Natasha, Pierre, Being Ordinary

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed Dec 18 13:16:15 PST 2002


At 7:05 AM -0800 12/18/02, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>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.

The narrator (whom I think we can equate with the voice of Tolstoy) takes care to lay out a Lesson in the first and second epilogues, which concerns how we are to understand history, especially the role of prominent individuals in history. He fights against the idea that history is a history of Progress to which prominent individuals contribute greatly by making "right" or "wrong" decisions freely.

At 7:05 AM -0800 12/18/02, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>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.

I don't know if Tolstoy thought of living without reflection as an ideal for himself (and great artists like him), but it is clear that he idealized it for women and peasants.

***** Walter Moss [Department of History and Philosophy, Eastern Michigan University], _Alexander II and His Times: A Narrative History of Russia in the Age of Alexander II, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky_, Part Two, Chapter 19, "A Marriage and a Masterpiece"

...For Tolstoy the orphan, family life was a central part of the harmony which he craved. And in War and Peace two noble families figure prominently, the Rostovs and the Bolkonskys. By the end of the novel the once lively Natasha Rostov is married to Pierre and has four children. Tolstoy painted her as almost an ideal wife and mother, one devoted to her husband and children, and caring little for society or appearances, Tolstoy wrote [in "First Epilogue: 1813-20, Chapter X" of _War and Peace_]:

There were then as now conversations and discussions about women's rights, the relations of husband and wife and their freedom and rights...but these topics were not merely uninteresting to Natasha, she positively did not understand them.

These questions, then as now, existed only for those who see nothing in marriage but the pleasure married people get from one another, that is, only the beginnings of marriage and not its whole significance, which lies in the family.6

Tolstoy's women in War and Peace led Turgenev, who was still estranged from Tolstoy, to ask a friend: "Why is it that all his good women are unfailingly not only females--but fools? And why does he try to convince the reader that if a woman is wise and cultured she is without exception a phrasemonger and a liar?"7...

<http://www.emich.edu/public/history/moss/atpt2.htm> ***** -- Yoshie

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