Tag Archives: Russian

 You, Me, Tolstoy and the Rest of the World

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Summer is the season for love and affairs. I plan to have as many affairs as I can. Of course, I mean “art affairs” because good art demonstrates Tolstoy’s Theory of Art. In films, paintings and writing, art relationships convey emotion and bridge the distance between the artist and the art recipient.

Film is an easy art form to love. The final production represents the vision of screenplay writer, director, cinematographer, actors, soundtrack composer and hundreds of other technical experts. In Writing Screenplays That Sell, Michael Hauge writes that a winning screenplay “enables a sympathetic character to overcome a series of increasingly difficult, seemingly insurmountable obstacles to achieve a compelling desire.” Empathy engages the audience to experience a characters’ emotions. Each of these movies—Moonlight, Manchester by the Sea, and La La Land—conveys emotions and establishes relationship.

Relationship

According to Tolstoy, all art forms offer this relationship experience, an opportunity to share a connection. My favorite art affairs are with paintings and sculptures I have seen many times and for many years. Travel to San Antonio, Texas requires visiting my childhood friends including Chagall’s “Dream Village” and Diego Rivera’s “Delfina Flores” at the McNay Art Museum. The Art Institute of Chicago houses other long lost friends and family, mostly in the 20th and 21st century rooms. Each visit discovers new subtleties missed before and possible new meanings in the twinkle of an eye or the last glint of a setting sun.

The same changing relationship occurs with literary classics. I will reread a piece, such as Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, and find aspects of the theme and plot more meaningful as an adult than as a high school student. A teenager might sympathize with the Happy, Biff or Bernard. The adult reader is more likely to fear and dread the consequences of Willy Loman’s mistakes. Good writing forms a quick connection with different types of readers that spans hundreds of pages. When the last page of the novel is turned, there is an immediate sense of loss, an aimlessness, a disconnect that sends the reader to the bookshelf for the next story in the series or more of the same magic from the same writer.

Emotion

My son’s Humanities class ventured to the art museum to select a painting to form a relationship. He chose Pablo Picasso’s “The Old Guitarist.” The somber grayed blues of the contorted musician with head bowed and legs crossed are representative of Picasso’s Blue Period. The emotional painting illustrates Tolstoy’s Theory of Art passing along the painter’s sadness to the viewer.

My college English class did a similar assignment, and I became a fan of Marsden Hartley. Decades later, I found the same painting now housed at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas. It was like two old acquaintances meeting by chance. I almost said, “We know each other from somewhere. Don’t we?” I shared an emotional connection with the artist because he reminded me of my childhood in the Southwest.

Bridge

Tolstoy also believes art is a bridge across time and culture. The Death of Ivan Ilyich is a bridge to a different time, culture and country. Tolstoy, like other great writers, eliminates the distance that separates reader from author.

What does it take to write like Tolstoy and how long? If an Olympic sport takes at least 10,000 hours for mastery, can an ordinary person transform into Tolstoy in five years. To speed my progress, I consulted How to Write Like Tolstoy by Richard Cohen. A Tolstoy example dominates the preface, but the book by this English professor is mostly about other great writers with a little Tolstoy sprinkled on top.

Who writes like Tolstoy today? Who makes a reader care about make-believe characters enough to forget the time, neglect friendships and tasks waiting for attention? Some of my favorite writers are Elizabeth Stroud, John Updike, Junot Diaz, Yann Martel, Jim Harrison, Elmore Leonard, Lauren Groff and Cormac Mccarthy. A Tolstoy writer brings characters to life. Some I wish I knew, but most, I’m glad I only experienced through a story.

The Tolstoy Zone

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The name, Leo Tolstoy, carries a bit of an intimidation factor. Tolstoy lived in the 1800s, and the world has changed since then. Many writers have come and gone, yet Tolstoy continues to be relevant.

At the library, I find several nondescript volumes lacking flashy colors, fonts and modern graphics. Recognizable titles include War and Peace (1400 pages), Anna Karenina (750 pages), The Cossacks (160 pages) and The Death of Ivan Ilyich (53 pages). I weigh my decision because quite literally my book bag is an unhealthy amount of heavy, and the winner is The Death of Ivan Ilyich. I load the three audio disks for my next commute to work and prepare for an easy week of listening to some old guy’s story about a different time and place. Instead, I discover “a dimension as vast as space and timeless as infinity . . . [that] lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge.” It is an area called the Tolstoy Zone.1

Within minutes of beginning this novella, I want nothing more than to continue. Often, I stop and marvel at Tolstoy’s timeless words and characters. I bubble the aspects of theme that intrigued me as shown in the photo.

 

The “D” Word

In this novel [spoiler alert] Ivan Ilyich dies. Death is part one of Tolstoy’s two-part story. The author approaches theme like a shark circling its prey. On each pass, the shark takes a closer look at what it will consume. The Death of Ivan Ilyich begins with the outside view of death. How do the living view the dead? By reading the Gazette, Pyotr Ivanovich sees the obituary placed by the widow, Praskovya Fyodorovna Golovin. The shocking news becomes an opportunity for career advance for some and a relief for others. Ivan has died and not me. The friend, Pyotr, is one of only two guests for the funeral.  Uncomfortable realities exist in this time period when the dead remain in the home slowly decomposing for days; when an untimely and early death jeopardizes a family’s finances; and when illness causes long periods of declining health to a miserable end. Tolstoy leads the reader with Pyotr to the next revelation–fear. Next time, it might be me who dies.

Fear and death are universal themes much older than the 1880s. Biblical passages, such as John 11:38-44, have cultural ramifications of Lazarus’ death for Martha and Mary. Also, Ezekiel 37:1-14 symbolizes Israel’s hopelessness with a valley of dry bones. Death is both literal and figurative and represents aloneness, separation, desperation, destruction, loss of relationships and loss of possibilities. Tolstoy’s study of emotion is intimate, realistic and all encompassing. He writes of what modern readers recognize as the stages of grief published roughly a hundred years later by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in her famous book On Death and Dying.

Life after Death

Ivan is dead, and Pyotr scuttles off to resume his card game and find a permanent replacement for his friend’s vacant seat. The circling shark has swallowed the prey. So what does Tolstoy do? He analyzes how the subject tastes from beginning to end and resets the clock to show how this terrible situation occurred.

The story changes narrators and pivots to be about life instead of death. If this sounds religious, it is no coincidence. According to Richard Pevear’s introduction for Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Other Stories, Tolstoy began a personal religious conversion to moral teachings known as “Tolstoyism,” and eventually published What is Art? to receive worldwide recognition.

If I am to read like a writer, I know “what” happens in this story and “why” this novella wrestles with finding meaning in life. The beauty in the story is “how” this message unfolds through Ivan’s thoughts about his life. It feels like a geometric proof written as poetry. Each statement builds upon the next. The narrator wants to live, but, then again, no; he only now considers the lack of meaning and suffering in his life. Although he has tried to be proper and correct, he lived his life wrong and failed to help the people who needed him the most. The transformation of Ivan’s character with only internal monologue is the key to Tolstoy’s mastery. Very clearly, Tolstoy uses Ivan Ilyich as an example of what not to do. Of course, it is an alert to change, but the final message is comforting. If Ivan Ilyich can find peace, so too can everyone else.

Tolstoy is approachable in this timeless novel. All of my earlier fears were wrong. I may never tackle War and Peace, but I appreciate Tolstoy’s writing.

  1. Rod Serling, The Twilight Zone Series 1963.

 

 

Four Types of Playful Writers

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Writers are, in general, playful people. As explained in a study by Dr. Rene Proyer “Playful people are able to reinterpret situations in their lives so that they experience them as entertaining or are able to reduce stress levels.” In my writing, I often rework real life situations with a better (or worse) ending and a more empowered character – a SuperMe – capable of witty remarks and amazing feats of skill, knowledge or cunning. Although it seems hard to find anything entertaining about pain or loss, the expression of an unpleasant experience in a creative way can be cathartic. For an example, recall Life of Pi by Yann Martel; young Pi survives on a boat with what seems to be a tiger, baboon and hyena.

The study categorizes playful people in four ways. I imagine writers can check one or all these categories. I will test each categories with myself and with the four Russian writers on my reading list for the year – Tolstoy, Chekov, Bulgakov and Nabokov.

1) “Other-directed playful” includes socializing with friends and other writers.   For me – a member of several writing groups, an “E” for extrovert on Myers-Briggs tests and working in a profession that involves people – this category is a hit. For the Russians writers, socializing with each other is well documented. Tolstoy reportedly took partying (1800’s style) at college to the extreme and never graduated. Lucky for him, it did not deter his writing career and success.

2) The “light-heartedly playful” consider life a game. And in games, it’s how the game is played. During the years I cared for my parents, we continued to play games. I had a performance baseline for each of them and measured each day against the previous. During play, the filters and pretensions dropped. Strategy choices revealed character, health and mental faculty. Humor was also part of the game. Chekhov began his writing career by publishing humorous anecdotes and stories to pay for his medical school studies. After that, his writing took a turn for the dark and serious.

3) The “intellectually playful” like to play with thoughts and ideas. Occasionally, the less tired and more clever me does re-orchestrate events to tell a playful story. I once threw away a microwave because my son said smoke came out of it. When I learned this might not have been true, I wrote a short story, “Trial of the Microwave.” On a more serious topic, Bulgakov wrote a satire about Stalinist Russia, Master and Margarita, which casts a wall-eyed loon and a talking cat as the devil’s attendants. I needed the talking cat in the microwave situation.

4) The “whimsically playful” enjoy “strange and unusual things and are amused by small day-to-day observations.” Details – accents, tone of voice, body language – convey information to the observant. The crystallized conflict photographed above caught my attention the other day. I took several photographs to determine if the ice was melting or the water was freezing. Before I could decide, my fingers numbed, and I almost dropped my phone in the water. Nabokov’s narrator in Lolita can dial up the description to create a complete image and feeling. Read through this jewel by Nabokov. He writes “. . . on the trim turf of the lawn-slope, an old gentleman with a white mustache, well-dressed – double-breasted gray suit, polka dotted bow-tie – lay supine, his long legs together, like a death-size wax figure.”

One last point about playfulness, Dr. Proyer notes that play enhances the ability to solve complex problems. A playful person can shift perspectives. In writer-speak, this shift is changing point of view. A writer imagines the thoughts and motivations of each character and determines the best narrator for a story. Solving (complex) plotting problems may mean jumping into another character’s thoughts and point of view. Or the story might need the intimacy of first person. Sometimes, I get it wrong. I’m quite proficient at switching from third person to first or vice versa. And being playful, I find it fun to edit and try it again in a different way.