But this thing about Natasha's `collapse' irks me. She does not collapse anymore than Pierre, but no one mentions his collapse -- from enlightenment ideals to self-satisfied domesticity... Joanna
Indeed. But isn't it possible to be ordinary and to be human at the same time? That i the problem with Natasha'a later development, no? She totally sacrifices herself to maternal instinct. Anyway, women's ambitions' haven't been the source of the world's grief, mostly... Justin
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I don't know. Not every turn of character in W&P has to be a lesson, even if many were. There is a neutral zone to consider, which is a fidelity to lived experience that just doesn't fall out exactly on expected lines or morally configured contours. Natasha grows up, but in an artless and disappointing way. Isn't that really all that is there---something of a fatherly view on how children turn out as grown ups?
Natasha's vitality, interest, excitement, dreams, expectations, desires, promises, all have to meet the grip of concrete circumstances, the lived, and how those first qualities turn in that struggle into other qualities doesn't seem to depend much on `moral' fiber so much as something almost indefinite, indistinct, and completely un-understood---the actual stuff of a living person. So I would tend to give Tolstoy credit for a fidelity to the lived.
Pierre doesn't or rather didn't bother me as much as Natasha. He was always a happy, self-satisfied slob with a good heart and a lot of money and connections---but almost no gravitas, even in his desperate moments (most of which I forget now---Moscow evacuation and burning?). Those darker elements are mostly reserved for Prince Andre, captured especially in the little coda at the end, when his son dreams of making his unknown father proud. He chooses his uncle Pierre to idolize because he likes him. But Pierre will be as incapable of understanding what is dangerous about a boy like that, as he was of truly knowing his friend Andre. The hope is that because Pierre isn't dark and is ordinary, almost trivial, domestic and bourgeois to the core, that Andre's son will be safe...
It is this last thoughtful suspicion that Tolstoy leaves, that is echoed in Brecht: ``Unhappy is the age that needs a hero...''
Justin adds, ``Anyway, women's ambitions' haven't been the source of the world's grief, mostly.'' Perhaps not the world, but more than a few men: Lady Macbeth and what's her name, Hamlet's mom (Gertrude, had to look it up).
Chuck Grimes