Collage 73

Lola Baltzell
from page 153-154 of original text
collage, acrylic paint
made 4/16/10

What a great piece to publish today, as beloved Laura is off to Paris for a couple of days! Lynn and my assignment is to publish the blog in the interim.

The interrelationship between Russia and France through Tolstoy's eyes is very interesting - the upper classes speak so much French, that some of them actually speak better French than Russian. There's a scene I read some time ago, where the Russians finally surrendered to Napoleon (in 1806, I think), and in that scene the Russian military leadership seems to be fawning all over the little French general, having banquets together and acting like old friends, while not too far away is a hospital full of lower-ranking Russian soldiers wounded and suffering and getting little to no treatment. We get this scene through Nikolai's eyes. Tolstoy doesn't like war, or hypocrisy.

Well, it's 5:30 in the morning. This blog is like the collage process - I don't know what I'm going to write until I write it. Then the process itself takes you somewhere, and you sit back and look at what you've put down, and say, "oh. now that's interesting!" ~Lulu