मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… . . 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Thursday, February 18, 2016

This Picture is as Good as a Perfect Work of Art

A. N. Wilson, 'Tolstoy', 1988:
"...Tolstoy's many letters to Bashilov make fascinating reading, emphasising not merely how much he cared about the finished book, but also how vividly he saw each scene and each character in his mind’s eye. If Bashilov sent a sketch which displeased Tolstoy, he got a quick letter back telling him what was wrong. They are not angry offensive letters, but they have an eye for everything:...The advice pours out, revealing that all the characters in War and Peace are just as real to Tolstoy- more real, really- than characters in real life.
..."


War and Peace miniseries on BBC seems to have become a major hit. This has led to a lot of interest in the book and its author all over again.

One of the most interesting things I recently learned about Tolstoy was how deeply he cared about the illustrations that went into the book. (This is in sharp contrast to most Marathi writers, who at best are indifferent to how their work is illustrated.)


"In the summer of 1866, as Leo Tolstoy prepared for his serialized novel War and Peace to be published as a single volume, he wrote to illustrator Mikhail Bashilov (M. S. Bashilov), hoping to commission drawings for the new edition of the novel, which he referred to by its original title, 1805. When Bashilov questioned a detail of historical verisimilitude—shouldn’t the turn-of-the-nineteenth century officers be wearing powdered wigs?—Tolstoy responded:

When I first began writing 1805, I discovered somewhere that powder had been done away with at the beginning of [Czar] Alexander’s reign, and I wrote on that basis; I later came across evidence, as you did, that it was still used in 1805. I didn’t know what to do. … Decide for yourself, whatever is most agreeable and convenient for you. In favor of drawing people wearing powder is the reason that if there is positive proof that powder was in use in 1805, I can correct the new edition and allude to powder and uniform. In fact it’s probably necessary to draw people wearing powder and in historically accurate uniform, to which I shall try to be faithful in the new edition...."

Now, see how Tolstoy gets the exact thing he is looking for, in the illustration of Pierre Bezukhov, from Bashilov.





















On the pictures above of Pierre, Tolstoy comments on April 4, 1866:

"His face is good (if only there could be more of a tendency to philosophizing in his forehead – little wrinkles or bumps over his eyebrows), but his body is small – it should be wider and stouter and more massive."....

and suggests...

"Pierre might be portrayed lying on a couch and reading a book, or, having torn himself away from his book, gazing distractedly and thoughtfully ahead through his glasses – he’d have leaned on one arm with the other tucked between his legs – actually, this is really better than him standing, though you, of course, know best."

  
All pictures by M. S. Bashilov (1821-1870)

And after seeing the result,  he writes:

"This picture is as good as a perfect work of art may possibly be; that is, it cannot be any better."

(courtesy: http://sites.utoronto.ca/…/tolstoy-and…/works/war/pierre.htm)