War and Peace: 2019

I assumed it was either something about the difference between ladies who were homosexual and men who were or (and I am no theologian - @colon_closed_bracket ?) that possibly trying to use the Bible to condemn lesbianism is a pretty modern US Bible Belt type of take. I mean there are loads of Christians with zero issue with homosexuality as it stands…

The superhero we need, TBF.

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Must be weird if you have that finger tattoo as a result of the moustache thing, kind of like if every time you answered the phone to your mates you still answered ‘WASSSUUUUUUUUUPPP’ like those Budweiser ads from ages back.

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Yes, probably belongs in the outdated cultural references thread

Finally getting some war!

Also, I was a few days behind, but this thread convinced me I was about to encounter some hot girl on girl action. @1101010 misled me and I would like my money back.

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Well I’m sorry mate, YMMV but I felt it was significantly hotter than some dusty mid-19th C popular tome would be expected to contain :smiley:

Chapter 6 down. It feels like this bit of the novel isn’t benefitting so much from the format as we keep chopping up the ACTION and there’s little character stuff

I like it when Pierre is in it

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Denisov. Worra twat

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Don’t understand why Tolstoy’s given him a speech impediment. What exactly does it add to his character?

Why does Dolokhov get a free pass for his bad behaviour? Is it just because of his strong army bants? He’s like a character from a bad comedy movie

I wonder about translating this sort of thing. Like is it the same in Russian?

Part 2, Chapter 8 down: I didn’t really understand the bridge thing for most of this. First it seemed clear they wanted to destroy the bridge last chapter or so, but here it felt like they were on both sides of it… Then by the end they’re all on one side…

Yeah I don’t get it either. Apparently the translation that men were ‘knocked out’ is actually supposed to mean that they died, which makes the commander’s attitude way worse.

Yeah I’m struggling to visualise what’s going on on and around the bridge

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By the end I guess the point was everyone was retreating and the bridge was the bottleneck but I wasn’t fully clear why these particular characters were trying to get through faster. At the start I felt like there were two streams going each way and they were trying to get to the enemy side to prepare for battle.

Part 2 Chapter 9 and can we talk about how much he needs an editor?!

Here’s the opening sentence

Pursued by the French army of a hundred thousand men under the command of Bonaparte, encountering a population that was unfriendly to it, losing confidence in its allies, suffering from shortness of supplies, and compelled to act under conditions of war unlike anything that had been foreseen, the Russian army of thirty-five thousand men commanded by Kutuzov was hurriedly retreating along the Danube, stopping where overtaken by the enemy and fighting rearguard actions only as far as necessary to enable it to retreat without losing its heavy equipment.

I mean what the fuck?! And a few sentences later we enter the same problem, what I can only describe as a “comma coma”:

Instead of an offensive, the plan of which, carefully prepared in accord with the modern science of strategics, had been handed to Kutuzov when he was in Vienna by the Austrian Hofkriegsrath, the sole and almost unattainable aim remaining for him was to effect a junction with the forces that were advancing from Russia, without losing his army as Mack had done at Ulm.

There is so much worse to come.

He seems to be under the impression that he has a head for military theory. He doesn’t.

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Having now finished the chapter, which sorts its sentences out, it’s a rum do. Talk of them being on the left bank of the Danube which would surely be the French side, yet they are retreating.

And in fact mostly it’s a river that bisects Europe into a North and a South side, so it seems even less clear.

Hard to feel sorry for Andrew after how he’s treated his wife. Wonder if Tolstoy thinks you’re meant to feel sympathy to him as a character because maybe in the 19th C this sort of behaviour to your wife was fine?

The first one reads much more like a history textbook than a well-crafted novel…

I was wondering about this today, re: the bridge section already discussed.

So much of what he’s describing is unclear - and not in a war-is-chaos way - but seemingly due to poor description and structure.

I’d wondered if maybe I was alone in finding it confusing but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Then I thought perhaps it reads beautifully in Russian, but across this thread we’re reading a few different translations, and the book has been subject to intense criticism and discussion for 150 years so plenty of time and textual interrogation to build a brilliant translation.

So far the Dostoyevsky I’ve read runs rings around Tolstoy in terms of characterisation, description, syntax etc.

However, fully aware that with another 1,250 pages to go this is the equivalent of pronouncing judgement after reading 25 pages of your average novel.

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