61–70 of 100 posts
Most people dont think War and Peace was even Tolstoys greatest novel. Anna Karenina is regarded as the greatest novel of all time by lots of authors and critics though of course there is no consensus and its sort of a silly notion.
To me, Anna Karenina is really mostly notable for having the second-greatest opening line in all literature.
"It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times."
Most people dont think War and Peace was even Tolstoys greatest novel. Anna Karenina is regarded as the greatest novel of all time by lots of authors and critics though of course there is no consensus and its sort of a silly notion.
To me, Anna Karenina is really mostly notable for having the second-greatest opening line in all literature.
I do think though Russians do get a bit too much press for their novels, in a way that isn't, I think accorded to the French. For example dealing with events from the same period of time is Hugo's "Les Miserables" (it has a description of the battle of Waterloo lasting around 12 chapters), perhaps captures more of the variety of human experience.
Most people dont think War and Peace was even Tolstoys greatest novel. Anna Karenina is regarded as the greatest novel of all time by lots of authors and critics though of course there is no consensus and its sort of a silly notion.
I do think though Russians do get a bit too much press for their novels, in a way that isn't, I think accorded to the French. For example dealing with events from the same period of time is Hugo's "Les Miserables" (it has a description of the battle of Waterloo lasting around 12 chapters), perhaps captures more of the variety of human experience.
Actually the battle scenes in War and Peace were written under significant influence of Stendahl's in la Chartreuse de Parme. I don't know, how the French treat their novelists, but from a Russian perspective, Stendahl's a big literature, and Hugo more of a teenage reading. I'm pretty sure Tolstoy shared this view.
The problem with Les Miserables is that of wide circulation of translations which are actually abridgements, I fear many readers would have missed the grandeur of the whole unabridged novel. Same seems to be the case with Count of Montecristo.
https://www.nyrb.com/products/life-and-fate?variant=10949301...
It's astonishingly good, both as literature and as an indictment of war and totalitarianism, and I'd recommend it to anyone who loves War and Peace.
I read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation about 10 years ago. There were a lot of good references and footnotes. But way into the novel, as the Russian army is about to crush the last remnants of Napoleon’s army retreating from Moscow, Field Marshall Kutuzov first tells his gathered troops to consider that the French are human too and have suffered along with them. Then, after a dramatic pause he continues: “But,…
I think he was abbreviating/f@c#ifying «морда ишака в говно» in the original Russian. The last word is a very old fashioned term for "shit" and it means "put their face in it" where face is really muzzle of an ass with similar connotation. The Polish translation I read used „pyskiem w g…” so it's more obvious ;)
P.S. That word is not old fashioned, it's used a lot in modern spoken Russian. It's quite vulgar though, much more so than the English equivalent.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In my copy of Crime and Punishment it has some names (especially place names) where the end notes say it was partially redacted to get the manuscripts past censors. Not necessarily the case for every redaction though.
Even this can be pretending to pretend. That is, the censor is some bored middle-class beaurocrat rather than a true believer. So all you need is to give the him plausible deniability so he can turn around to his bosses and say "Hey, he redacted the name, how was I to know he was talking about your mother."
Most 19th century was depressing and stagnant time wrt politics, so books drew immense public interest.
That said, op's example would be automatically censored by the author himself, since this language was unprintable in 1860s.
I don't know about the Dostoevsky's places, always thought it was a traditional trope - places named with the first letter are ubiquitous in Russian novels.
Edit: also, it's worth noting that much censorship was made to make books suitable for morally unstable or easily agitated demographics, like women, so sometimes the motives for a particular edit could be hard to relate from modern relativistic perspective.
An amusing footnote I found in Tolstoy's Confession: The context: >In spite of the fact that during these fifteen years I regarded writing as a trivial endeavor, I continued to write.* I had already tasted the temptations of authorship, the temptations of enormous monetary rewards and applause for worthless work, and I gave myself up to it as a means of improving my material situation and as a way of stifling any que…
I wonder if he was depressed when he wrote this.