http://blog.oup.com/2010/10/war-and-peace2/ Academic insights for the thinking world. Tue, 21 May 2013 18:35:24 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4.2 http://blog.oup.com/2010/10/war-and-peace2/#comment-291339 OUPblog » Blog Archive » War and Peace Part Three: Deprivation Tue, 04 Sep 2012 20:08:37 +0000 http://blog.oup.com/?p=11553#comment-291339 [...] It has struck me that, in writing these blogs about Tolstoy’s War and Peace, I am responding primarily to catastrophic events: the burning of cities, devastating earthquakes, states of emergency. The Russians have a special word for this type of catastrophe—“stikhiya”—encompassing the elemental, the random, the apocalyptic. Stikhiya sweeps away the routine and the quotidian, and yet, most of us will not personally live at the epicenter of devastation. Even when my own house is plunged in days of cold and darkness, after the all clear is sounded, I am alive and well, and can venture out and drive through the main streets of town to survey the aftermath of the storm. The scenes of fallen trees, scattered branches, downed power lines, damaged homes, and clusters of rescue workers clearing the wreckage, unroll slowly before my rain swept windshield. I am looking at an image framed, at the camera panning across disaster scenes in an art film. Amy Mandelker has taught at UCLA, University of Southern California, Columbia, Brown, and Princeton Universities. Her books include Framing ‘Anna Karenina’: Tolstoy, the Woman Question & the Victorian Novel and Approaches to World Literature: Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’. She has revised the acclaimed Maude translation of War and Peace, available this October. You can read her previous blog posts here and here. [...] [...] It has struck me that, in writing these blogs about Tolstoy’s War and Peace, I am responding primarily to catastrophic events: the burning of cities, devastating earthquakes, states of emergency. The Russians have a special word for this type of catastrophe—“stikhiya”—encompassing the elemental, the random, the apocalyptic. Stikhiya sweeps away the routine and the quotidian, and yet, most of us will not personally live at the epicenter of devastation. Even when my own house is plunged in days of cold and darkness, after the all clear is sounded, I am alive and well, and can venture out and drive through the main streets of town to survey the aftermath of the storm. The scenes of fallen trees, scattered branches, downed power lines, damaged homes, and clusters of rescue workers clearing the wreckage, unroll slowly before my rain swept windshield. I am looking at an image framed, at the camera panning across disaster scenes in an art film. Amy Mandelker has taught at UCLA, University of Southern California, Columbia, Brown, and Princeton Universities. Her books include Framing ‘Anna Karenina’: Tolstoy, the Woman Question & the Victorian Novel and Approaches to World Literature: Tolstoy’s ‘Anna Karenina’. She has revised the acclaimed Maude translation of War and Peace, available this October. You can read her previous blog posts here and here. [...]

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