>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,
Yeah, well, that's not the sort of Lesson I mean. T makes the same point better in the battle scenes, with Napolean clearly not in charge at Borodino, and this is only one theme in a big book. The question of whether it's best to live without reflection is another.
YF says: 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.\
. . . 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...
Actually I think he did idealize it for himself too. It seems to have been a source of agony to him that he was born with a brain that would not stop going. The brainy guy in the book (W&P), Prince Andre, is a picture of misery, and Pierre is never so unhappy as when he uses his limited apparatus to try to think.
jks
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