There goes the nobility.
Petya...together with the diminished but still quite large crowd, stood before the palace, looking through the palace windows while the sovereign dined, expecting something further, and equally envious both of the dignitaries who drove up to the entrance, to the sovereign's dinner, and of the palace footmen who served at the table and flitted past the windows. -- p. 675 in P/V
I am so thrilled that Team Tolstoy will be showing at Yasnaya Polyana.
Lucy Arrington
Yesterday my wife and I arrived at Lola and Mark's place "out west" for a short visit that coincides with Lola's birthday tomorrow. It's the first time we've seen each other in nine years. We had been thinking about driving in to Boston to visit the Team Tolstoy studios today, but the weather is too perfect to spend 5-plus hours battling holiday-weekend traffic in a car. So we will stay in the hills, but I do regret not getting the chance to see the studio and an idea of what it might be like to work more directly with Lola and the other members of Team Tolstoy.
(The following comment contains a major SPOILER regarding War and Peace!)
Pierre (and Tolstoy) go off on a numerology tangent: At the end of this chapter, Pierre discovers that if individual letters are given certain values, the words "L'Empereur Napoleon" add up to 666. Then he tries out various permutations of his own name and eventually finds what he hopes to find: namely that "L'Russe Besuhov" also add up to 666. This is obviously deeply significant, because according to the Book of Revelations, 666 is the mark of the beast. Pierre concludes that it is his role to assassinate Napoleon.
We have an interesting -- and very good -- problem today. W have 2 collages with the same number! This happened once before. When we were hanging our first show in December 2010, lo and behold we had repeats as well. On the left we have Lynn's which features the spine of an old grammar book for French speakers to learn Spanish. Adrienne's is on the right.
Lucy Arrington
Suffering, and with a sinking heart, as always in a crowd, Natasha walked in her violet dress with black lace as women know how to walk-- the more calmly and majestically, the more pained and ashamed she felt at heart. She knew she was pretty, and she was not mistaken, but that did not cause her joy as it used to. 
"But the happy day came, and when Natasha, on that Sunday so memorable for her, in a white muslin dress, came home after communion, for the first time in many months she felt calm and not burdened by the life that lay ahead of her." -p. 659 in Pevear/Volokhonsky 
Lucy Arrington
No matter how silly or stupid or vexing Natasha's behavior is throughout the book, I have a soft spot for her. In this passage, she is seriously ill, overcome by depression brought on by learning of Anatole's secret marriage. Her loved ones rush about, making sure the doctor's orders are fulfilled, and the doctors shook their heads and prescribed relief of all sorts contained in "not-so-harmful pills". I love how Tolstoy describes this scene, the doctors '[satisfying] that eternal human need for the hope of relief, the need for compassion
Well, it's time to find a Russian tutor! I got an email from Yasnaya Polyana yesterday. We are invited to visit in late August for 4 days during an international conference. Mr. Tolstoy will be there so it will be a good time to connect with him. October is also an option, but he travels a lot so it might be difficult to find another for-sure slot. So we are all scurrying around, trying to put together time and money to take a 10 day trip. My husband Mark calls Yasnaya Polyana "ground zero" because Leo himself was born there, wrote all his masterpieces and is buried there as well. So it will be quite a pilgrimage.
Lucy Arrington
"The sun had only just appeared in the clear space under a cloud when the wind died, as if not daring to ruin this lovely summer morning after the storm; the drops were still falling, vertically now, and all became still. The sun came out completely, appeared on the horizon, and vanished into the long, narrow cloud that stood above it. A few minutes later, the sun appeared still more brightly on the upper edge of the cloud, tearing it's edge. Everything lit up and glistened. And along with this light, as if in response to it, cannon fire rang out ahead." -p. 651 in Pevear/Volokhonsky
We are waiting to hear back from Yasnaya Polyana regarding
Lucy Arrington
Lucy Arrington
Lots of news here from Team Tolstoy.
On these pages we have another of Tolstoy's philosophical musing...
Every time we hit another "century" mark (set of 100 collages), it gives me pause to think. The first time we hit 100, we hung them on the wall of our first studio, amazed by our accomplishment. That was late last summer. Now today we are posting #399. Last Friday it was just Lynn and in the studio. We were working away and I handed her another page. She turned to me and said, "do you realize that this is #500?". When complete, we will have made just over 750 collages. So that means we're 2/3 done. Rather than feel elated, felt a touch of emptiness.
This features a stamp from the former Soviet Union. Chris Carney Johnson, one of our contributors from Atlanta, sent us a sizable collection of them. some months ago. Much like the question of whether it is OK to re-purpose the text of War and Peace, we had the same question about re-purposing the stamps. They are a piece of history. So we didn't use them for a few weeks while we mulled over whether we should or not. So this is the first appearance of one of them.
I am going to break with our usual attempt to match the artist with their words -- I will write for Adrienne. I really like one particular passage here. Hope you don't mind, Adrienne!
Over and over again you see this ambivalent attitude of the Russians and their relationship to the French. Even in the midst of preparing for battle, one of the Russian imperial adjutants, Chernyshov, is reading a French novel. In this scene, some Russian officers are also speaking in German. I used some old German text here. -- Lola
Some time ago Otto made a collage with burned edges. So this is a way to connect with him, even though he works in solitude in Berlin. We had made a lot of collages on this studio day. I was the last to leave the studio, and decided that it would be fun to burn some edges. Our studio neighbor is a famous photographer who specializes in disasters, mostly man-made. I borrowed matches from him as he also smokes a cigar once in a while. As I was burning away, I recalled an incident when I was a child. I and my brother set fire to a shed in the neighborhood while playing with matches. Take away message -- don't leave me alone in the studio! -- Lola
Now that we have an invitation to show this project at Ground Zero, i.e. Yasnaya Polyana, the Tolstoy Estate and Museum in Tula, Russia, my thoughts turn to logistics. This will warrant a "field trip", don't you think, to get the lay of the land? This will be a far cry from hanging a show in East Boston where we have easy access to hardware stores or whatever else we might need. We have a whole year to prepare, but it will go quickly. So at some point in the next months, a few of us will make our first pilgrimage to YP. How exciting! -- Lola
I am not sure who made this one. Either Lynn or I. It has her handwriting on the back -- just the collage number. But it looks like a collage I would have done. I tend to use the whole page of the original and position it the way it would be on a book so it's easily readable. I vaguely recall being drawn to this page of a thesaurus with the header "volition", but underneath it says, "ill-devised, -imagined, -judged... mis-guided; misconducted, foolish... being all thumbs". I also used a map that Otto had sent. It looks like Russian but it is Bulgarian. And camouflage green. War time. -- Lola
Team Tolstoy just received notice that we are officially invited to exhibit The War and Peace Project in Russian next (2012) summer! We will install it in June and it will run through September. Our exhibit will coincide with the Tolstoy family reunion, so the director (great-grandson of Leo himself) would like the show up for the family to enjoy. This is just fabulous news to us -- and hopefully to others who will enjoy this body of work. And who are also inspired by the masterpiece of War and Peace. -- Lola
The reappearance of the old prince, Andrei's father, suggested the use of this face fragment to me. It feels disproportionately large and a bit phantasmagoric- like I imagine he must seem to Princess Marya.
Regarding Prince Andrei and his sky: