The story of Tolstoy and his wife
The subject of the Tolstoy marriage came up in this thread, in the context of a discussion about Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina. In that book, Tolstoy presents a thinly-disguised more idealized version of his own marriage to his wife Sonya, told through the story of the relationship between the characters Levin and Kitty.
I read that book in high school, and I remember quite a bit of Levin and Kitty’s story. Much later I became extremely interested in the real-life tale of the Tolstoy marriage, an intense relationship that careened from love to hate and back again with some regularity, and featured the interaction of two complex and gifted individuals blessed with extraordinary energy and the ability to drive each other nearly mad.
It’s a story that’s not only fascinated me, but several authors. There are three major books on the subject, two of which I’ve read, and a movie I’ve seen that I don’t much like but that was highly praised. The two books I’ve read are titled Married to Tolstoy and Lev and Sonya, and the one I haven’t read is a tome by none other than William Schirer and is entitled Love and Hatred: The Tormented Marriage of Leo and Sonya Tolstoy.
That last title is no exaggeration.
It’s hard to summarize what was going on there, but I’ll just say that the Tolstoy marriage was not only one of the most intense (in every sense of the word) on record, but it was also one of the most amply documented. Both parties kept voluminous no-holds-barred diaries which they regularly left for each other to read.
The Tolstoys had thirteen living children – only eight of whom survived childhood – and if memory serves me, Sonya had several more pregnancies that ended in miscarriages. Meanwhile, Tolstoy later in life developed a moral or religious aversion to sex even in marriage, although he continued to engage in sexual relations with his wife quite regularly. He even wrote a long short story on the subject (“The Kreutzer Sonata”), and Sonya wrote a rebuttal. Just to get a little flavor of that story of Leo Tolstoy’s, here’s a description:
The work is an argument for the ideal of sexual abstinence and an in-depth first-person description of jealous rage. The main character, Pozdnyshev, relates the events leading up to his killing of his wife: in his analysis, the root causes for the deed were the “animal excesses” and “swinish connection” governing the relation between the sexes.
As for Sonya’s reaction, here’s what happened:
It was fair to say Sofiya was humiliated and incensed when [The Kreutzer Sonata] was published and her marriage to The Great Man became suspect, subject to nationwide speculation. (And yet such was her devotion she made a special plea to the Czar to allow its publication after Orthodox Church objections banned it)…
For a long time, it had been thought Sofiya kept her dismay to her private diary. But…it turns out she wrote an entire novella of her own that has languished unpublished and untranslated in the depths of the archives of the Tolstoy Museum in Moscow for more than a century.
…Just published for the first time in English in a translation by the scholar Michael R. Katz, it appears in a Yale University Press edition that includes not only Tolstoy’s original Kreutzer, not only Sofiya’s “answer novel,” not only a response document from Tolstoy’s son and from his daughter, but much more. The volume is called The Kreutzer Sonata Variations.
Here’s Sonya’s book, which I haven’t read, so I don’t know whether I would agree or disagree with the Slate author’s description:
Specifically, Sofiya pulls off a remarkable structural feat in mirroring Kreutzer’s wife-murder plot from the point of view of the murdered wife. And she does it with prose that (in English at least) comes across as graceful, emotionally intuitive, and heartbreaking.
Thematically, she counters her husband’s rage against sex and love with what is, cumulatively, a deeply affecting defense of love. A portrait of love from a woman’s point of view unlike any you can find (or I have found) in Tolstoy.
Meanwhile, in real life Sonya ran the large estate – with help, but it still required enormous work and energy – dealt with a bunch of eccentric Tolstoy-admiring hangers-on, fought her husband’s efforts to deprive their children of education and their inheritance, and copied out his manuscripts in longhand as a tireless secretary. I believe she copied out War and Peace something like eight or so times as it was being written and rewritten, deciphering Tolstoy’s handwriting and revisions, staying up long hours at night to do it. Over the years she is reported to have become more difficult and more emotionally distraught, and although it’s pretty easy to see why that may have happened, it couldn’t have been easy for Tolstoy either.
Commenter “Zaphod” mentions a famous incident: “Shouldn’t have shown his newlywed wife his diary.” You better believe it. Tolstoy was 34 when he married, almost twice the age of his 18-year-old fiancee, and he had lived a very dissolute life as opposed to her innocence at the time. Here’s how Wiki describes the incident, plus the literary reference in Anna Karenina:
On 17 September 1862 the couple became formally engaged after Tolstoy gave Sophia a written proposal of marriage, marrying a week later in Moscow. At the time of their marriage, Leo Tolstoy was well known as a novelist after the publication of The Cossacks. On the eve of their marriage, Tolstoy gave Sophia his diaries that detailed his sexual relations with female serfs. In Anna Karenina, 34-year-old Konstantin Levin, a semi-autobiographical character behaves similarly, asking his 19-year-old fiancée Kitty to read his diaries and learn of his past transgressions. The diary included the fact that Tolstoy had fathered a child by a woman who remained on the Yasnaya Polyana estate. In Anne Edwards’ Sonya: The Life of Countess Tolstoy, she describes Sophia as having a deep fear that Tolstoy would re-enter a relationship with the other woman.
Anne Edwards doesn’t just describe that fear; it features prominently in Sonya’s diaries over the years, and she could not avoid seeing the woman now and then on the estate where she still lived. Why did Tolstoy decide to have Sonya read his account? He wanted to unburden himself of a guilty conscience and decided full disclosure was necessary, but I believe he was putting his own needs way before those of his bride and ignoring how terribly it would affect her. The man who could write so eloquently about Kitty’s feelings wasn’t nearly as thoughtful about those of the real-life Sonya. At any rate, the decision to have her read the diary backfired, as did so many of the things they did to each other.
The 2009 movie about the last years of the Tolstoy marriage was called “The Last Station.” I saw it, but by then I was somewhat of an expert on the Tolstoy marriage, and although it starred Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren (two good actors) I found many things wrong with it, although perhaps I was being nitpicky. At any rate, the last chapter in their marriage – which did occur at a railway station, where Tolstoy died very shortly after leaving Sonya when he was 82 years old – is especially tragic.
For anyone interested – and not everyone will be, I’m pretty sure – I recommend any of this material. I also offer what I believe is the last picture ever taken of the couple together (just a few weeks before his “escape” and death), which I think expresses Sonya’s pain and desperate need to hold on, and Tolstoy’s resentment and resolute need to go:
In younger days, around the time they were married:
And if you’re interested in learning what drew these two together in the first place, Tolstoy explains in Anna Karenina in a scene that occurs between Levin and Kitty. I can’t remember where I read it (maybe in one of their diaries?), but I distinctly recall learning that this is based on something that actually happened:
A silence followed. [Kitty] was still drawing with the chalk on the table. Her eyes were shining with a soft light. Under the influence of her mood he felt in all his being a continually growing tension of happiness.
‘Ah! I’ve scribbled all over the table!’ she said, and, laying down the chalk, she made a movement as though to get up.
‘What! shall I be left alone—without her?’ he thought with horror, and he took the chalk. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said, sitting down to the table. ‘I’ve long wanted to ask you one thing.’
He looked straight into her caressing, though frightened eyes.
‘Please, ask it.’
‘Here,’ he said; and he wrote the initial letters, w, y, t, m, i, c, n, b, d, t, m, n, o, t. These letters meant, ‘When you told me it could never be, did that mean never or then?’ There seemed no likelihood that she could make out this complicated sentence; but he looked at her as though his life depended on her understanding the words. She glanced at him seriously, then leaned her puckered brow on her hands and began to read. Once or twice she stole a look at him, as though asking him, ‘Is it what I think?’
‘I understand,’ she said, flushing a little.
‘What is this word?’ he said pointing to the n that stood for never.
‘It means never,’ she said; ‘but that’s not true!’
He quickly rubbed out what he had written, gave her the chalk, and stood up. She wrote, t, i, c, n, a, d.
…He was suddenly radiant: he had understood. It meant, ‘Then I could not answer differently.’
He glanced at her questioningly, timidly.
‘Only then?’
‘Yes,’ her smile answered.
‘And n … and now?’ he asked.
‘Well, read this. I’ll tell you what I should like—should like so much!’ She wrote the initial letters, i, y, c, f, a, f, w, h. This meant, ‘If you could forget and forgive what happened.’
He snatched the chalk with nervous, trembling fingers, and, breaking it, wrote the initial letters of the following phrase, ‘I have nothing to forget and to forgive; I have never ceased to love you.’
She glanced at him with a smile that did not waver.
[NOTE: Sonya was an excellent early amateur photographer – in her copious free time? – when photography required a lot of technical know-how and patience. Here’s a book of many of her photographs; it includes some diary excerpts.]
Wow. Had to imagine untying less appealing. Sorry. Not my thing.
Obligatory Pokudin-Gorsky colour snap (bit more work than that) of Tolstoy at Yasnaya Polyana.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c6/L.N.Tolstoy_Prokudin-Gorsky.jpg
And the Emir of Bukhara just for the hell of it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Prokudin-Gorsky#/media/File:Prokudin-Gorskii-19.jpg
This is a magnificent image from a lost world.
I bet *he* didn’t have much trouble with his wives.
Might have to give Sonya’s book a look. Especially after this glowing Amazon review:
“Ain’t Love Grand. Not according to these stories. It makes marriage look like a nightmare. I did not enjoy the subject thou these stories are well written. It would be a good book to read before you contemplate marriage. Especially since marriage nowadays don’t last very long at all. If you are already married don’t even think about reading this book. It’s too late for you.”
A good way to while away an idle hour is to read Amazon reviews of famous literature. You’ll soon that Hamlet was on to something about Man being a Piece of Work.
Maybe oddly I have read War and Peace 2 times, seen every version possible and not anything else from Tolstoy. Maybe I should look into other works.
Happy Saturday evening to you.
The guy was obviously psychologically disturbed. Not sure narcissism is what best characterizes him, or OCD; but something along those lines or containing those tendencies.
No man with a past demands that his much younger wife be exposed to the details of his oat sowing years. She undoubtedly expects something of the sort – would be in fact skeptical of him if there were not some episodes or experience – in his previous life, but would be content with general information and reassurances. Many of us here have been there and done that and can testify to it on a personal level.
Of course no normal man keeps a diary of his sexual adventures in the first place [or probably any long term diary at all]; much less asks that a woman he is already engaged to, to wade through the squalid swamp of his guilty flailings.
The fact that Tolstoy was addicted to whoring also says something else about him and how he viewed other humans. They are outlets for his urges; and are mere characters in his internal dramas.
P8ss on Tolstoy; on his neurotic theatricality; on his self-centered and self-serving dramas; and on his obsessive compulsivity.
Although not a bad looking male in early middle age [as middle age was then accounted at 34] and once he lost the callow punkish look he had in the early clean shaven images; as a not yet very old man, his bulbous nosed and sagging face bore all the marks of the internal dissipation and obsessions which he never really freed himself of.
The protagonist did have a point about the Kreutzer Sonata being musical pornography.
I like the Perlman / Ashkenazy 1973 on Decca which I’ve got on an unripped CD in storage 8,000km away. Sadly it’s not on Tidal so have to make do with the also very good Repin / Argerich.
Speaking of Repins:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Repin#/media/File:Leo_Tolstoy02.jpg
and my all-time Deplorably favourite Repin:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ilja_Jefimowitsch_Repin_-_Reply_of_the_Zaporozhian_Cossacks_-_Yorck.jpg
IIRC Penguin Classics Paperbacks used this Repin for cover of their edition of the Kreutzer Sonata:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilya_Repin#/media/File:Menter_by_Repin.jpg
I’d forgotten that this famous C S Lewis piece begins with a quotation from War and Peace:
https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/
“May I read you a few lines from Tolstoy’s War and Peace?
When Boris entered the room, Prince Andrey was listening to an old general, wearing his decorations, who was reporting something to Prince Andrey, with an expression of soldierly servility on his purple face. “Alright. Please wait!” he said to the general, speaking in Russian with the French accent which he used when he spoke with contempt. The moment he noticed Boris he stopped listening to the general who trotted imploringly after him and begged to be heard, while Prince Andrey turned to Boris with a cheerful smile and a nod of the head. Boris now clearly understood—what he had already guessed—that side by side with the system of discipline and subordination which were laid down in the Army Regulations, there existed a different and more real system—the system which compelled a tightly laced general with a purple face to wait respectfully for his turn while a mere captain like Prince Andrey chatted with a mere second lieutenant like Boris. Boris decided at once that he would be guided not by the official system but by this other unwritten system…”
T wasn’t stupid and knew his way around.
What’s interesting is that both T and Sonya had the wit to know What Was Wrong. A torment of middle and old age, especially those with some grey matter between their ears is that Knowing is not Enough. Especially once the moving finger has moved on.
And The Inner Ring is more even apt today than when it was written.
Another tangled long-term marriage: Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Unlike Tolstoy, the Lone Eagle didn’t sow any premarital wild oats, but as a fervent believer in eugenics, he started three separate clandestine families in Germany and Switzerland beginning in 1957; he fathered a total of seven children by three different women, none of whom ever married. Meanwhile, he had had six children (including the baby kidnapped in 1932) by Anne, his American wife, whom he had selected for what he considered her “good genes.” She eventually became a noted author in her own right after years of Lindbergh’s control over her and the children; she had had to account for every cent of household expenses. As for the American children, Lindbergh saw them for only a few months every year, but he gave them lengthy to-do lists. He kept copies of the lists and checked them off the next time he saw the kids.
As for Anne, she is said to have had a three-year affair with her physician in the early 1950s, though she apparently never learned of her husband’s three secret families. The most detailed account of the Lindberghs’ marriage is in German: see Rudolf Schröck, Das Doppelleben des Charles A. Lindbergh, München, 2005. Their story (including their pre-WWII involvement in the American isolationist movement) may not have the high-voltage intensity of the Tolstoy marriage, but it certainly illustrates the effects of twentieth-century intellectual fads and international fame on a married couple.
“… and featured the interaction of two complex and gifted individuals blessed with extraordinary energy and the ability to drive each other nearly mad.”
Now THAT rings a bell.
Or as the bard notes
“I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!”
” I found many things wrong with it, although perhaps I was being nitpicky.”
Don’t apologize. It is one of your more enduring quirks.
And then there is the master’s touch of “a smile that did not waver.”
Gerard vanderleun:
Enduring or endearing? Or both?
Or is that nitpicky?
That Cossack depiction is hilarious. The expression on the face of the one doing the writing! I’ve probably looked like that a couple of times in my life while writing certain e-mails. 🙂
@PhilipSells:
Isn’t it! I remember first seeing it and thinking… “I am not alone. It’s going to be alright.”
Pretty sure I’ve posted this before, but here’s the context for anyone who is new to it:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reply_of_the_Zaporozhian_Cossacks
Sultan Mehmed IV to the Zaporozhian Cossacks: As the Sultan; son of Muhammad; brother of the sun and moon; grandson and viceroy of God; ruler of the kingdoms of Macedonia, Babylon, Jerusalem, Upper and Lower Egypt; emperor of emperors; sovereign of sovereigns; extraordinary knight, never defeated; steadfast guardian of the tomb of Jesus Christ; trustee chosen by God Himself; the hope and comfort of Muslims; confounder and great defender of Christians – I command you, the Zaporogian Cossacks, to submit to me voluntarily and without any resistance, and to desist from troubling me with your attacks.
—?Turkish Sultan Mehmed IV
—
Zaporozhian Cossacks to the Turkish Sultan!
O sultan, Turkish devil and damned devil’s kith and kin, secretary to Lucifer himself. What the devil kind of knight are thou, that canst not slay a hedgehog with your naked arse? The devil shits, and your army eats. Thou shalt not, thou son of a whore, make subjects of Christian sons. We have no fear of your army; by land and by sea we will battle with thee. Fuck thy mother.
Thou Babylonian scullion, Macedonian wheelwright, brewer of Jerusalem, goat-fucker of Alexandria, swineherd of Greater and Lesser Egypt, pig of Armenia, Podolian thief, catamite of Tartary, hangman of Kamyanets, and fool of all the world and underworld, an idiot before God, grandson of the Serpent, and the crick in our dick. Pig’s snout, mare’s arse, slaughterhouse cur, unchristened brow. Screw thine own mother!
So the Zaporozhians declare, you lowlife. You won’t even be herding pigs for the Christians. Now we’ll conclude, for we don’t know the date and don’t own a calendar; the moon’s in the sky, the year with the Lord. The day’s the same over here as it is over there; for this kiss our arse!
—Koshovyi otaman Ivan Sirko, with the whole Zaporozhian Host
Zaphod Critical Opinion FWIW: Khorosho!
This is some very pretty wording:
“steadfast guardian of the tomb of Jesus Christ; trustee chosen by God Himself; the hope and comfort of Muslims; confounder and great defender of Christians”
Never had much interest in people who shot themselves in the foot–likely in pursuit of their own wonderfulness–and whose ricochets most predictably hit bystanders.
Metaphor alert.
I find myself in full agreement with DNW’s assessment of Tolstoy.
Perhaps we need a thread on Great Writers Who Weren’t Assholes.
But how long would it be?
Zaphod:
First the list of Great Writers would have to be generated.
And then – well, “assholes” would have to be defined. What’s the measure of a non-asshole? Happy marriage? Happy children? Good friends? All of the above?
“Great Writers” – or great artists of any type – tend to be complicated characters.
That’s also true of the non-great, quite often.
DNW:
Tolstoy also had a gambling problem in early life. He had a midlife crisis, too, and after that he set out trying to live a selfless, religious, and frugal life. That caused huge problems,too, especially to his family. A man of extremes.
Male writers are certainly known to keep journals – but then, I suppose you wouldn’t consider them normal men. If I remember correctly about Tolstoy’s discussions of his sexual affairs in his diaries, I don’t think they were at all detailed. Just references to having seen someone (or having slept with someone) on a certain day, or something like that.
One of the odd things about Tolstoy and some other writers is the combination of great sensitivity to the feelings of others that is demonstrated in his fiction, and insensitivity in his life.
@Neo:
“First the list of Great Writers would have to be generated.
And then – well, “assholes” would have to be defined. What’s the measure of a non-asshole? Happy marriage? Happy children? Good friends? All of the above?”
Endearing! Definitely.
“Great Writers” – or great artists of any type – tend to be complicated characters.
That’s also true of the non-great, quite often.”
^— This.
These two High IQ Autists wrote a great book which touches upon it:
https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyday-dp-0197551955/dp/0197551955/
“One of the odd things about Tolstoy and some other writers is the combination of great sensitivity to the feelings of others that is demonstrated in his fiction, and insensitivity in his life.”
I figure we’ve all only got so much cognitive energy to budget here and there. Squeeze the balloon in one place and it’ll bulge out in another. And mental interpersonal resources get particularly stretched during times of ‘enlightened’ social change when the rule book is thrown out and there’s less autopilot.
Additionally the naturally sociable don’t have to study and analyse interactions. They just do them. A talented Spergy Fellow might well learn to understand others better than his own motives and interactions.
@ 8:38: Ah, looks like he kept his cell phone handy, tucked into the top of his boot.
Neo says, “Male writers are certainly known to keep journals – but then, I suppose you wouldn’t consider them normal men.”
Speaking of men who keep journals (as distinct from journalists, of course), I’d be interested in your take on Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, brothers who not only wrote their books and kept a journal together, but did not spend more than a day apart in their adult lives. They were parted only when Jules died in 1870. I remember reading somewhere that their writing styles are so similar that it’s difficult to tell which brother wrote which journal entry.
As for “not normal men”– that’s putting it mildly. There’s a 2015 review by Tara Isabella Burton in The Paris Review of the diary of the brothers de Goncourt. Chronicling literary Paris from 1851 to 1896, “The Journal of the de Goncourts” features enough searing bons mots and scandal mongering to make Gawker look like a Sunday school brochure. In one entry from 1852, the famed cross-dressing novelist and amoureuse George Sand threatens to “publish an account” of the behavior of her son-in-law, the sculptor Clésinger; he is quick to reply: “then I’ll do a carving of your backside. And everybody’ll recognize it.” The novelist, playwright, and bohemian Villiers de l’Isle-Adam is described as having “the face of an opium addict or a masturbator”; Edmond de Goncourt dismisses Oscar Wilde’s homosexuality, like his poetry, as a “plagiarism from Verlaine.”
Whether or not one is familiar with the poets, novelists, and absintheuses of Haussmannian Paris, to read the Goncourt brothers is to plunge headlong into a world of bitter rivalries and bitterer friendships, in which every gathering around a café table on the Grands Boulevards is a chance to raise one’s status in the byzantine literary hierarchy.
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/07/21/whats-the-use/
What I couldn’t help noting– in light of the current obsession with COVID– is Burton’s comments on the hypochondria that pervaded the Goncourts’ literary circle: “Again and again, we watch as the best of French letters become preoccupied with an illness—often, though not always, brought on by venereal disease or drink—hold court on a deathbed, and then succumb. Théophile Gautier, Flaubert, Turgenev himself—all these and more have perished by the journal’s last entry.”
Well, anyway, here’s another case study of male diarists for your collection.
PA Cat:
Doesn’t sound much like hypochondria, if they all were dying.
I think you have spoken with great precision, be it consciously or unconsciously, by using the term “sensitivity to” rather than “consideration for”, others’ feelings or needs.
These ” artists” you refer to, have the suspicious neurotic obsessive’s ( or brutalist’s) interest in, and developed skill at, discerning and analyzing motives and weaknesses, and exploiting them. Where we average types politely avert our eyes and pretend not to notice, they having no inhibitions of that sort go straight for the jugular.
Hence the ability to generate descriptive scenes of great pathos; and, if coupled to their own imaginings and yearnings, occasionally transitory sensitivity and hope.
But essentially, that kind of man is a vulgar if dissatisfied reductionist at heart; a characteristic which has one virtue at least in allowing him to see more clearly the desperate and existentially hopeless and tragic aspect of the human animal’s social strivings.
Coming from rule-bound societies where people are further trapped by ritualistic behaviors and imposed expectations and where the gain dial is turned up enough in people so that anyone not willfully blind can see the psychological needle gyrating wildly, merely heightens the dramatic effect. Adds suffocating pressure.
And there one gets the basic types in that world: various members of a society of devils wearing human masks; all trying to manipulate and devour each other, all fated to be devoured themselves eventually. But living by a fiction, some of them anyway, that they inhabit a better world than they do, and that an ultimate escape may be possible.
Of course escape might actually be possible. Just not for them, being what they in truth are.
PA+Cat…re Anne Lindbergh, I have the impression that she had a serious crush on Antoine de St-Exupery.
david foster: Anne Lindbergh was indeed fascinated with the author of Le Petit Prince, but according to those who knew her best, she did not act on it.
My favorite greeting card on the subject of love hate relationships: “I’m so miserable without you, it’s almost like you’re here”
Googled it and found out those are lyrics by Billy Ray Cyrus
I really don’t care about Tolstoy’s personal life. It’s only relevant because he and wife made it so.
What’s interesting and truly nice, this happened before FB, Twitter, TMZ, etc.
Today, Tolstoy would be vilified and his works censored.
Eva Marie,
My wife and I have a decades long running joke on that theme: If one of us mentions some type of pain or symptom that could be related to a fatal disease the other will reply, “Oh no… You’re not getting out of this that easily!”
We have friends who, early in their marriage, developed a sound strategy for preventing divorce. Their rule was, either would freely grant a divorce if requested, but the requestor had to take the children.
@PA+Cat:
Re: George Sand’s Behind
Have you seen this before?
https://ciphermysteries.com/2010/05/16/george-sands-cryptography
Rufus: My favorite joke about just this is: A couple in their 90’s are before a judge, asking for a divorce. He says, “You’ve been married for so long. Why a divorce now?” The wife replies, “We had to stay together until the children died.”
Many thanks to Zaphod and the others whose discussion of the Zaporozhian Cossacks sent me off to do research on the event.
What a wonderful thing! It fits so completely with one of my favorite aspects of human nature. And Repin so expertly captured the story on canvas.
Beautiful! Wonderful! Hurray for humans!!
Regarding the Cossacks, when reading about their fun it brought to mind John Cleese’s French Knight’s antagonization of King Arthur in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.”
I wonder if it wasn’t an inspiration for that gag?
They threaten to fart in his general direction IIRC.
There’s a faint whiff of another of Repin’s contemporaries, Vereshchagin, in the opening vistas and aftermath of battle cinematography in the Anna K adaptation discussed previously.
And *he* actually did die during the Russo-Japanese war when the battleship Petropavlovsk was sunk by a Japanese mine off Port Arthur.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_battleship_Petropavlovsk_(1894)
Japanese Ukiyo-e style depictions of events during that war are quite the thing!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_battleship_Petropavlovsk_(1894)#/media/File:Sinking_of_the_Petropavlovsk.jpg
Richard Burton – no, not that one – the one of search for the origin of the Nile fame, also kept journals where he kept copious notes of the strange and deviant sexual practices of the natives he encountered. Upon his death his wife had them all destroyed . in order to protect his eternal memory.
@Xylourgos:
Good point. Sir Richard did get around. Byron might have called him an amateurish try-hard though.
“kept journals where he kept copious notes of the strange and deviant sexual practices of the natives he encountered.”
The Our Greatest Ally Fan Club members here present will be amused to learn that back in the early 2000s when there was a UN Peacekeeping Force in East Timor, the Jordanian contingent had to leave under a cloud because the locals took exception to them having their ways with the livestock.
Frank Harris, who at one stage could do no wrong, pretty much cancelled himself with his autobiography which included much about the local colour he went out of his way to seek out on his travels — which included the Americas, Europe, Africa, and the Far East.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Harris
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_Life_and_Loves
He was a strange one. Bought himself a stomach pump so that he didn’t have to diet. That’s in My Life and Loves, too.
}}} featured the interaction of two complex and gifted individuals blessed with extraordinary energy and the ability to drive each other nearly mad.
Sounds a lot like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Both fantastic, gifted actors, but, if you’ve seen “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?” you can pretty much guess what happened when those two went at each other with hammer and tongs.
There were other movies where they had similarly extreme behavioral differences “in-role” (although I have not seen it in 45 years, “Hammersmith Is Out” comes to mind).
That Burton was an incredible actor is best noted as his sans-Elizabeth, tortured psychologist in Equus. You can hear the pain of the character merely from his voice.
}}} Xylourgos
Amusing that we brought up a pair of different Richard Burtons on this topic. 😛
}}} Why did Tolstoy decide to have Sonya read his account? He wanted to unburden himself of a guilty conscience and decided full disclosure was necessary, but I believe he was putting his own needs way before those of his bride and ignoring how terribly it would affect her.
Indeed. Honesty in a relationship seems distinctly important, but brutal honesty does even poorer with lovers than it does with friends.
At the very least, if you’re going to say something unpleasant to another whom you care about, you have to do your best to soften the blow. To produce such honesty by a frankly written diary just ain’t happening.
Sometimes it’s important to provide a reality check for a loved one above all other things — but the best first attempts to address the problem via such a slap in the face are always best done with a velvet glove.
And part of that is to realize that people are 24″ of plate steel up front, but soft and squishy inside. So a stinging flick of a finger is better than a baseball bat when you’re past that outer defense.
OBloody; DNW:
Good analogy to Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor for the intensity and the ability to drive each other crazy, over a long period of time. And they were in the spotlight, too, albeit a different sort of spotlight (and of course very different from the Tolstoys in many many other ways).
DNW, I put you in the salutation here because I remembered that Richard Burton kept a diary for much of his life, some of which has been published. He was an excellent writer.
Do you reckon Richard Burton as a “normal” man, or Elizabeth Taylor as a normal woman?
And I am not speaking here of mastery of acting techniques or having resonant baritone voices as disqualifying. Nor even of heterosexual orientation per se as qualifying.
I am referring to their public behaviors and what that relays about their mentalities and moral sensibilities.
Now having said that, I have seen Burton interviewed where he was apparently not only sober, but sobered by life somewhat. And he spoke almost movingly about his father.
At that moment he reminded me somewhat of a “Frank Sinatra” type, i.e. someone who if you could have stripped away the ass-hole-ness while he was living, one would have been better appreciated when live, rather than dead.
As it is, I have only a limited ability to tolerate self-absorbed drunks. Or drunks of any kind, for that matter. Those with some verbal facility are probably the worst.
If those stories about the brawls of the kitchen-sink-drama, angry-young-men generation, of British actors were true, they would all have been dead at the hands of those they annoyed long before they ever showed up dissipated and well into an obviously enfeebled middle age on late night talk shows.
I guess being an actor,you have to know what kind of bar to pick your fights in.
Some public figures or say, actors, who descend into alcoholism you feel bad for. From our childhood TV viewing, population maybe, William Holden, or Alan Ladd. Others, Tracy or Bogart, or Glenn Ford, you might kind of shrug at.
And some celebrities you just say to hell with them and food riddance.
Fortunately for them, and the rest of the world, I’m not God, and so what I say goes, has an enforceable limit of about 6 feet.
Much less than 6 feet, it is basic arithmetic.
Neo,
Please delete my last comment.
Another attempt – and I know better than to try – to use the problematic hand-held.
An attempt to edit in a block quote close, led into a wilderness of warnings, sluggish responses, back tracking to the wrong page … etc.
The comment is not worth the effort to read, much less for me to have written
DNW:
I originally started a much longer comment to you, but I was in a hurry to get to writing my posts and I cut it short. But this is more or less where I was going with it – I was going to add something like this:
But of course, you wouldn’t consider Burton “normal.” Your definition of “normal” would almost certainly be different from mine. Or perhaps I’m just less interested than you in defining “normal” for the world, and less certain that I know what it is.
Of course Richard Burton isn’t average and he was very far from perfect. He was indeed an alcoholic, a severe one. He also was hugely gifted and highly accomplished in his field, and from the evidence of his diaries (excerpts from which I’ve read) very smart and articulate. Average? No. But how abnormal was he, and was keeping a diary a symptom of that abnormality?
You write, “I have only a limited ability to tolerate self-absorbed drunks. Or drunks of any kind, for that matter.” Well, in that way you probably are normal. I’m not keen on them either, but then again, I don’t have to live with one, and to listen to them or to read what they write is sometimes fascinating if they are brilliant and gifted, which they sometimes are.
DNW:
I responded to your comment before I saw your request to delete it. I’ll fix the problem with the indent instead – unless you absolutely would prefer I delete it, in which case I’ll also delete my own response.
Ok, Neo. Thanks for the fix and … your measured response.
You need to find another hobby.
https://shortboxing.com/average-reach-of-a-pro-boxer/
A normal man with arms that are 6 feet long, fantastic, and how profound. Because the implied threat was the ability to strike an opponent 6 feet away. A true manly man, or an orangatan? The primate philosopher? 🙂