Tolstoy Question

[Hugh McLean]

That's a real puzzler. I see that the Maudes called it a "bath-sheet," 
rather than a bed-sheet, but does that make it any better? (What is a 
'bath-sheet"? A big towel?)I also tried out the idea that it might be 
prosty'nja, with the stress on the second, rather than third syllable, 
meaning 'simpleton', but that doesn't work either, unless we imagine her 
calling him "Prosty'nja!"  as part of her kapriznichan'e.  For best 
effect the list should be of three physical objects associated with the 
schoolroom, like the ruler; but Tolstoy threw in the abstraction 
kapriznichan'e. We'll have to give him a bad mark for that.
> 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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