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joe_olipo 's review for:
War and Peace
by Leo Tolstoy
prescient work from the future past.
not a precursor, but precisely what later becomes the critical theory response to 'enlightenment historians', "These Napoleonic histories are overdetermined," (my paraphrase) though imputing this understanding to national character.
Tolstoy already possesses the advanced quality of circumscribing the conversations in the drawing room/social gathering which would later appear fresh as the ellipses in the work of Celine.
knows well the establishment of dramatic irony for the sake of a joke. in the battle before Austerlitz soldiers and generals as "paper tigers" who run from battle pretend to issue orders and so on. in the confrontation between an unrecognized brave (Andrei) and a boastful Rostov, admirable authorial restraint in restricting the former's speech.
Pierre's brief Masonic diary as almost precisely the self-involved work of our 21st century authors(!) Tao Lin...???
yet Helen does not exist (as a character) and is killed off-screen?
on calculus and the World Spirit -
not a precursor, but precisely what later becomes the critical theory response to 'enlightenment historians', "These Napoleonic histories are overdetermined," (my paraphrase) though imputing this understanding to national character.
Tolstoy already possesses the advanced quality of circumscribing the conversations in the drawing room/social gathering which would later appear fresh as the ellipses in the work of Celine.
knows well the establishment of dramatic irony for the sake of a joke. in the battle before Austerlitz soldiers and generals as "paper tigers" who run from battle pretend to issue orders and so on. in the confrontation between an unrecognized brave (Andrei) and a boastful Rostov, admirable authorial restraint in restricting the former's speech.
Pierre's brief Masonic diary as almost precisely the self-involved work of our 21st century authors(!) Tao Lin...???
yet Helen does not exist (as a character) and is killed off-screen?
on calculus and the World Spirit -
To comprehend the laws of this movement is the goal of history. But in order to comprehend the laws of the continuous movement of the sum of all individual wills, human reason allows for arbitrary, discrete units. The first method of history consists in taking an arbitrary series of continuous events and examining it separately from others, whereas there is not and cannot be a beginning to any event, but one event always continuously follows another. The second method consists in examining the actions of one person, a king, a commander, as the sum of individual wills, whereas the sum of individual wills is never expressed in the activity of one historical person.and what would later become the Marxist analysis of burning of Moscow arising from the material conditions of the time -
Historical science in its movement always takes ever smaller units for examination, and in this way strives to approach the truth. But however small the units that history takes, we feel that allowing for a unit that is separate from another, allowing for the beginning of some phenomenon, and allowing for the notion that all individual wills are expressed in the actions of one historical person, is false in itself.
Any conclusion of historical science, without the least effort on the part of criticism, falls apart like dust, leaving nothing behind, only as a result of the fact that criticism selects as an object for observation a larger or smaller discrete unit, which it always has the right to do, because any chosen historical unit is always arbitrary.
Only by admitting an infinitesimal unit for observation—a differential of history, that is, the uniform strivings of people—and attaining to the art of integrating them (taking the sums of these infinitesimal quantities) can we hope to comprehend the laws of history.
"The French ascribed the burning of Moscow au patriotisme féroce de Rastopchine; the Russians—to the savagery of the French. Yet in reality, with regard to the burning of Moscow, there were not and could not be any reasons for placing the responsibility for it on one or several persons. Moscow burned down because it was put into conditions in which any wooden town would have to burn down, regardless of whether the town had or did not have a hundred and thirty poor-quality fire pumps. Moscow had to burn down, because its inhabitants left it, and as inevitably as a pile of wood chips has to catch fire if sparks pour down on it for several days. A wooden town in which, in the presence of the inhabitants who own the houses and of the police, there are fires almost every day during the summer, cannot help burning down when there are no inhabitants there, but troops smoking pipes, making campfires on Senate Square out of the Senate's chairs, and cooking meals twice a day. Billet troops in the villages of some area during peacetime, and the number of fires in that area increases at once. How much greater, then, is the possibility of fires in an empty wooden town in which foreign troops are billeted? Le patriotisme féroce de Rastopcbine and the savagery of the French are not to blame for anything here. Moscow caught fire from the pipes, the kitchens, the carelessness of enemy soldiers, who were living in houses they did not own. If there was arson (which is very doubtful, because no one had any reason for it, and in any case it was troublesome and dangerous), that arson cannot be taken as the cause, since without any arson it would have been the same."although perhaps the longest novel I have read which does not pass the Bechdel test (and I am only only partially facetious).