Maslova Recalls the Past

Tolstoy has the ability to create scenes that really have a way of leaving an impact on me. He has a balance which combines the right levels of drama and emotion and he really cracks the human character.

Again, we see his strength to articulate a human and his/her emotions in a way unlike other authors.

I’m not sure what attracts me to the scene below. Perhaps it illustrates a scene that could have played out in my own life.

From chapter XXXVII -

It was a warm, rainy, and windy autumn night. The rain now pelted down in warm, heavy drops, now stopped again. It was too dark to see the path across the field, and in the wood it was pitch black, so that although Katusha knew the way well, she got off the path, and got to the little station where the train stopped for three minutes, not before, as she had hoped, but after the second bell had been rung.

Hurrying up the platform, Katusha saw him at once at the windows of a first-class carriage. Two officers sat opposite each other on the velvet-covered seats, playing cards. This carriage was very brightly lit up; on the little table between the seats stood two thick, dripping candles. He sat in his closefitting breeches on the arm of the seat, leaning against the back, and laughed. As soon as she recognized him she knocked at the carriage window with her benumbed hand, but at that moment the last bell rang, and the train first gave a backward jerk, and then gradually the carriages began to move forward.

One of the players rose with the cards in his hand, and looked out. She knocked again, and pressed her face to the window, but the carriage moved on, and she went alongside looking in.

The officer tried to lower the window, but could not. Nekhludoff pushed him aside and began lowering it himself.

The train went faster, so that she had to walk quickly.

The train went on still faster and the window opened.

The guard pushed her aside, and jumped in.

Katusha ran on, along the wet boards of the platform, and when she came to the end she could hardly stop herself from falling as she ran down the steps of the platform. She was running by the side of the railway, though the first-class carriage had long passed her, and the second-class carriages were gliding by faster, and at last the third-class carriages still faster.

But she ran on, and when the last carriage with the lamps at the back had gone by, she had already reached the tank which fed the engines, and was unsheltered from the wind, which was blowing her shawl about and making her skirt cling round her legs. The shawl flew off her head, but still she ran on.

"…but still she ran on." Just beautiful.

There was a time in my life where I could have been Nekhludoff in that train…and someone that I loved and still love very much could have been Maslova running down the train platform.

I made a decision and “she” agreed with this decision and the scene above never played out for me.

I couldn’t leave her behind. She had too much potential and I loved her too much to not have her in my life.

The Awakening

I feel that at the speed I am reading I’ll certainly be through with this novel by the time you are born. Completing this novel will certainly give me the strength to conquer others. Yes, I use the word conquer. Although the writing/translation has been somewhat updated, it’s still not really in the modern style that I am accustomed to in my other readings. I can hardly wait to get to my Pevear and Volokhonsky translations.

So, I’m now on page 234 and what I am doing is placing marks in the book at pages which contain passages that I would like to comment upon.

So from chapter XXVIII – “The Awakening” – I discovered the following passages that moved me.

He stopped again, folded his hands in front of his breast as he used to do when a little child, lifted his eyes, and said, addressing some one: "Lord, help me, teach me, come enter within me and purify me of all this abomination."

He prayed, asking God to help him, to enter into him and cleanse him; and what he was praying for had happened already: the God within him had awakened his consciousness. He felt himself one with Him, and therefore felt not only the freedom, fullness and joy of life, but all the power of righteousness. All, all the best that a man could do he felt capable of doing.

His eyes filled with tears as he was saying all this to himself, good and bad tears: good because they were tears of joy at the awakening of the spiritual being within him, the being which had been asleep all these years; and bad tears because they were tears of tenderness to himself at his own goodness.

He felt hot, and went to the window and opened it. The window opened into a garden. It was a moonlit, quiet, fresh night; a vehicle rattled past, and then all was still. The shadow of a tall poplar fell on the ground just opposite the window, and all the intricate pattern of its bare branches was clearly defined on the clean swept gravel. To the left the roof of a coach-house shone white in the moonlight, in front the black shadow of the garden wall was visible through the tangled branches of the trees.

Nekhlyudov gazed at the roof, the moonlit garden, and the shadows of the poplar, and drank in the fresh, invigorating air.

"How delightful, how delightful; oh, God, how delightful" he said, meaning that which was going on in his soul.

There specifically two parts to the above passage that I’d like to comment upon. From the beginning of the selection to the sentence ending with the word “goodness”, a scene is played out that I feel I have seen myself almost recreate in my own life. I have found myself – at times – before I really began to explore my relationship with a spiritual entity “requesting” some sort of assistance with a problem I was facing. I cannot say that I felt any sort of weight lifted from me or a “spirit” entering into me. I can say though that did feel some sort of “power of righteousness” and I feel that was as a direct result of me placing my faith in the action of prayer as a possible solution to the problem I was facing. I felt that the act of praying was the best that I could do and that action itself was going to solve my problem…not necessarily a “God” or “spirit”. The feeling of righteousness gained just by the act of praying is a possible reason that led me down one of my paths of exploration of my spirituality and faith.

The second selection from that passage above is where Nekhlyudov is gazing at the scene outside of his window.

With my inability to completely relate to Nekhlyudov in the first part of the above passage, with this second part, I can totally relate.

It was a moonlit, quiet, fresh night; a vehicle rattled past, and then all was still. The shadow of a tall poplar fell on the ground just opposite the window, and all the intricate pattern of its bare branches was clearly defined on the clean swept gravel. To the left the roof of a coach-house shone white in the moonlight, in front the black shadow of the garden wall was visible through the tangled branches of the trees.

Nekhlyudov gazed at the roof, the moonlit garden, and the shadows of the poplar, and drank in the fresh, invigorating air.

It was on more than one occasion that I stood in the deepest night or in the earliest of mornings in the cold crisp snow and observed the earth just as above. It was either in Vermont or in Romania. And – in keeping with Tolstoy’s philosophy of disclosure – I was probably in some sort altered state of mind which I feel I could apply to Nekhlyudov and his particular mental state which forced him to seek the intervention of ‘God”.

And now WTFED:

“When you do not work you become bored. When you are bored, you sin”

HAPPY BIRTHDAY! YOU ARE 182 YEARS OLD!

A sign?

It's as if I'm being guided. Came in the mail today.