Antonomasia’s Reviews > War and Peace > Status Update

FINISHED.

that there is nothing but trees in that region. There is a character of that time (as there is of every epoch), which comes from the greater alienation of the upper circles from the other estates, from the reigning philosophy, from peculiarities of upbringing, from the habit of using the French language, and so on. And this character I have tried as far as I could to express.

If in our minds we have formed an opinion of the arbitrariness andcrude force characteristic of that time, it is only because the legends, memoirs, stories, and novels that have come down to us record only the most outstanding cases of violence and brutality. To conclude that the prevailing character of that time was brutality is as incorrect as it would be for a man who sees only treetops beyond a hill to conclude

in a greater degree than I find them now or at any other time. In those times, too, people loved, envied, sought truth, virtue, were carried away by passions; there was the same complex mental and moral life, sometimes even more refined than now, among the upper classes.

I have the following rejoinder. I know what this character of the time is that people do not find in my novel—the horrors of serfdom, the immuring of wives, the whipping of adult sons, Saltychikha,3 and so on; and this character of that time, which lives in our imagination, I do not consider correct and did not wish to express. Studying letters, diaries, legends, I did not find all the horrors of that brutality

That ideal of glory and greatness which consists not only in considering nothing that one does as bad, but in being proud of one’s every crime, ascribing some incomprehensible supernatural meaning to it

Not surprised that he interviewed battle participants. Those sections were excellent.

Fuuucking hell, that was a slog. [Epilogue pt2].
-It's not like I hadn't heard it was.
-Reminds me why I CBA with outdated academic non-fiction
-or with most abstract philosophy.

These rants about historiography show mostly that certain terms & concepts were needed: systems; complexity; chaos; feedback (esp re the figure who is produced / influenced by society and in turn influences and directs it).

Very much like the Victorian English ideal of family values (and he contrasts it with decadent French ideas and new fangled ideas that are essentially feminism)