disparates (2)

a propósito de uns disparates anteriores, ou a despropósito.

troca de correspondência entre Flaubert e Turgenev sobre Guerra e Paz, o livro que o primeiro tinha recebido para ler com recomendações de Turgenev. [e não tinha Flaubert em tag, pecado]

Croisset, January 21, 1880

... Thank you for getting me to read Tolstoy's novel. It's first-rate. What a painter, and what a psychologist! The first two volumes are sublime; but the third falls-off badly. He repeats himself and philosophizes: you see the man, the author, the Russian, whereas hitherto there had been only Nature and Mankind. Sometimes he seems Shakespearean. I cried aloud with admiration as I read - and it's a long novel. Tell me something about the author. Is it his first book? In any case, he has balls! Yes! it's very strong! very strong!...

- -
e a resposta de Turgenev:

"Mon bon vieux,
You cannot imagine the pleasure I was given by your letter and by what you say about Tolstoy's novel. Your approval confirms my view of him. Yes, he is very strong, and yet you have put your finger on the spot. He has also conceived a philosophical system at once mystical, childish and arrogant: this has doubly spoiled his second novel (Anna Karenina), which he wrote after War and Peace, and which also contains some first-class things."

- -

Pamuk on Tolstoy:
"In the interview, Charlie Rose asked Pamuk what he thought was the greatest novel of all time, and Pamuk answered “Anna Karenina” without any hesitation. This interested me, since people usually pick War and Peace for the greatest novel of all time if they are into Tolstoy. To explain his love of Tolstoy, Pamuk retold an anecdote about Nabokov, who once explained Tolstoy’s writing style by simply opening a window in a dark classroom. His point: Tolstoy has a way of lighting up the entire room for you in every scene."
daqui.

and Nabokov on Tolstoy:
I hate tampering with the precious lives of great writers and I hate Tom-peeping over the fence of those lives — I hate the vulgarity of "human interest," I hate the rustle of skirts and giggles in the corridors of time — and no biographer will ever catch a glimpse of my private life; but this I must say. Dostoevski's gloating pity for people — pity for the humble and the humiliated — this pity was purely emotional and his special lurid brand of the Christian faith by no means prevented him from leading a life extremely removed from his teachings. On the other hand, Leo Tolstoy like his representative Lyovin was organically unable to allow his conscience to strike a bargain with his animal nature — and he suffered cruelly whenever this animal nature temporarily triumphed over his better self.
(...)
The queer thing about it is that actually Tolstoy was rather careless when dealing with the objective idea of time. In War and Peace attentive readers have found children who grow too fast or not fast enough, just as in Gogol's Dead Souls, despite Gogol's care in clothing his characters, we find that Chichikov wore a bearskin overcoat in midsummer. In Anna Karenin, as we shall see, there are terrific skiddings on the frozen road of time. But such slips on Tolstoy's part have nothing to do with the impression of time he conveys, the idea of time which corresponds so exactly with the reader's sense of time. There are other great writers who were quite consciously fascinated by the idea of time and quite consciously tried to render its movement; this Proust does when his hero in the novel In Search of Lost Time arrives at a final party where he sees people he used to know now for some reason wearing gray wigs, and then realizes that the gray wigs are organic gray hairs, that they have grown old while he had been strolling through his memories; or notice how James Joyce regulates the time element in Ulysses by the slow gradual passing of a crumpled bit of paper down the river from bridge to bridge down the Liffy to Dublin Bay to the eternal sea. Yet these writers who actually dealt in time values did not do what Tolstoy quite casually, quite unconsciously, does: they move either slower or faster than the reader's grandfather clock; it is the time by Proust or the time by Joyce, not the common average time, a kind of standard time which Tolstoy somehow manages to
convey.

No wonder, then, that elderly Russians at their evening tea talk of Tolstoy's characters as of people who really exist, people to whom their friends may be likened, people they see as distinctly as if they had danced with Kitty and Anna or Natasha at that ball or dined with Oblonski at his favorite restaurant," as we shall soon be dining with him. Readers call Tolstoy a giant not because other writers are dwarfs but because he remains always of exactly our own stature,t exactly keeping pace with us instead of passing by in the distance, as other authors do.

And in this connection it is curious to note that although Tolstoy, who was constantly aware of his own personality, constantly intruding upon the lives of his characters, constantly addressing the reader — it is curious to note that nevertheless in those great chapters that are his masterpieces the author is invisible so that he attains that dispassionate ideal of authors which Flaubert so violently demanded of a writer: to be invisible, and to be everywhere as God in His universe is. We have thus the feeling now and then that Tolstoy's novel writes its own self, is produced by its matter, by its subject, not by a definite person moving a pen from left to right, and then coming back and erasing a word, and pondering, and scratching his chin through his beard.

- - -

moral e ética

Tolstoi é claro, as suas ideias sólidas e limpas, o bem e o mal definidos, o corpo e a mente, a simplicidade e a empatia, a terra e a honra, a alegria de celebrar a vida. em Guerra e Paz, muitos são os episódios memoráveis e que vibrarão pelo futuro, vivos para sempre em obras alheias e nos arquétipos da cultura comum. Andrei olhando para as nuvens, Anatol caindo do cavalo, Denisov roubando víveres para o seu pelotão, a alcoviteira. há também a shakespeariana varanda de Natasha. e Anna Karenina está lá no corpo de Ellen, Lévin e Kitty em Andrei e Natasha. das mais impressionantes 'cenas': Andrei atravessando o hospital militar. esta cena então perde-se na contagem de réplicas. aqui, este movimento que acompanha o andar do personagem é mais frequente, ou o olhar de quem está de lado a ver. em Karenina, o olhar começa no meio do grupo de pessoas e depois eleva-se para uma vista panorâmica de toda a sala, outro lugar entretanto comum do cinema.

não me admira que Nabokov tenha dedicado a vida à literatura russa: entre Gogol, Tolstoi, Dostoiesvky e Chekhov está na verdade quase tudo.  (não esquecendo o pai, Turgenev e ele próprio, Nabokov, o último ? nesse breve período genial) --que século glorioso ("One century, the nineteenth, had been sufficient for a country with practically no literary tradition of its own to create a literature which in artistic worth, in wide-spread influence, in everything except bulk, equals the glorious output of England or France, although their production of permanent masterpieces had begun so much earlier. This miraculous flow of esthetic values in so young a civilization could not have taken place unless in all other ramifications of spiritual growth nineteenth-century Russia had not attained with the same abnormal speed a degree of culture which again matched that of the oldest Western countries. I am aware that the recognition of this past culture of Russia is not an integral part of a foreigner's notion of Russian history. The question of the evolution of liberal thought in Russia before the Revolution has been completely obscured and distorted abroad by astute Communist propaganda in the twenties and thirties of this century. They usurped the honor of having civilized Russia.", diz o mestre.)

e continua:

"For an artist one consolation is that in a free country he is not actually forced to produce guidebooks. Now, from this limited point of view, nineteenth-century Russia was oddly enough a free country: books and writers might be banned and banished, censors might be rogues and fools, be-whiskered Tsars might stamp and storm; but that wonderful discovery of Soviet times, the method of making the entire literary corporation write what the state deems fit — this method was unknown in old Russia, although no doubt many a reactionary statesman hoped to find such a tool. A staunch determinist might argue that between a magazine in a democratic country applying financial pressure to its contributors to make them exude what is required by the so-called reading public — between this and the more direct pressure which a police state brings to bear in order to make the author round out his novel with a suitable political message, it may be argued that between the two pressures there is only a difference of degree; but this is not so for the simple reason that there are many different periodicals and philosophies in a free country but only one government in a dictatorship. It is a difference in quality. If I, an American writer, decide to write an unconventional novel about, say, a happy atheist, an independent Bostonian, who marries a beautiful Negro girl, also an atheist, has lots of children, cute little agnostics, and lives a happy, good, and gentle life to the age of 106, when he blissfully dies in his sleep — it is quite possible that despite your brilliant talent, Mr. Nabokov, we feel [in such cases we don't think, we feel] that no American publisher could risk bringing out such a book simply because no bookseller would want to handle it. This is a publisher's opinion, and everybody has the right to have an opinion. Nobody would exile me to the wilds of Alaska for having my happy atheist published after all by some shady experimental firm; and on the other hand, authors in America are never ordered by the government to produce magnificent novels about the joys of free enterprise and of morning prayers."

sem dúvida, mr. nabokov. poucas coisas foram tão assassinas como o comunismo russo.

'and tortured them too'

o abismo generacional de Fathers and Sons que a rapariga lê na praia: um detalhe estrutural.
(not only Americans and English...)