continuing, and helped avoid burnout; it’s a trick I’m sure to use moving forward when I want to tackle longer works.

The second element was, of course, the amazing group of people I got to chat with every single day.

In the end, War and Peace is as chaotic and messy as individual human lives and the general cycles of history are, and is as relevant today as it was in the nineteenth century.

[shannybasar]

#TolstoyTogether: Day 84

Day 84 | June 9 - Epilogue, Part II, v-viii. From "The lives of peoples cannot be contained" to "from their plastering point of view, everything comes out flat and smooth."

Throughout the novel Tolstoy has moved masterfully from the macro:

History shows us that these justifications of the event have no general sense and contradict themselves, like killing a man in recognition of his rights, and killing millions in Russia to humiliate England. But in a contemporary sense, these justifications have a necessary significance. 

These justifications take away the moral responsibility of the people who produce events. These temporary goals are similar to the brushes that go in front of a train to clear the way on the rails: they clear the way of the people’s moral responsibility. 

to the micro:

He could not live, because all man’s strivings, all his impulses to life, are but his strivings towards greater freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame and obscurity, power and submission, strength and weakness, health and sickness, education and ignorance, work and idleness, satiety and hunger, virtue and vice are nothing but greater or lesser degrees of freedom.

From A Public Space:

Clive James said he could finish War and Peace in one breath if there were a long enough breath. I could imagine a long breath last until the last fifty pages, where I do feel I need several breaths. —Yiyun

[shannybasar]

#TolstoyTogether: Day 83

Day 83 | June 8 - Epilogue, Part II, i-iv. From "The subject of history is the life of peoples and of mankind" to "we will get the history of monarchs and writers, and not the history of the life of peoples."

Tolstoy returns to his theory of history:

In place of men endowed with divine power and directly guided by the will of a divinity, modern history has put either heroes endowed with extraordinary, superhuman capacities, or simply men of the most diverse qualities, from monarchs to journalists, who guide the masses. 

Power is the sum total of the wills of the masses, transferred by express or tacit agreement to rulers chosen by the masses. 

From A Public Space:

Still, every time I make a point of reading every word in Epilogue, Part Two, the smart and the baffling and the repetitive. I’m not embarrassed to say that this feels like a mental tug-of-war with Tolstoy. I won’t feel at peace if I give in. —Yiyun

[shannybasar]

#TolstoyTogether: Day 82

Day 82 | June 7 - Epilogue, Part I, xiv-xvi (end of Part I). From "Soon after that, the children came to say good night" to "I'll do something that even he would be pleased with..."

Pierre’s advice seems very relevant:

When you stand and wait for that tightened string to snap any moment, when everybody’s waiting for the inevitable upheaval - people must join hands, as many and as closely as possible, in order to oppose the general catastrophe. 

Tolstoy switches points of view twice in just two lines to show us the admiration of his wife and nephew:

But she rejoiced looking at his animated, rapturous figure. 

With still more joyful rapture, Pierre was looked at by the boy they had all forgotten, with his thin neck emerging from a turned-down collar.

Tolstoy proves again that he is the best writer on love as he describes Nikolai and Marya’s feelings for one another:

If Nikolai could have been conscious of his feeling, he would have found that his firm, tender and proud love for his wife has always been this feeling of wonder for her inner life, before that lofty moral world, almost inaccessible  to him, in which his wife always lived. 

He was proud that she was so intelligent and good, being conscious of his own insignificance before her in the spiritual world, and rejoiced the more that she, with her soul, not only belonged to him, but made up a part of him.

She felt a submissive, tender love for this man, who would never understand all that she understood, and as if because of that she loved him still more strongly, with a shade of passionate tenderness. 

and how Pierre and Natasha talk to one another:

Natasha, left alone with her husband, also talked as only a wife and husband can talk, that is, grasping thoughts and conveying them to each other with extraordinary clarity and quickness, in a way contrary to all the rules of logic, without recourse to opinions, conclusions, and deductions, but in a totally special way. 

and Nikolenka’s feeling for Pierre:

Nikolenka felt weak from love: he felt strengthless, boneless, and liquid. 

[shannybasar]

#TolstoyTogether: Day 81

Day 81 | June 6 - Epilogue, Part I, x-xiii. From "Natasha was married in the early spring of 1813" to "when the stockings were finished"

I can’t tell if Tolstoy approves or disapproves:

Natasha did not follow the golden rule preached by intelligent people, especially the French, according to which a girl, once married, should not let herself go, should not abandon her talents, should be still more concerned with her appearance than when unmarried, should entice her husband just as she had enticed her before he was her husband.

Discussions and arguments about women’s rights, about the relations between spouses, about their freedom and rights, though they had not yet been called “questions,” as they are now, were the same then as they were now; but these questions not only did not interest Natasha, but she decidedly did not understand them.

I prefer Nikolai and Princess Marya’s marriage:

Pierre was very surprised by his wife’s view, which was completely new to him, that every minute of his life belonged to her and her family; Pierre was surprised by his wife’s demands, but was flattered by them and submitted to them.

At home Natasha put herself on the footing of her husband’s slave; and the whole house went on tiptoe when Pierre was busy reading or writing in his study.

Nikolenka, Prince Andrei’s son, has been well brought up by Princess Marya: 

He did not want to be a hussar or a chevalier of St. George like Uncle Nikolai, he wanted to be learned and intelligent and kind, like Pierre.

I feel so sorry for the countess:

She ate, drank, slept, woke, but did not live. Life gave her no impressions at all. 

whose role is to remind us that we will all age: 

They said that she had already finished her business in life, that all of her was not in that which could be seen in her now, that we would all be the same, and that it was a joy to submit to her, to restrain oneself for the sake of this being, once so dear, once as full of life as we, and now so pathetic. Memento mori - said these glances.

[shannybasar]

#TolstoyTogether: Day 80

Day 80 | June 5 - Epilogue, Part I, vi-ix. From "At the beginning of winter, Princess Marya came to Moscow" to "which she involuntarily remembered at that moment."

Princess Marya and Nikolai are making me cry almost as much Pierre and Natasha:

For a few seconds they looked silently into each other’s eyes and the distant and impossible became near, possible and inevitable. 

Without deciding the question for himself, he glanced once again at her suffering and loving face and suddenly understood she was right, and he had long been in the wrong with himself.

He became closer and closer with his wife, discovering new spiritual treasures in her. 

i did not expect him to be come a brilliant farmer:

And only when he understood the tastes and strivings of the muzhik, learned to speak his language and understand the hidden meaning of his speech, when he felt akin to him, only then did he begin boldly to manage him, that is, to fulfil in relation to the muzhiks that very duty the fulfilment of which was demanded of him. 

or such a good father, as shown in this poignant moment:

His leaps reminded him of dancing, and, looking at the child’s round, happy face, he thought of how she would be when he, as an old man, started taking her out, and would do the mazurka with her, as his late father used to dance the Daniel Cooper with his daughter.