War and Peace

Ok, let’s get the lineups straight.  This is a test, and all the wrong answers will be corrected below when I dig out the book, but for now, I want to rely on memory.

The big thing now seems to be that Count Bezukhov is about to die, and there are a few people intriguing about his inheritance.

First among them is Anna Mikhailovna Drubetskoy, a poor widow who will do anything for her son Boris, no matter how humiliating it might be.  Anna is trying to arrange a commission for Boris through Prince Vassily, who himself seems to be in line to receive something from Count Bezukhov’s estate (which includes at least forty thousand souls – serfs to you and me - if that’s any indicator of its value).  Once Vassily is able to arrange Boris’s commission, Anna Mikhailovna discovers that she doesn’t have enough money to pay for Boris’s uniform; fortunately, her old friend Countess Rostov asks from her husband for five hundred rubles, and he gives her seven hundred, because that’s the kind of guy Count Rostov is.

Princess Anna seems to have contrived against Count Bezukhov’s daughters at one point several months before the story began, and the count rewrote his will, leaving his estate entirely to his illegitimate son Pierre, who has spent the last several years in France (much of the novel is written in French, as it is the language du jour among Petersburg’s aristocracy.  Pierre is a young man and is very fat, as Tolstoy reminds us over and over again.  He lacks social polish and does not pick up on the non-verbal cues telling him where to stand, when to speak, when to stop speaking, what to speak about, what not to speak about.  One night, he gets drunk with the no-good younger son of Prince Vassily and ends up tying a policeman to a bear and then throwing the bear into the river.  For this, his relatives banish him to the Moscow home of Count Bezukhov, who refuses to see him.

After Bezukhov has his sixth stroke, and is on the verge of dying, Prince Vassily seeks out his oldest daughter, Catiche, so they can work together to get the count to “correct” his will.  Where I am now (the start of Part 1, XIX, Catiche is a little too angry at the way the world has betrayed her steadfast devotion to her father that she can’t be of much help

But this story isn’t all intrigue.  Set in 1805, at the start of war between Napoleon’s forces and Russia, it presents us with two potential military heroes: Nikolai Rostov, who seems to embody the earnestness of a good youth, who has chosen to join the hussars and actually fight rather than take on an easier commission, and who is thus far able to withstand the charms of Julie Karagin so he can remain faithful to his second cousin Sonya, with whom he has shared a kiss; and Boris, who seems younger and less mature, and exchanged a kiss with the thirteen year-old Natasha.  Vera is the bitter Rostov sister who wants to make sure that none of the romances work out.

Those 530 words may have to suffice for my recollection of the important parts of the first 77 pages.  Now it’s time to correct and develop all the thoughts I’d forgotten.

Prince Vassily’s surname is Kuragin; his younger son’s – the no-goodnik – is Anatole.

Other than that, I’ve written a shockingly correct summary of stuff so far.  To celebrate, some of my favorite quotes from the beginning.

As Annette Scherer (Anna Pavlovna) is playing the hostess at her “soiree,” Tolstoy writes:

As the owner of a spinning mill, having put his workers in their places, strolls about the establishment, watching out for an idle spindle or the odd one squealing much too loudly, and hastens to go and slow it down or start it up at the proper speed – so Anna Pavlovna strolled about her drawing room, going up to a circle that had fallen silent or was too talkative, and with one word or rearrangement set the conversation machine running evenly and properly again.

 My marginalia – Virginia Woolf must have loved this epic simile.  What I didn’t write was how pleasantly surprised I was to see an epic simile – who knew?  I can’t recall seeing one in Dostoevsky.

Catiche’s quote about her disappointment in discovering that she might actually not earn the estate:

Yes, I was stupid, I still believed in people, and loved them, and sacrificed myself.  But only those who are mean and vile succeed.  I know whose intrigue this is.

Anyway, no time to analyze - got to get back to reading.