The Story Continued: Pierre's Inheritance
.......When Pierre’s father dies, he makes Pierre–to Pierre’s surprise–the principal heir of his wealth. Now Pierre appears to have an identity, that of a nobleman who wields power and oversees an estate. Suddenly, he is popular with the proud aristocrats. They lead him to believe that his personal qualities, rather than his riches, have endeared him to his former detractors. Chief among the deceivers is Prince Vassily, who dangles his beautiful daughter, Hélène, before him in a décolleté dress that hints at the pleasures awaiting him if he marries her. Even though Pierre admires–perhaps even loves–one of the Rostovs, the very appealing Natasha, he takes Hélène as his wife to live with him at his home in St. Petersburg. But Pierre finds that he is still not happy. His wife cares only for fashions, jewels, and the social limelight. She loves Pierre’s money, not Pierre. So Pierre continues his search for meaning and peace of mind in various other ways: He joins the Masons. He frees the peasants bound to his estate.
.......Meanwhile, Prince Andrey Bolkonsky and Nicholas Rostov cross paths before the Battle of Austerlitz in Moravia (then part of the Austrian Empire and now part of the Czech Republic), where Bolkonsky is an adjutant serving under the Russian general Prince Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov. Nicholas sees action. The first time he is frightened. The next time, when he is delivering a message and is shot at, he is thrilled.
.......Napoleon, of course, is a wily, unpredictable military genius who registers one victory after another–no matter how large the opposing armies, no matter the lay of the land or the battlefield conditions. He can do no wrong. When Kutuzov frowns on engaging the French at Austerlitz, Czar Alexander I, who has come to the front himself, overrules Kutuzov. The result? The French win an impressive victory.
.......During the fighting, Prince Andrey fights bravely and carries his country’s flag while leading Russian troops toward enemy fire. However, he suffers a serious wound. Although it is not fatal, his relatives and friends receive word that he may have died. After the battle, Nicholas Rostov returns home on leave. When he arrives with a soldier friend, Denisov, the entire family, along with serfs and servants, greet Nicholas with kisses, hugs, and tearful eyes. The family also greets Denisov warmly. Sonya, now 16 and very pretty, cannot take her eyes off Nicholas, for she loves him. There is an understanding that Nicholas is meant for Sonya, but Sonya does not want understandings or promises; she wants Nicholas’s love. She wants Nicholas to be free to make up his own mind. Nicholas does love the charming Sonya, but during his leave he drifts from her as he and Denisov enjoy club activities, party bashes, and all the other wild things young soldiers do together, including, as the narrator says, “visits to a certain house.”
.......Nicholas and his friends, including the rakish Fedya Dolohov, attend a special dinner at the English Club in Moscow to honor the Russian general Pyotr Ivanovich Bagration, who distinguished himself by slowing a French advance at Hollabrunn. Sitting across from Nicholas and Dolohov is Pierre Bezuhov. It is an unfortunate seating arrangement, for Dolohov has been seeing Pierre’s wife. Pierre suspects they have been intimate. Angry words are exchanged and a duel ensues in which Pierre, though unschooled in weaponry, somehow manages to wound Dolohov. Later, Pierre leaves Hélène–for a while.
.......Meanwhile, Andrey has returned to Bald Hills intact and in good health, thanks to peasants who nursed his wound after the Battle of Austerlitz. His family is jubilant, of course, but all is not well with his wife: She has undergone a difficult labor giving birth to Andrey’s child. Then she dies. The child is a boy, Nicholas–or Nikolushka, as his family calls him.
Andrey and Natasha Fall in Love
.......One day when Pierre visits the Rostovs–old friends of his who are always read to welcome him–Prince Andrey tags along. When Andrey sees Natasha for the first time, he is immediately smitten with her, and she is absolutely awed by him. In a short time, they make wedding plans. But when Andrey broaches the topic of marriage while visiting his tyrannical father, the old man frowns upon a union of the Bolkonskys and Rostovs. The Rostovs haven’t enough money or prestige to suit him. However, if Andrey still wants to marry Natasha after delaying the wedding for one year, the old prince says, he will withdraw his opposition to their marriage. Andrey agrees to the terms and later returns to military service.
.......One evening, Natasha Rostov attends an opera at which the dissolute Anatole Kuragin spies her out, likes what he sees, and targets her as his next conquest. After having his sister, Hélène, introduce him to the dazzling young lady, he lavishes Natasha with flattery. Natasha shrinks from his advances at first, but–impressionable and capricious romantic that she is–welcomes them later, forgetting all about Andrey. What she does not know is that Kuragin is already married; he had been forced into a union with a woman he wronged. Kuragin talks Natasha into agreeing to elope with him after persuading a friend to pose as the priest who will perform the marriage. While Natasha prepares for the elopement, her cousin Sonya tries to talk her out of it but fails. So Sonya tells Pierre of Kuragin’s scheme. Pierre angrily drives off Anatole, then consoles Natasha and informs her of Anatole’s marriage.
.......In June 1812, Napoleon crosses from Poland into Russia across the Niemen River with 600,000 men. Along his marching path, Russian citizens destroy supplies that would help sustain Napoleon’s army. Nevertheless, in spite of suffering hardships, Napoleon marches on. Two months later, Kutuzov becomes commander-in-chief of the Russian army, replacing Prince Mikhail Barclay de Tolly as the field marshal. Kutuzov continues de Tolly’s policy of strategic retreat by destroying supplies and allowing Napoleon’s army to wear down during its long march. However, at Borodino, the Russian army digs in to protect Moscow, about seventy miles east. Pierre Bezuhov is there behind the Russian lines to observe the ensuing battle as part of his self-education.
.......Fighting is fierce along a three-mile front, and both sides suffer heavy casualties. One of the wounded is Andrey Bolkonsky. The Russians fight well enough to halt the French advance and claim a moral victory. By nightfall, the fighting ceases except for occasional artillery fire, and Kutuzov’s forces withdraw. Several days later, the French march into Moscow. But Napoleon finds the city almost completely abandoned. The wounded Prince Andrey is with the fleeing Rostovs, who happened upon him after Kutuzov’s army passed through the city. Pierre Bezuhov is among those remaining in Moscow. He has a bold plan: to assassinate Napoleon. As for Napoleon himself, he has conquered a magnificent city only to find magnificent emptiness. His men loot and build fires to cook food. But the flames from one of the fires, or perhaps the lit pipe of a sleeping soldier, ignite a building. Soon another building burns, and then another and another. Eventually most of the city in on fire.
.......About 3½ miles from Moscow, the fleeing Rostovs stop to pass the night along the road, then resume their journey the next morning. After traveling all day on roads crowded with other refugees, they stop for the night 14 miles from Moscow at the village of Great Mystishchi. From there, they can see the red sky above Moscow in the distance. During the night, Natasha, unable to sleep, goes to the hut where Prince Andrey is lying in a fever. In a corner under the dim light of a candle, she sees the broken man. When she kneels at his bedside, Andrey smiles and extends his hand to her.
Pierre Arrested
.......In Moscow, Pierre rescues a child from a burning building and helps an Armenian woman escape the clutches of a soldier. The French arrest and imprison him, making it impossible for him to carry out his assassination plan. During his confinement, he befriends a peasant, Platon Karataev, who gives Pierre food and helps teach him the importance of compassion. Pierre also witnesses executions of Russian citizens and, most important, realizes that the meaning of life lies in love for all of humankind–nobles, peasants, everyone.
.......Oddly, life continues as usual in St. Petersburg–the parties, the *bleep*, the banquets. At one of Anna Pavolovna Scherer’s soirées, there is talk of an illness that has afflicted Hélène Kuragin Bezuhov, the always popular coquette. The illness, the reader learns later, is self-inflicted: Hélène has taken a lethal dosage of drugs. It seems that her quest for the attentions of the men in St. Petersburg society was really a quest for love, genuine love, even if she never realized what she was looking for. She dies a lonely woman.
.......After occupying Moscow for 39 days, Napoleon and his troops withdraw. They are out of supplies. Moreover, marching in pursuit of the enemy army–or attacking the city of the czar, St. Petersburg–in the gathering cold of fall and winter will only diminish their ranks. When they head southward in October, over the same route they used to reach Moscow, they take cartloads of treasure–and prisoners, including Pierre. But the withdrawal is a disaster. By November, weighted down with booty and fighting cold and hunger, they lose many men. Snow falls. There is no food. A bridge collapses, sending many Frenchmen to an icy death. Along the way, Cossacks attack the French, further diminishing their ranks. The Grand Army of Napoleon has become an endless queue of walking corpses.
.......At Yaroslavl, where the Rostovs are staying, Prince Andrey’s sister, Marya, visits Andrey. There is no hope for him, and he dies peacefully after he and Natasha reconcile.
.......The war peters out in Russia, but not before one young fellow–headstrong Petya Rostov, who longed to be like his brother and fight in the war–enlisted and died in a skirmish.
.......During one of the attacks on the fleeing French army, Pierre is freed. When he returns to the north, he marries the young woman he has always loved, Natasha Rostov, and she proves to be a good and sensible wife who bears children and loses her figure–but not her appeal and common sense. At long last, Pierre has found his meaning in simple family life. Nicholas Rostov, meanwhile, works to support his impoverished family and eventually marries wealthy Marya Bolkonsky, Prince Andrey's sister, in part to pay his and his family's debts, and they adopt Prince Andrey’s son, Nicholushka. Poor Sonya, who has always loved Nikolay, gives him up without protest, thereby expressing heroic, unselfish love. Cold-fish Vera marries a soldier, Lt. Alphonse Berg, after he plainly tells her he wants her for her money.
.......Many of the elders in the Rostov, Bolkonsky, and other families have died by now.
.......Kutuzov is a hero.
.......Life goes on in the villages and cities of Russia.
.......There is peace.
Community Forum
Topic: Game for April (Read 355403 times)
April 20, 2009, 02:48:07 pm