Tolstoy Question

[Judson Rosengrant]

If I may, I have a small question for students of Tolstoy and perhaps of
nineteenth-century Russian domestic culture.  Near the end of the third
paragraph of Chap. 29 of the Юность section of Tolstoy's trilogy, we find
the following:

Происходило ли это оттого, что прозаические воспоминания детства--линейка,
простыня, капризничанье--были еще слишком свежи в памяти, или от отвращения,
которое имеют очень молодые люди ко всему домашнему . . . , но только Володя
еще до сих пор не смотрел на Катеньку, как на женщину.

In an earlier draft Tolstoy had, Володя долго не мог переварить воспоминаний
детства, слез, линейки, простыни, связанных с Катенькой. . .

I'm interested here in your conjectures about the implications of простыня.
The word had the same basic sense for Tolstoy that it has in modern Russian,
that is, 'bed sheet', but there seems to be a special meaning here that for
him justified the word's inclusion in what is presented as a logical series
of particular childhood memories, or, as the text evolved, as a set of
metonyms evoking childhood in a more general sense.

Unlike линейка, which is used several times in Детство in what seem to be
relevant contexts, простыня occurs only one other time in the trilogy, but
in a way that makes the usage an unlikely antecedent; that is, while the
meaning of линейка is textually governed and resonant, that of простыня is
not.

To put it in the simplest way, при чем тут простыня?  Is there a secondary
meaning, or is this one of those very rare instances in Tolstoy where the
text is simply obscure?

Lest my question seem trivial or obvious, I'll add that the hallmark of the
young Tolstoy's style is its extreme concreteness and precision: words mean
what they mean in a very stable way and almost always have very definite,
logically integrated referents, even when those referents are complex and
multileveled: the word-object relation in the young Tolstoy is bracingly
rigorous and transparent.  But in the instance queried here, it isn't: one
is unsure just what Tolstoy had in mind.  With another author, one might
happily tolerate that circumstance (there is in the prose of Pasternak or
Platonov, for example, a certain in-built instability or elusiveness that a
translator should seek to preserve), but not with Tolstoy.  He insists on
knowing exactly what things are and what their relation to other things is,
and when we fail to see what that relation is, it's usually the result of a
lack of understanding on our part of the full implications of a term in its
local, historical meaning. . .

Thanks for your insights.

JR  


Judson Rosengrant, PhD
PO Box 551 
Portland, OR 97207

503.880.9521 mobile
jrosengrant at earthlink.net

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