I said: 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. -------
Chuck replied: 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?
I say: Well, of course not every (or any) turn of caharcter in a literary work has to be a Lesson, though in Tolstoi's case you can bet that that every turn is intended to be. It's pretty clear that T thinks N turned out just right. That sort of living without reflection was his ideal. He's pretty clear about that. I agree that N's development has a fidelity to lived experience, and it's partly the way that the picture of the mature N goes beyond what T seems to have meant that makes it so scary; he exposes (to our way of thinking) his own ideal as scarily bankrupt.
Chuck: 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.
jks: Agreed. Always, with T. Apropos of Russian novelists, I just picked up the Peavey & Vokolonsky(?) translation of Demons (aka The Possessed); they are really super. I read their Anna K and Brothers K. I hope they do a W&P.
Chuck: 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?).
jks: But though Pierre has no gravitas, a nice characterization, he has a kind of aspiration that this misses, a striving for a better world. It's what hooks him into to Freemasonry. And he''s not self-satisfied, far from it. He' desperately unhappy. He's not quite ordinary, because of this intense self-refledctiveness. But he hasn't the moral grandeur of Prince Andre.
Chuck. 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...
jks: Well, P, like N, becomes ordinary, almost through force of will, as much as circumstance. But it's sort of a betrayl of his possibilities, even though these are limited by his own lack of great capacity.
Chuck: 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).
jks: There have been bad girls, and in literarure too, Lady MacBeth, for sure. Not Queen Gertrude, she's only the occassion for Claudius' misdeeds. Did you read Updike's nice litle book, Claudius and Gertrude? I don't usually care for Updike, but I thought he got inside her character very nicely in that book. And I don't think that women have been innocent of humanity's troubles because women are naturally nuturing or anything of the sort. Given the opportunity they can be as wretched as men: Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, Golda Meier, Condi Rice. But they mostly haven't been given the opportunity.
jks
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