Shocked, shocked, I tell you

[nineveh_uk]

I was going to write something brief and sarcastic to the effect that although it is some time* since I got half-way** through War and Peace, though my memory of it is imperfect I was pretty sure that it didn't contain surprise incestuous undertones, or indeed overtones. Fortunately for my dignity I looked up the character list first, and apparently the incestuous undertones are at least somewhat canon***. I'm not sure that I'm convinced by the adaptation so far: for something set in Russia in 1805 I'm not getting much sense of a fundamentally different society to that of a generic Jane Austen adaptation, or indeed the present day UK, but I'll be watching the second episode.

I note that it so far lacks the extremely tight breeches of the big Russian film version, but it has one thing in common in that forty years from now, anyone who watches it will look at the women's hairstyles and think how much more they look like the period in which it was made than the period when it was set.

*About twenty years.

**I was disappointed it wasn't Anna Karenina II.

***Though I will need to make a second attempt to discover whether the novel had them as totally scurrilous rumour or otherwise. I will make sure I choose a more engaging translation.

ETA: I have just learned that the adaptation was by Andrew Davies, and thus all is explained.

Comments

[antisoppist]

I don't think it was a coincidence that there were two copies of War and Peace volume 1 at the farm (my mother's and my grandmother's) but none of volume 2. I did once get to the end of about chapter 2 in my teens but got put off by everyone having about five different names all used interchangeably.

I'm interested in the Briggs translation because he said female translators of the past couldn't write soldiers' slang and I don't know whether he's right or sexist. But to find out, I'd have to read all the translations and compare them, including the one that keeps all the French in French, and I haven't finished Les Miserables yet.

I recorded it and watched Endeavour (with interruptions).

[caulkhead]

I have read all of War and Peace, and enjoyed it very much, but I was on a very small island in the middle of winter with nothing very much else to do at the time. Don't think I would have made it through without the helpful chart at the front explaining who was who, though.

I have started Anna Karenina three times, and keep getting stuck at the harvesting scene.

[aella_irene]

Coincidentally, I recently came across the Wikipedia pages for possibly incestuous Romanovs. They were 20th century, though.

[coughingbear]

forty years from now, anyone who watches it will look at the women's hairstyles and think how much more they look like the period in which it was made than the period when it was set.

Make-up too - I was very struck by this in the Walters/Petherbridge Sayers.

[lilliburlero]

I saw a gif of Gillian Anderson wearing a one-shoulder evening gown and Stephen Rea looking like a obsequious Suffolk Blackface crammed into mess kit and approximately shorn and had to go and have a little lie down.

[elmey.livejournal.com]

Doesn't start here till Jan 18. It's hard to believe that the 1960s USSR gave us tighter breeches than modern TV is capable of!

I read the novel so long ago I don't remember enough details to have an opinion on incestuous undertones--though I will say that I had no clue about Russian naming conventions at the time and was in a state of confusion regarding who was who for quite a while.

[white_hart]

I'm not watching it, but it does seem to be a general feature of historical drama that the women's hairstyles and makeup invariably look like the period in which the drama was made and not the period in which it is set.

[auntyros.livejournal.com]

I didn't watch it on the basis that the trailer looked like bog-standard Andrew Davies Austen, and I don't even much like that when the source material is Austen, let alone when it's supposed to be Tolstoy.

[sonetka.livejournal.com]

I have read a good deal of it but it was a long time ago and I was laboring through the grammar and not really capable of picking up incestuous subtext if there was any. I'll have to either give up and get an English copy or break out my dictionary and give it another shot. What's weird is that given the time frame, it probably did resemble Jane Austen's society in a lot more ways than the current Russian upper-crust resembles their English counterparts, including the language! English and French were much more fashionable languages for the Russian aristos to teach their children than, well, Russian (hence you have Pushkin, a generation later, making fun of Tatiana for writing her love letter in French because her Russian is so poor).