Glad the house move is finally sorting itself out, SanFranBear!
I’m just catching up after several weeks of having lost my reading mojo. The final weeks of the uni term were super exhausting, as they always are, and then admissions stuff, which normally takes up one further week at the end of the autumn term, took up TWO weeks. I kept trying to read for pleasure in the evenings but my brain just wouldn’t comply.
Anyway I won’t name check everyone, but thanks so much to all for the brilliant comments and links, especially Viking for the link about Tolstoy’s wife Sophia, Cornish for the John Crace digested read (haha!) and Desdamona for that wonderful New Yorker piece by James Wood. And thanks again Desdamona for keeping us going all year long. I’ll never forget your witty summaries at the beginning of the year.
I really enjoyed the first epilogue and here are the scatty notes I made when I finished it, although some comments have been better made already by other posters:
Epilogue, Part One, Ch 1: I wonder whether Tolstoy isn’t going too far here with his assertions that people’s views about what is good and what is evil change over the course of history. For example, he says, ‘as we follow the development of historical science, we see that the view of what the good of mankind is changes with each new year, with each new writer; so that in ten years what seemed good looks like evil, and vice versa.’ I do see his point to an extent, but what about an historical event like, say, the Holocaust?! That was unambiguously evil. OK, I know the Holocaust hadn’t happened yet when Tolstoy was writing, but maybe he should stick with his theorising about the French invasion of Russia and stop trying to generalise so much about all of human history!
Ch. 4: I do like the extended bee analogy to explain how humans see events from different perspectives. Very clear and gripping.
Ch. 5: Poor Count Rostov.
Ch. 6: A very romantic chapter end with Nikolai and Marya finally confessing their love to each other. Love it!
Ch. 7: Tolstoy’s conservative attitude towards serfs is emerging strongly again in this chapter. Nikolai is a firm but fair master and the serfs love him. OK.
Ch. 8: Sonya as ‘sterile blossom’. I’m really not happy with her fate.
Ch. 9: Interesting depiction of marital strife and its resolution in the relationship of Marya and Nikolai. I like the fact that Tolstoy doesn’t just end his story with marriage and happy ever after, but tries to give some depiction of what marriages can be like.
Ch. 10: Another portrait of marriage, this time Natasha and Pierre’s. I have mixed feelings about this chapter. On the one hand, Natasha is a bit of a rebel; she doesn’t care about the gender norms that say wives should look and behave a certain way. On the other hand, Tolstoy’s conservative notions about women and family also come through strongly here. Natasha’s entire focus is now on her family, and the narrator seems implicitly to approve of this. [Nota bene: having read Desdamona’s comments about Tolstoy’s fixation on how older women let themselves go, I now think that maybe Natasha’s lack of concern about her looks is not so feminist after all!]
Ch. 11: Pierre loves babies and Nikolai just doesn’t see the point. Ha.
Ch. 12: Interesting and rather sad portrait of Countess Rostov. She is ‘already past sixty’, so clearly Very Old. Ahem.
Ch. 13: I do love the fact that Denisov is back and warmly embraced by the family circle.
Ch. 14: Nikolenka, the son of the dead Andrei, is completely infatuated with Pierre (the father figure he never had).
Ch. 15: More insight into the marriage of Nikolai and Marya. Marya’s diary is all about her children. At least now she has found a focus for all that religious zeal.
Ch. 16: Love the way the story of the characters ends with Nikolenka. Through him the memory of Andrei, and of Pierre’s friendship with Andrei, will be kept alive.
Now to read epilogue 2 and the appendix!