Tolstoy Question

[William Ryan]

  Prostynya also has the meaning of  "(bath) towel" and also, according 
to Dal', a cloth protecting occupants of a sledge (sani) from the snow.
Will

On 25/08/2010 18:46, Judson Rosengrant wrote:
> 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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