Collage 426

This quote is taken from The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova:

It is a gradation of towns, of architecture, of gradually receding minarets blended with the advancing church domes, of the very look of forest and riverbank, so that little by little you begin to believe you can read in nature itself the saturation of history. Does the shoulder of a Turkish hillside really look so different from the slope of a Magyar meadow? Of course not, and yet the difference is as impossible to erase from the eye as the history that informs it is from the mind. Later, traveling this route, I would also see it alternately as benign and bathed in blood-- this is the other trick of historical sight, to be unrelentingly torn between good and evil, peace and war.

--Chapter 38, page 288.

The passage describes the route from Istanbul to Budapest, but could also describe some of the contested lands in War and Peace.

Lynn Waskelis

from page 107-108, Volume 2 of original text
collage, ink, pigment
made 3/10/11
Pevear/Volokhonsky translation page 684-687