#w&p analysis

[nikolenka]

@uranowitz asked me The Question, aka Why do i love the bolkonskys, and i love love love them as a collective because andrei & marya are not perfect siblings, but they love each other and look out for each other (even if andrei can be a dick to her, re: her god’s folk).

one other detail that i really love about them is how they are foils to each other in the love they seek: andrei has earthly love from his wife, his family, his peers (/pierre), but lacks a feeling of heavenly fulfillment; inversely, marya is essentially loveless (and she wants to be loved So Badly) but finds comfort in her deep devotion to god, which comes easily. yay foils!!

i also love them as individual characters for so so many other reasons but as a Whole that is why !

[nikolenka]

fractylic-hexameter replied to your post

Why Vera and Tushin? Just curious--it's been long enough since I've read that I don't remember my impressions of them. (Mine's Denisov, btw.)

i like vera because she’s both hilarious and also pitiful—she doesn’t click with anyone else (save her weird husband berg) because of her (correct) logical nature. how is she a rostova?? she’s completely unlike the rest of them

i love tushin because he was an absolute wreck. he wore no boots and was an awkward mess on the battlefield and off. also he lost an arm and was still kicking you go man (also both andrei and nikolai had a thing for him js)

[nikolenka]

Hi, I have a question about w&p. I'm about 400 pages in and maybe I missed it, but was there ever an explanation for how Andrei got back from the battle of Austerlitz? It seemed like he just kinda appeared magically during Liza's birth. But idk, I might have missed it or maybe it comes later. I figured I'd ask you cause you seem like an Andrei expert. Thanks!

hey!! so we never get a direct explanation (he really does just show up like “hey what’d i miss”), but we can assume, in loose terms, how he got there. the end of book one states that prince andrei and the other fatally wounded were left to the care of the people of/around austerlitz. even if napoleon and the french thought that andrei was to die, we know he clearly didn’t. that leaves him, a prince of one of the most influential families in russia, healthy (somewhat) in moravia; i’d assume that from there he was able to use his status both as a bolkonsky and as adjutant to arrange transportation back to bald hills.