Tolstoy and the New York Times

[John Dunn]

Lowering the tone by several octaves (if that's what tones are measured in), I should perhaps alert you to the sumptuous, multi-national, multi-lingual adaptation of War and Peace that RAI Uno (the first channel of Italian state television) has just shown in four 2-hour episodes.  The production involved six different co-producers and actors from ten different countries, and while I have no skills in multi-lingual lip-reading, I calculated that the actors between them probably spoke their lines in six different languages, though all was, naturally, dubbed into Italian. 

I would like to be able to say that the adaptation displayed all the virtues one would expect from something produced in such circumstances, but, in my view, it was nowhere near as good as that, and I gave up part-way through episode 2. Some of you, though, should be able to judge for yourselves, since I assume (and, as an Italian TV licence-payer who does not want to see yet more time given up to ex-Rangers football players and assorted comedians advertising mobile telephones, devoutly hope) that RAI and its co-producers will want to recoup their money by selling it to as many countries as possible. Since one of the co-producers was the Rossiya TV channel, it will presumably be shown in due course in Russia, but I doubt if the the presence of two reasonably well-known British actors in minor roles will be enough to persuade anglophone broadcasters to part with their cash.

It did, incidentally, occur to me to wonder if the director shot millions of hours of film, which different editors can cut and paste to produce a version that matches each nation's view of what War and Peace should be like. Probably not, alas(?).  

John Dunn.


-----Original Message-----
From: Marian Schwartz <schwartzm at SBCGLOBAL.NET>
To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
Date: Sat, 3 Nov 2007 09:54:53 -0500
Subject: [SEELANGS] Tolstoy and the New York Times

For those of you who haven't seen this, the New York Times Reading Room is running a long discussion of the Pevear-Volokhonsky War and Peace with such contributors as Bill Keller, Sam Tanenhouse, Francine Prose, and Liesl Schillinger.

It would be wonderful if someone knowledgeable about Tolstoy, and particularly his writing style, could weigh in on the discussion.

You should be able to access the blog at
http://readingroom.blogs.nytimes.com

Sincerely,
Marian Schwartz

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John Dunn
Honorary Research Fellow, SMLC (Slavonic Studies)
University of Glasgow, Scotland

Address:
Via Carolina Coronedi Berti 6
40137 Bologna
Italy
Tel.: +39 051/1889 8661
e-mail: J.Dunn at slavonic.arts.gla.ac.uk
johnanthony.dunn at fastwebnet.it

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