Re: WAR AND PEACE by Tolstoy

On Sat, 1 Feb 2025, Paul S Person wrote:

>
Too long and boring for me. I prefer Dostoyesky any day of the week. Crime and
punishment is excellent! Borther Karamazov also good. The idiot I found so-so.

>
I enjoy Bondarchuck's /War and Peace/ every time I see it. I just wish
it were complete. The novel was not memorable.
>
/The Idiot/ was interesting, but ultimately pointless. If an actual
idiot had been involved, that might have helped.

This is the truth!

I've experienced /Crime and Punishment/ both in novel and Classics
Illustrated form. Somewhere, probably in a class, I was fed the
factoid that the protagonist turns himself in because the detective
wears him down. Imagine my surprise when I last read it to realize the
true reason.

I like to meditate on conscience and morality when reading it. In fact, when I
watched Trumps coronation ceremony I was wondering how many in that room have
blood on their hands, directly or indirectly and if any of them ever are
bothered by it? Commanding militaries, sending boys into their deaths is not for
me.

/The Brothers Karamazov/ was read as part of the collection called The
Great Books of the Western World. I didn't much like it. Perhaps if he
had finished the projected follow-ups it would have made more sense.
The /only/ character I had any concern about (any empathy with) was a
small boy who dies. None of the brothers was worth reading about,
IMHO.

Yes, it does have some boring parts. Overall, the spiritual themes are
interesting.

I also read other Dostoyevsky novels, notably /The Devils/ which, like
/The Secret Agent/ (which Hitchcock filmed under the title /Saboteur/,
having used /The Secret Agent/ for a completely different spy story
earlier), is about The Revolution. One thing I noticed in a few of
them were references to Jesuits trying to convert Orthodox believers
to Roman Catholicism. This makes me wonder if the famous
"anti-Christian" essay in /The Brothers Karamazov/ is not actually an
"anti-Roman-Catholicism" essay, since it is clearly about a Roman
Catholic institution. But I have no idea if this is the case or not.

Wasn't the slavophile movement in full bloom this time? Also, it is interesting
how Putin today is reviving this spirit in order to culturally separate from the
west, and create the feeling of a threatening enemy ready to pounce and destroy
the soul of russia.
Nothing new under the sun.