On Tolstoy's “War and Peace” • Hacker News Board

Re: On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”

#71

Post by mzs » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 4:05 AM UTC

geoka9 wrote: post #68

mzs wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

I seriously doubt that - that phrase doesn't make any sense to a Russian speaker as an expletive. 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.

Thanks! I was guessing what it could have been from the Polish translation. I was wrong and it seems translators took some liberty here.

Re: On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”

#72

Post by potatoyogurt » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 4:39 AM UTC

lstodd wrote: post #23

_4gzn wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. http://gramota.ru/lenta/news/8_784

If you had read the thing, you wouldn't be throwing useless links around. Since you do and thus obviosly didn't read it, why you even consider commenting here?

Did you read his link? It directly addresses your point. I will summarize and add some context, since I don't know if you read Russian. The word мир in Russian has two meanings, "peace" and something that is translated in different contexts more like "the world" or "society." These were once different words with different spellings, but during the Soviet Union, authorities decided that some letters had to be purged because they were naughty, so orthographic reforms were carried out that standardized some spellings and eliminated a few letters. So the previously distinguishable words "мир"(peace) and мір (the world/society) became orthographically indistinguishable. However, since Tolstoy published prior to the Soviet Union, you can tell what the likely intent was by how the title was spelled in pre-revolutionary publications. In almost all cases, it was spelled мир. There is just one instance when it was spelled мiр, and it seems likely that it was a misprint.

Re: On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”

#73

Post by m0zg » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 4:41 AM UTC

beloch wrote: post #24

War and Peace reminds me of David Lynch's "Dune". Aspects of it are utterly brilliant. Perhaps unsurpassed. As a whole though, it suffers from the effects of poor decisions. Tolstoy famously said that he didn't even consider War and Peace to be a novel, but something else that sort of passes for one. Where another author with an axe to grind would tell a story that leads the reader to the desired conclusion, Tolstoy…

I suppose a lot of meaning and cultural context is lost in translation. I never understood how people in the West even approach these masterworks of Russian literature. They're challenging even for the natives.

That having been said, War and Peace is my favorite Russian novel by far. First time I read it I was 15, they force you to read it high school. I disliked it intensely. Second time I read it I was 40. I absolutely loved everything about it, even Tolstoy's relentless arguments in favor of his positions on historical events. To understand them, you have to understand the traditionally Russian fatalism, that still exists there even to this day. The overriding belief that things are largely predetermined, and the capacity of any single person (including Napoleon) to change anything is pretty limited. Which is not an unreasonable position to take, IMO.

There are a ton of subtle, impossible to translate details in it that you simply will not get if you read it in any language other than Russian and without the Russian cultural background. Same is true in the opposite direction: Russians will not get some of the subtleties in US classical literature. There's just far less of it, and nothing, as far as I can tell, quite of the same stature as Tolstoy or Dostoevsky.

Re: On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”

#74

Post by dnhz » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 5:15 AM UTC

ebullientocelot wrote: post #9

alex504 wrote: post #4

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.

No argument with what you're saying, but on a personal level I can't stand Anna, the character. Reminds me too much of a rather unfortunate ex, and ruins the story for me.

To me, Anna Karenina is more about Levin than anyone else since Levin is basically a fictional version of Tolstoy.

Re: On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”

#75

Post by rjf72 » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 5:41 AM UTC

beloch wrote: post #24

War and Peace reminds me of David Lynch's "Dune". Aspects of it are utterly brilliant. Perhaps unsurpassed. As a whole though, it suffers from the effects of poor decisions. Tolstoy famously said that he didn't even consider War and Peace to be a novel, but something else that sort of passes for one. Where another author with an axe to grind would tell a story that leads the reader to the desired conclusion, Tolstoy…

Out of curiosity, why would you consider such a thing a philosophy as opposed to something that can be demonstrated, or challenged, with evidence?

For instance the stock market is an example of a complex system that ought be trivial to create a very strong deterministic model of. Though it qualifies as complex, in reality it's quite a trivial system. Things tend to go up on good news, down on bad news, and all actors involved have mostly the same very simple motivation of increasing their returns. Real complex systems in practice are exponentially more difficult than the stock market because motivations and quantifications are far less clear. Yet in spite of its triviality and the fact that there has likely been more manpower and money dedicated to 'solving' the stock market than perhaps any other endeavor ever, we still remain completely clueless.

I'm sure your logic is to suggest that we yet lack the means of deciphering even such simple systems. Yet you are also making one extremely strong implicit statement. Systems with sufficient entropy become impossible to 'decode' to any meaningful degree. Consequently, you're arguing that there is a limited amount of entropy in complex social systems. Where is the logic for declaring this a reasonable view? I am not saying this to antagonize. The reason I'm curious is I imagine your view is quite common, yet I've never once heard it plainly stated (and I imagine most who hold such views aren't even aware they hold them). And now it's quite sparked my curiosity!

Re: On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”

#76

Post by byproxy » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 5:47 AM UTC

nbabitskiy wrote: post #69

adrianratnapala wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

It was not the case at the time. Censors were bright guys, including e.g. great writer Goncharov, or Nikitenko, who hadn't written any novels, but left very thoughtful memoires. On many occasions censors of controversial books were reporting to the tzar personally, or were tzars themselves (e.g. Nikolay I censored Pushkin). Most 19th century was depressing and stagnant time wrt politics, so books drew immense public…

Oh, I'm aware of place names and certain people beginning with just the first letter (such as 'Prince S.' in 'The Idiot'), but certain words were blanked out with stars, such as 'B*'. It happened only a handful of times in 'The Idiot', sometimes for a name a occasionally for a place. I don't recall that form of redaction ever appearing in 'The Karamazov Brothers', though.

Re: On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”

#77

Post by konart » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 5:58 AM UTC

As a russian, reading twitter '1 like - 1 fact' thread about Leo Tostoy and his wife (including how much it is her merit that the novel as we know it actually have seen the light of day) was a better read than War and Peace.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1068888815627055104.html

(google translate does a good job actually https://translate.google.ru/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&u=https%3A...)

Re: On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”

#78

Post by rjf72 » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 6:05 AM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #52

Endy wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, Anna Karenina is really mostly notable for having the second-greatest opening line in all literature.

And the greatest?

"The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel."

Definitely the greatest line I've ever read. Such extensive imagery and metaphor (well beyond just the sky), tucked into 15 words.

Re: On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”

#79

Post by kazinator » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 6:07 AM UTC

aidenn0 wrote: post #52

Endy wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, Anna Karenina is really mostly notable for having the second-greatest opening line in all literature.

And the greatest?

"Common Lisp is a new dialect of Lisp, a successor to MacLisp, influenced strongly by Zetalisp and to some extent by Scheme and Interlisp."

Re: On Tolstoy's “War and Peace”

#80

Post by coldtea » Thu, Mar 07, 2019, 8:38 AM UTC

billfruit wrote: post #3

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.

Great as it is, Les Miserables is a telenovela compared to War and Peace.