| Tolstoy's attention to concrete, everyday objects and his emphasis on his heroes' cardinal physical traits are not just literary techniques but cognitive strategies he uses to evoke vivid, life-like mental images of his characters. Tolstoy's careful rendering of his protagonists' points of view fosters a "perspectivism" that extends Bakhtin's concept of dialogism to the visual realm. Although Bakhtin was appreciative of reader imaging and aware of the power of perspectival narratives, he failed to give Tolstoy the same credit he gave Goethe for visually evoking the novelistic chronotope.; A mistrust of visual presence, a false demarcation of the capacities of pictorial and poetic arts, and an unwillingness to study the individual's unique internal representation of the text have inhibited studying how mental imagery affects our construction, understanding, and appreciation of texts. The research of Stephen Kosslyn, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Elaine Scarry, and Christopher Collins counteracts these prejudices and provides a basis for studying visual authors like Tolstoy.; In War and Peace, wisdom and self-knowledge are gained often not by an exchange of ideas, but by an integration of visual perspectives. Therefore, the positioning of the narrator and shifts in point of view take on epistemic and stylistic importance. Themes such as voyeurism, bearing witness to another's pain, and reconciling one's own point of view with those of others become central. Tolstoy uses three perspectives or "lenses" to view people and events: a close-up lens, a zoom lens, and a wide-angle lens. Although Tolstoy often expresses himself in absolutes, he does not present the events or people in the novel from one unified perspective. The image of the vast, voiceless blue sky functions as a marker for the divine perspective which supersedes the authoritarian voice of the narrator.; Readers often seek out adaptations to recapture the pleasure of first encountering a text. I analyze the way the illustrations by Mikhail Sergeyvich Bashilov and Dementii Alekseevich Shmarinov, the stage adaptation by Helen Edmundson, and the film adaptations by King Vidor and Sergei Bondarchuk augment, transform, and comment on Tolstoy's text and highlight the importance of visualization and visual ethics. |
