oh, count, sometimes I think I would marry anybody

lexa / 30 / blog where I talk about leo tolstoy’s war and peace

[lisiya-gori]

pov you're marya bolkonskaya in 1813

[lisiya-gori]

we talk about characters who should have been at the club but when it comes to natasha rostova I feel very strongly that she should have been in college. that girl should not have been engaged at nineteen, she should have had three random roommates, her older sister’s driver’s license, and a vague plan to study abroad in florence next semester

[helenekuragina]

fandom perception of julie/marya as julie being blatantly aware of her attraction to marya while marya is the stereotypical religious repressed girl in denial is so funny to me because it's quite literally the opposite in canon.

there's nothing in her relationship with julie on its own that pushes marya away from her, it's specifically when julie begins entertaining the idea of marriage that they grow apart from each other. while this is another clear example of the theme of the corrupting influence of society, contrasting marya's sincerity with julie's readiness to be swept up by shallow flattery, it's interesting in the ways that it mirrors a surrender to comphet. the contrast between how julie speaks to marya about marriage before she inherits and after is so stark.

in volume one, part one, xxii:

compared to in volume two, part five, ii:

julie's desire for marriage is rooted entirely in societal pressure and the fact that society rewards acquiescence to the norm. the depth and sincerity of her relationship with marya is positioned in direct opposition of a shallow, meaningless marriage. it's julie who chooses to conform to the expectations of society, with marya left on the outside, mourning the loss of a genuine, meaningful connection. marya's displeasure is even directly compared to the idea of a marriage spoiling the enjoyment of a relationship.

as @lisiya-gori said here, people are wholly unwilling to separate the idea of marya's experience of religion from our own cultural context... when establishing their context is necessary to understand literally anything these characters do. the entire message is reliant on the idea of truth and earnestness triumphing over falseness and frivolity. aristocratic society is the primary oppressive factor in war and peace, so julie's adherence is a sign of her own denial, while marya's distance from society suggests authenticity.

marya's own feelings about marriage only strengthen the parallel to comphet, with marya being aware of the expectation and the inevitability...

...while julie can feel the inauthenticity in boris's courtship but convinces herself otherwise.

marya obviously has her own repression, etc., that would inform how she categorizes how she feels about julie, but it's notable that she acknowledges that love and affection aren't inherent to marriage and that it is imposed on women regardless. she isn't immediately expecting to find romantic love in marriage and she also expresses her own preference for a love separate from attraction to a man. she isn't in denial of the reality of marriage and she openly accepts the importance of love separate from it, while julie cannot.

the potential queer coding in marya isn't in what her religion could be repressing within her, it's in what she refuses to let aristocratic society take away from her — her sincerity and her love.

[helenekuragina]

i feel like people have a tendency to employ queer headcanons in the most boring way possible. this is something i've been thinking about irt fandom in general, but it's definitely applicable to the war and peace fandom specifically. it's impossible to ignore the way gender is addressed in the novel and i feel like people underestimate how intentional tolstoy is about how these characters move within the society they're in and how important that is for establishing them as characters.

the way people approach queer headcanons is more often than not running with one thing and then ignoring everything to the contrary and i can't help but be like. so what's the point then. the "fuck the author i'll do what i want" approach to fandom has always been kind of boring to me because i just end up thinking "why do you even like this work/character/etc. if you want them to be unrecognizable from the source material?" like.......... especially for characters who are so deeply informed by the world they live in, what's left after you've removed them from that context?

i understand the urge to ignore time period homophobia, etc., but, honestly, as a lesbian, it's a lot more interesting to explore how a queer reading of a character informs their established behavior rather than changing that behavior to fit that reading. it's looking at a character and coming to a conclusion about them that they likely can't or won't come to themselves because of their circumstances. headcanoning a character as queer doesn't have to mean that they know that and it's usually more interesting if they don't.

not to mention, there's an established pattern at this point of people excusing misogyny by going "it's because they're gay" and that's truly just willfully ignorant and annoying. what's your goal? what are you adding to the conversation? what is the point of spending your time discussing something if you can only enjoy it when it's warped to fit what you're comfortable with?

[cheriboms]

very strange to be a fan of a "classic" thing bc like. its overrated. its underrated. everyone knows OF it but its a toss up if theyve actually ever engaged with it. you want to talk to everyone about how good it is but its so culturally ingrained that everyone waves off your glowing review as "well duh, its [classic thing]". its dismissed and overlooked BECAUSE it is so good. you cant find anyone to talk to about it except for deranged ppl on tumblr bc the masses havent actively thought about it in 30 years. its been referenced in every form of media since it released. no one gives it a second thought. youre going crazy.

[lisiya-gori]

Really love your blog, wishing you everything good) questions 22 + 25 from the ask game

hi, thank you so much for giving me an excuse to talk about wap!

22. your favorite part of canon that everyone else ignores

the entire nikolai/marya arc at the end of the book is sooooo good and I never see anyone talk about any of it. bogucharovo, the voronezh scenes, the very end when nikolai comes back to moscow to wallow in self-martyrdom—all absolute hits. people don't like them together, whatever, I am telling you that's beside the point. watching nikolai rostov flop around and freak out and literally get down on his knees to pray for his cousin-girlfriend to break up with him is worth the price of admission all on its own.

the section where nikolai rescues marya from the peasants at bogucharovo is, in my opinion, the most underrated run of chapters in the entire book. it's one of the few moments where you can really see the tensions within the bedrock social system this society is built on. the internal politicking in the village. marya going out to give a big magnanimous speech offering grain the peasant families and it backfiring on her immediately. her explicit immediate relief when she sees "a man of her own class," and that being the kick-off point for their entire relationship. there is SO MUCH going on there. I'm serious, everyone close this app and go read vol 3 book 2 chapter 9 of war and peace RIGHT NOW

25. common fandom complaint that you're sick of hearing

you know, I sometimes think people can be a little too quick on the draw when it comes to criticizing the many literary sins of one count lev nikolaievich tolstoy. not to say they don't exist, or that they shouldn't be criticized at all, but—listen, kind of relating back to what I said in response to my last ask, I don't actually think war and peace would be better if it were more like the kinds of modern media that get very popular on this website. in fact, I think it would be worse. the whole point of war and peace is that it's a long and idiosyncratic novel written by a russian aristocrat in the 1860s. and while I do not think we can say that tolstoy was a good person (bad husband, literal slaveowner, etc.), it has to be said that war and peace is a genuine literary masterpiece. you couldn't write it, and neither could I. it is a legitimately weird and fascinating piece of art.

and, like, look. the female characters in this book are not flat. subject to authorial misogyny? yes, absolutely. often crammed uncomfortably into stereotypical boxes? of course! but genius is about the ability of a work to transcend its author, and tolstoy's female characters routinely transcend him. natasha at the opera, marya in the aforementioned bogucharovo scene, sonya half-pretending to see andrei in the mirror on christmas. even a character like hélène, who is more or less written to be an exemplar of a Bad Woman, gets away from tolstoy and becomes something much deeper and more interesting, as my dear friend @helenekuragina can attest. if you aren't interested in any of the women in this book—especially in favor someone like anatole, who is quite literally written to be a vacuous hole of a man—I don't think it's really fair to blame them for not being sufficiently interesting, or tolstoy for writing them that way. they may often be mistreated by the narrative, but they're not boring.

[lisiya-gori]

1, 10, 25?

thank you for asking!

some of these are going to be long answers, and I already had another ask about 25, so I'll be answering that one a little later. in the meantime, here are 1 and 10:

1. the character everyone gets wrong

so, of course I'm going to say marya bolkonskaya here. how could I ever do otherwise. blame the adaptations, blame society, blame god, but it's so rare for me to see anyone get her right. this is maybe THE reason why I still run a war and peace blog to this day: if there was good marya bolkonskaya content out there, there's a solid chance I would have burned out on it by around 2017. nevertheless, here we are.

I do feel the need to qualify this statement a bit. war and peace is a very long book that not a lot of people even attempt to read, and marya is a very complex character who is maybe the fifth- or sixth- most important of its protagonists. a lot of people simply do not care enough to get past a surface-level reading of her character, and that’s…fine, you know?

but at the same time it is kind of disheartening when I think about how fundamentally lazy 80% of marya takes are. it’s always something like: “she’s a pure and innocent martyr” (not true, she is OBSESSED with martyrdom, which is different). “she’s a lesbian” (ok sure, I can see it, but what else?) “she’s very religious, and I’m going to act like that has the exact same cultural connotations that it would have for a twenty-first century American protestant.” it’s all very surface-level, you know?

and again, maybe THAT’s because about half of our exposure to marya is filtered through the lens of her father and brother, who very much do take her for granted. but can we seriously not talk about her enthusiasm for specifically weird folk religious practices? can we not talk about the tension inherent in that when you’re a fabulously wealthy literal princess? can we not talk about the fundamental struggle between duty and freedom? can we not ever talk about the ruthlessly judgmental moral-philosophical complex marya bolkonskaya has fully constructed for herself by age seventeen? one of the very last things tolstoy says about marya is that, while she may be happy with her life now, “her soul always longed for the infinite, the eternal, and the perfect, and therefore it could never be at peace.” why can’t we talk about THAT?

it is so, so rare, in nineteenth-century literature—and even, frankly in a lot of modern literature—to find a female character whose primary conflict is a psychological struggle against herself. not as a vector for some broader societal issue, but as a response to the baseline mortifying fact of being alive. so I suppose it isn’t SHOCKING that people don’t know what to do with her when they find her. I guess.

10. worst part of fanon

it’s actually kind of hard for me to think of what I would classify as “fanon” for war and peace! the only things that readily come to mind are gender/sexuality headcanons, and those are literally fine. and like, people ship characters together in ways I don’t like, but that’s hardly news in this day and age. of the things that do annoy me, I’ve talked about a lot of them before, and I don’t want to retread anything here

in general, I would say that there’s a tendency for online discussion of war and peace to simplify the characters and the plot beyond any real recognition. there’s a lot going on in tolstoy, at all levels, and too often I see people take these highly complex, multidimensional characters and kind of sand them down to fit vaguely familiar archetypes. those archetypes are usually based on modern media and just aren’t really a great fit for a book like this. I’m not dogmatic about this—I’m not saying nobody should EVER call nikolai rostov a himbo, that would be crazy—I just also wish we could go a bit further beyond this kind of thing than we have in the past decade-ish. (before that, I saw barely anyone talk about war and peace online at all, so, I mean, for all my complaints this is still a marked improvement)

one last thing, on the subject of fanon: does anyone else remember how, at the end of the 2007 war and peace miniseries, they have sonya and denisov get married off-screen with absolutely no foreshadowing or buildup? and the narration just tells us while we watch an idyllic final scene of all the surviving characters at a picnic? that was such a bizarre editorial choice that I sometimes think I hallucinated it, but I swear to god I did not

[yekokataa]

🔥 choose violence ask game 🔥

the character everyone gets wrong

a compelling argument for why your fave would never top or bottom

screenshot or description of the worst take you've seen on tumblr

what was the last straw that made you finally block that annoying person?

worst discord server and why

which ship fans are the most annoying?

what character did you begin to hate not because of canon but because how how the fandom acts about them?

common fandom opinion that everyone is wrong about

worst part of canon

worst part of fanon

number of fandom-related words you've filtered

the unpopular character that you actually like and why more people should like them

worst blorboficiation

that one thing you see in fics all the time

that one thing you see in fanart all the time

you can't understand why so many people like this thing (characterization, trope, headcanon, etc)

there should be more of this type of fic/art

it's absolutely criminal that the fandom has been sleeping on...

you're mad/ashamed/horrified you actually kind of like...

part of canon you found tedious or boring

part of canon you think is overhyped

your favorite part of canon that everyone else ignores

ship you've unwillingly come around to

topic that brings up the most rancid discourse

common fandom complaint that you're sick of hearing

[loveandlegacy]

as a rule it's always more interesting when two people who know each other outlive a third person that they both loved and then their relationship becomes So Much Weirder and more emotionally fraught, entangled, and charged when that third person dies

[helenekuragina]

9 for hélène!

give me an excuse to talk about war and peace

9. which of their relationships i would have cultivated more if it were up to me (both romantic and platonic).

i really like her dynamic with boris! it's something that reveals a lot about hélène and the way she thinks about her relationships with other people. it's very telling that the only two people we really see hélène displaying affection for, natasha and boris, are both people who are "beneath" her socially. she's someone who has been taught to view her relationships based on their perceived "power" in comparison to her own and it doesn't surprise me that she would only feel safe feeling affection for someone she holds power over.

boris is someone she could relate to as someone else who was taught to prioritize social status and i think there's a level of understanding between them in regards to what she can do for his reputation, but i also think that level of honesty would be deeply uncomfortable for hélène. so much of her success is attributed to molding herself into what everyone else wants her to be and she's so accustomed to operating in that mindset that i don't think she would be able to handle the idea of someone really knowing her. she doesn't even know herself. she hungers for genuine connection more than anything else, but she can't accept it when it comes. she treats him like a child, but she sends him angry letters when he stops seeing her.

there's a level of vulnerability and sincerity in her relationship with boris that we don't see in any of her other relationships. given that the majority of the men she's implied to have affairs with are higher status than her, there's definitely a significance to hélène being the one to pursue boris. even years after they stop seeing each other, she still asks him to dance 😔

something very delicious to me about the idea of boris being the closest hélène has been to falling in love but her self-sabotaging... yeah... yeah

[helenekuragina]

war and peace (original draft), leo tolstoy / american psycho, bret easton ellis

you either get it or you gont....

[goldensunset]

i’m really sorry about my behavior. you see, growing up, my family- *remembers blaming all my problems on other people is really annoying and unhealthy* i mean. i am responsible for all the evils of this world and i bear sins like the sky bears the stars

[lisiya-gori]

like the idea that nikolai rostov doesn't know he's into guys. it's obvious enough that everyone around him can tell even though it is the nineteenth century, but the man himself is completely clueless. then in like 1827 he and boris get drunk and have gay sex on julie's exquisitely waxed parquet ballroom floor following a heated argument at the st. petersburg english club and he has an entire midlife crisis about it. tells both his wife and sister because as a rostov he's constitutionally incapable of shutting up and they're both like wait you're just now figuring this out. everyone is shocked at this revelation. he asks marya how long she's known and she tells him she figured it out from context clues like a year before they got engaged. marya comes from a military family and spent her childhood hanging out with social rejects so she's actually a lot more aware of this kind of thing than you might think. she assumed that his interest in "farming" throughout their now decade long marriage was a euphemism and that he's been hooking up with one or several of the bald hills village hunks. has he actually just been micromanaging their agricultural production this entire time? nikolai talks about his financial trauma and they both cry. sonya is actually the only other person who didn't know. she decides it's none of her business at this point but it DOES answer a lot of lingering questions she's had about the whole dolokhov thing. natasha throws a party to celebrate

[the-tenth-arcanum]

ever since I was a little girl I knew I wanted to be into shit no one cares about

[lisiya-gori]

I do have to pour one out on this blog for best actress oscar winner jessie buckley, who first came to my awareness playing MARYA BOLKONSKAYA in 2016 bbc war and peace. you did such a good job with an objectively terrible script and those ridiculous sarafan outfits they had you wear (as if nikolai bolkonsky wouldn't KILL HIMSELF before he let his daughter buy and wear a dress inspired by traditional Russian folk costume), I am not at ALL surprised that you had what it takes. I don't care if you allegedly hate cats or whatever, this oscar is a win for weird girls, posers, orthodox mystics, last serving daughters, and independently wealthy single women EVERYWHERE

[lisiya-gori]

@dullingthehorns how does it feel to be one of the girls (gender neutral) who get it

[lisiya-gori]

I do have to pour one out on this blog for best actress oscar winner jessie buckley, who first came to my awareness playing MARYA BOLKONSKAYA in 2016 bbc war and peace. you did such a good job with an objectively terrible script and those ridiculous sarafan outfits they had you wear (as if nikolai bolkonsky wouldn't KILL HIMSELF before he let his daughter buy and wear a dress inspired by traditional Russian folk costume), I am not at ALL surprised that you had what it takes. I don't care if you allegedly hate cats or whatever, this oscar is a win for weird girls, posers, orthodox mystics, last serving daughters, and independently wealthy single women EVERYWHERE

[lisiya-gori]

Excuse me, hope it doesn't bother you, what is your main blog?

It's technically @mousselines, but I haven't reblogged anything on there in a longgg time. As I approach my 30th birthday I simply find that I have less posting energy than I used to.