War and Peace 2012

last try

https://i.imgur.com/981rllg.png

last try

seems pretty straightforward to me. what is your perplexity here?

what did "all the world know"? what's going on in that anecdote? there's obviously something. is it linked to the language difficulties? is the lack of real content the focus? that it's the most empty of social graces? but it really does appear to be a story, etc, even if it's not received.

is the implication that the dame tricked her into not riding in the carriage? am i meant to just be w/ the guests and not understand why he told the story (or why it needed to be told in russian)?

interpreting a tolstoy passage as intentionally vague / meaningless feels particularly unsatisfying

the world knew she only had one footman and the other one was a woman in disguise

but is there is an ironic connection between pretending to have two footmen and pretending to be a french sophisticate (or pretending to have a funny story to tell), or is russia, or the petrograd aristo/bureau class telling "moscow stories" at parties in (affectedly?) broken russian, pretending to have, or to be, something, or pretending that something else is something it is not, or is there nothing going on along these lines at all, or what? no idea rly.

ty that sounds about right to me. i didn't put together last night that she was pretending the maid was a footman and so revealing the long hair revealed that she was a woman.

dlh, you're right. The Russian aristocrats are all of a sudden trying to speak Russian because they've declared war on France. And the falseness is meant to mirror how Pierre (who is a legitimated bastard) is perceived by them, iirc.

they're all too glib unfortunately to really get a handle on the politics driving the war. hopefully he goes into it more later on.

Um... Let's just say that he talks about... what drives wars... a lot...

i'm sure - not too worried. presumably part of what drives wars are glib aristocrats.

"With the enemy's approach to Moscow the Moscovites' view of their situatoin did not grow more serious but on the contrary became even more frivolous, as alawys happens with people who see a great danger approaching. At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger since it is not in man's power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant. In solitude a man generally listens to the first voice, but in society to the second. So it was now with the inhabitants of Moscow. It was long since people had been as gay in Moscow as that year."

a memorable quote from the novel