The Snowstorm
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Tolstoi, best known for his popular novels “War and Peace” and “Anna Karenina”, also wrote numerous short stories including “The Snowstorm” from which today’s passage is taken. This story was written in 1856, two years after Tolstoi was lost and survived a snowstorm. There are so many beautiful paragraphs and sentences in this story that it was extremely difficult for me to select just one. However, I promise to bring you more passages from “The Snowstorm” in future posts. Imagine that the person about whom Tolstoi is writing in today’s passage is ‘YOU.” What would you be doing or thinking as the wind, “blew right against you, and blinded your eyes,….?”:
“Everywhere everything was white and mobile; sometimes the horizon seemed incomprehensible far off, sometimes compressed within two paces distance in every direction. Sometimes a high white wall would grow up suddenly on the right and run alongside of the sledge, then it would as suddenly disappear and grow up in front only to run further and further off and again disappear. If you looked up it would appear quite light the first instant, and you would seem to see little stars through the mist; but the little stars vanished from your view ever higher and higher, and all you saw was the snow, which fell past your eyes on to your face and into the collar of your furs; the sky was identically bright everywhere, identically white, colourless, uniform, and constantly mobile. The wind seemed to be perpetually shifting. Now it blew right against you, and blinded your eyes, now it blew teasingly sideways and flung the collar of your fur coat over your head and mockingly flapped it in your face, now it would howl from behind through some unprotected crevice. Audible throughout was the faint, miserable crunching of hoofs and sledge-boards over the snow and the expiring tinkle of the little bells when we passed over deep snow.”