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Patterns of Character Development in Tolstoy's War and Peace: Nicholas, Natasha, and Mary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

John Hagan
John Hagan*
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Binghamton
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Abstract

While the public action in War and Peace moves toward war and then away from it, an analogous private journey from spiritual war to spiritual peace takes place within each of the protagonists. For three of them, Tolstoy structures the development by (a) situating for each character a specific major turning point, (b) constructing among the three stories various parallels and contrasts, and (c) developing appropriate patterns of symbolic imagery. Nicholas moves from war to peace by becoming transformed from a soldier into a farmer, husband, and father; the change is defined by imagery associated with physical liberation and two kinds of hunt. The movement in Natasha's life is from peace to war and is a result of the exposure of her innocence and happiness to temptation and suffering. This development is underscored by imagery connected with two kinds of singing, by the contrasting ways in which she reacts to the party at Uncle's and to the opera, and by a specific analogy between her fate and that of the nation. The movement from war to peace in Mary's story occurs when the inner conflicts created by her relations with her father are resolved, after the latter's death, upon the arrival of Nicholas, with whom her experience is further linked by a repetition of the imagery of liberation.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 84 , Issue 2 , March 1969 , pp. 235 - 244
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1969

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References

1 “On the Craftsmanship of War and Peace,” Essays in Criticism, xiii (1963), 17–49.

2 War and Peace, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude, World's Classics, 3 vols. (London, 1933), i, 50–51; L. N. Tolstoy, Sobranie Socinenij, 20 vols. (Moscow, 1960–65), iv, 57. Henceforth these editions will be abbreviated as WP and SS, respectively, and volume and page references will be given in parentheses.

3 The use of imagery of frames, doors, windows, and sky to focus the theme of liberation is not confined to the story of Nicholas alone, as we shall see presently in our discussion of Mary. Such imagery is part of Tolstoy's habitual way of metaphorically representing certain kinds of spiritual experience throughout the novel—indeed, an essential element in the structure of his whole vision of life. Especially important is the role it plays at crucial points in the development of Andrew and Pierre, a subject too large to be discussed here, but some of whose dimensions may be suggested by such passages as the following: Andrew: WP, i, 369, 385, 386, 431, 516; ii, 7, 67, 68, 286–287, 534; iii, 135, 219–220; SS, iv, 380, 397; v, 48,132-133, 174, 235–236; vi, 41, 287,433; vii, 74–75. Pierre: WP, i, 476; ii, 252; iii, 31,124, 268–269, 397–398; SS, v, 91, 414; vi, 329, 422; vii, 123, 245.

4 As a further indication of Tolstoy's careful planning of Natasha's story, one may note how subtly the encounter between Natasha and Anatole is foreshadowed. When the latter is first introduced to us in Bk. i, it is in the chapter (WP, Ch. ix; 55, Ch. vi) immediately preceding our introduction to the Rostovs, who, at the time, are celebrating Natasha's name day. Moreover, in Bk. vii, Ch. ix, as the restlessness and loneliness which are going to make her vulnerable to Anatole grow more intense, we are told that Natasha “picked up her guitar . . . and began . . . picking out a passage she recalled from an opera she had heard in Petersburg with Prince Andrew” (WP, ii, 141; SS, v, 305; italics mine). The irony is obvious.

6 Note that this remorse occurs immediately after Nicholas goes through his comparable experience of feeling “moral nausea” for wounding the French officer (Bk. ix, Ch. xv). War and Peace, as I have already suggested, is filled with correlations and synchronizations of precisely this sort.

6 The parallel between the Bolkonski household and Anna Pavlovna's salon on the score of their fixity is also established by what Tolstoy says in two later passages: WP, ii, 287–288, 395; SS, vi, 42, 145.