The family is flesh. To give up the family—this is the second temptation—is to kill oneself.
—Tolstoy’s diary, May 1881
Vladimir Ilyich Tolstoy has not forgotten his roots. The writer’s great-great-grandson, director of the Leo Tolstoy Museum and Estate at Yasnaya Polyana, is known for his success in keeping the whole family together. Once every couple of years a hundred and fifty or so of the more than 350 Tolstoy descendants from twenty-five countries descend upon Yasnaya Polyana at Vladimir’s initiative for some sort of reunion, be it a wedding, a birthday, a funeral . . . I happened to be there on the day of one such event, the fiftieth birthday party of a great-great-granddaughter who lives in France. I’d learned about it just a day earlier when I ran into Vladimir’s nephew, Ilya Ilyich, a friend of mine, on the first floor of the Hotel Dvoryanskaya Usad’ba, or “Nobleman’s Estate,” where I was just then attending a conference. This was a family-only celebration, naturally, so I wasn’t invited. Still, this was not something I was about to miss, even if I had to enjoy it from afar.
I was standing under a great linden tree with enormous, thickly foliated branches when the rain started to come down lightly, the droplets ever so slightly breaking through the canopy above me. It was a breezy, balmy June night, and I loved being there, listening to the sound of the gentle rain against the giant leaves, feeling the wetness in my hair, on my shirt sleeve. The joyous melodies from the Russian folk quartet hired for the occasion drifted over me from fifty yards away, where the party was in full swing under a great tent that had been set up on the lawn near the hotel.
“To a wonderful woman, whom we love and admire, and who is very much needed in our lives,” proclaimed a stylishly dressed middle-aged man in French, raising a shot of vodka. As the music struck up again, I noticed several young boys dressed in khakis and white button-downs playing a game in the yard. Not far from that, two twin girls with adorable, identical bright red cloth flowers sewn on the back of their lilac dresses skipped across the lawn, hand in hand, their girlish giggles punctuated every so often by a delighted scream. A few slightly older girls were jumping rope, while a pack of teenage boys strutted their stuff out on the dance floor.
Standing beneath the dripping tree and inhaling the general atmosphere with delight, I thought to myself how the author of War and Peace would have loved to be there that night. I recalled the many joyous name-days at the Tolstoys’ I’d read about, the family birthday parties, the picnics in the fields, the troikaI races and the mummerII celebrations during which the great author often played a bear. I remembered the stories about Grandpa Lev tossing his grandson into the air with one arm and then catching him on the way down, and called to mind the famous photograph of the writer holding up his fingers to show his grandchildren Ilya and Sonechka just how big that cucumber in the fairy tale really is.
For the hour or so in which I stood there in the darkening woods dreaming of a world that once was, I felt that mixture of sad-sweet longing Russians call toska: a yearning for a long-departed world that continues to stir one’s imagination with all the force of reality . . .
Tolstoy’s contemporaries, well, they weren’t buying it. “The family, that warm and cozy element . . . which once gave the novel its content, has vanished from sight,” wrote the satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin in the early 1870s. “The novel of contemporary man finds its resolution in the street, on the public way, anywhere but in the home.” Saltykov-Shchedrin was referring here to stories like Nikolai Gogol’s “The Overcoat” (1842) and novels like Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866)—fiction that depicted the poverty, crime, and prostitution sweeping through Russian urban centers in the second half of the nineteenth century. But, of course, this very sort of development was what impelled Tolstoy to put that warm and cozy element back into the literature of his day, through depictions of the Rostovs’ troika races and Christmas games, as well as the dinner parties and name-day celebrations at their well-frequented home on Moscow’s Povarskaya Street.
“[I]t really is all gentry-landowner literature,” Dostoevsky remarked of Tolstoy’s novels, by which he meant the sort of literature created by privileged aristocrats ensconced in their private kingdoms, envisioning an idyllic, orderly Russia that no longer existed. Yet with all due respect to nineteenth-century Russia’s second-greatest novelist, most readers I know would not be opposed to spending a few weeks in the world described in War and Peace, just as they wouldn’t care to live out two hours in that of Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky’s “accidental families” of drunkards, prostitutes, and copy clerks all tossed together in run-down tenement houses, while real enough and certainly worthy of compassion, are simply not going to inspire us with a model to live by. War and Peace, on the other hand, can. It does so not by sugarcoating the harsh realities of modern life, as Dostoevsky suggested, but rather by showing us what is possible in spite of those realities.
Now, even Tolstoy would agree that there is such a thing as a toxic family, in which relationships are so torn as to be unmendable. And to veterans of such family hell, well, what Tolstoy suggests in War and Peace might appear a bit far-fetched. Then again, we’ve all seen examples of people coming from horrific backgrounds who charge into the future with redoubled commitment to creating families of their own, determined not to repeat the pattern of their own upbringings. Where the courage for such an outlook comes from is one of the greater mysteries of the human heart. Yet it reminds us of something Tolstoy knew from personal experience: that even those family relationships that appear fundamentally broken might be in fact more reparable than we suppose.
What the writer says of Moscow after the war, after all, is true of the whole world of the novel: “everything has been destroyed, except for something indestructible, immaterial” (1108). That “something” is the life force, which, continually renewing itself, can heal even the most seriously ruptured of family bonds. Or, as the poet Robert Frost would put it much later: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
The Tolstoys in 1887. Standing from left: Marya, Andrei, Tatyana. Sitting from left: Sergei, Lev, Tolstoy with his daughter Sasha, Sonya, Ilya, Mikhail.
Tolstoy saw the family as society’s primary social unit. When families break down, he observed, societies break down, and life itself falls apart. The very breakdown in family structures that Tolstoy wrote about so passionately in Anna Karenina was already taking place ten years earlier, in the 1860s, as he was working on War and Peace. Even then, the shift from agrarian to industrial economy, with the latter’s emphasis on individualism, competition, and consumerist gratification, was having its effect. Not only were peasants abandoning their communes in the countryside in favor of the economic opportunities in the cities, but Tolstoy observed a shift in attitude even among those in his own aristocratic circles, and watched with disappointment as his friends and relatives began getting divorced.
What’s more, the so-called woman question was heating up: nineteenth-century Russia’s equivalent of what today we would call feminism. The most progressive thinkers at the time (most of them young, unmarried, or both) encouraged women to pursue more important work beyond the chauvinistic confines of married life. One of the most famous examples of this argument was found in the radical Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel, What Is to Be Done?, written over four months from December 1862 through March 1863, during the author’s imprisonment in Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress. That book, which would inspire the Russian “free love” movement in the 1860s, not to mention future revolutionaries, tells the tale of Vera Pavlova, a poor girl living with her brother and a mother who wants to marry her off to the owner of the tenement house in which they live. Vera is saved from this loveless marriage as well as her poverty by a young medical student who marries her and helps her to set up a successful sewing business.
Tolstoy remained uninspired by Chernyshevsky and his model of the self-determined “new woman,” not least because he believed that, while running a sewing business with a doctor in training might well improve the quality of both one’s wardrobe and medical care, it hardly guaranteed one’s chances for long-term happiness. In the end, Tolstoy responded to the female emancipation movement with a character of his own, named Anna Karenina—a character who he felt offered a rather more realistic account of a “modern” woman’s prospects. Here was a passionate lady who managed to escape a loveless marriage and find her own freedom, only in the end to stick her head on the tracks before an oncoming train.
In War and Peace, too, Tolstoy offers something of a response to the progressive thinkers of his day, this time through the story lines of Natasha Rostova and Princess Marya. Freedom, alas, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, as the nineteen-year-old Natasha realizes while suffering from a severe case of “option-itis,” unable to choose between the juicily romantic Anatole and the jaded but morally superior Prince Andrei. Thankfully, she avoids throwing herself in front of any fast-moving ironclad vehicles, although after her failed elopement attempt, she does try to overdose on arsenic pills. That fiasco, however, serves as a watershed moment in her evolution from a rather narcissistic adolescent into the sort of mature young woman who learns to flourish even while accepting the limits of her freedom in love and in life.
When we look at Natasha and Princess Marya, and all of the characters, in fact—women and men—who end up surviving and finding happiness in War and Peace, we detect a pattern: they find deep fulfillment in opening themselves up to the joys, pain, vulnerabilities, and yes, responsibilities, not of individual fulfillment, but family life.
Take a look at Princess Marya’s family. Back in 1805, when things seemed more or less stable in Russia, a familiar gloominess reigned in the Bolkonsky household: the venerated old Prince Bolkonsky (father of both Princess Marya and Prince Andrei), a small-figured man with a brusque manner to go with his beetling brows, busies himself with his memoirs, his mathematical calculations, his energetic hobby of turning snuff boxes on a lathe, and of course supervising the ceaseless construction work on his estate. Nicknamed “the king of Prussia,” this scion of the old order is respected and feared by nearly everybody, not least his own daughter, whom he force-feeds daily lessons in geometry and algebra. Feeling out of place in her father’s enchanted castle of order and discipline, the physically frail and emotionally sensitive Princess Marya would rather lose herself in studying the Gospels, or writing long, heartfelt letters to her friend Julie in Moscow. And, of course, she is drawn to the notion of building a family of her own.
No wonder the arrival of the dashing Anatole Kuragin and his father Prince Vassily at Bald Hills in December 1805 is a welcome departure from her daily drudgery. Prince Bolkonsky may be less than enamored of this young cad and his fortune-hunting father, who have come to ask for the hand of the unattractive but very rich princess, but Marya is at once elated and terrified: “ ‘Can it be—a husband?’ ” (227).
Try as he might to give his daughter the space in which to make her own sound decision, the old prince cannot bear the thought of her leaving him, least of all for someone like Anatole. And so when he notices Anatole’s attraction to the provocative Mlle Bourienne, a family companion living with them, the old prince is as relieved as he is insulted. Nevertheless, he calls his daughter into his office for a consultation and explains that “ ‘a proposal has been made to me concerning you, Miss.’ ” She is free to decide on her own, he tells her before proceeding to dispense what must be one of the stranger pieces of parental counsel in literature:
“I desire only one thing—to do your will,” she said, “but if my desire must needs be expressed . . .”
She did not have time to finish. The prince interrupted her.
“Splendid!” he cried. “He’ll get you and your dowry and incidentally take along Mlle Bourienne. She’ll be his wife, and you . . .”
The prince stopped. He noticed the impression these words made on his daughter. She hung her head and was about to cry.
“Well, well, I’m joking,” he said. “Remember one thing, Princess. I hold to the rule that a girl has the full right to choose. And I give you freedom. Remember one thing: the happiness of your life depends on your decision. There’s no point in talking about me.” (230)
But freedom is exactly what this excessively controlling father hasn’t a clue how to give his daughter. In his own rather awkward way, he is, of course, trying to protect her, for he sees perfectly clearly that her marriage to Anatole would be a disaster. Indeed, within minutes of this conversation, Princess Marya, strolling into their winter garden, notices her prospective fiancé whispering sweet nothings in Mlle Bourienne’s ear while fondling her shapely waist. That this tête-à-tête occurs within a day of Anatole’s arrival certainly does not augur well for Princess Marya’s future with him. And so, rather than bemoaning her own fate, she suggests that Mlle Bourienne marry Anatole instead. After all, Marya concludes, Bourienne must be desperately in love with Anatole; otherwise, why would she have flirted with him so audaciously right under Princess Marya’s nose? It doesn’t occur to her that Bourienne is as much of a self-centered egoist as Anatole.
Things go from discouraging to downright depressing for Marya after the death of her brother Andrei’s wife Liza and his subsequent proposal to Natasha Rostova. Andrei’s father is opposed to this union, and as usual, Princess Marya receives the brunt of his angry outbursts, which have become more and more frequent. One day she receives a letter from her brother in which he requests that their father shorten the postponement of his marriage to Natasha by three months. When Marya communicates this request, the old man falls into a perfect rage, adding to an already steady barrage of attacks against his daughter fresh personal insults, including threats to marry Mlle Bourienne himself and hints that maybe Marya should move in with Andrei and Natasha, since the sight of her has become positively unbearable to him.
Utterly confused by her father’s senseless cruelty, the princess mutes her sadness through prayer, writing long letters to Julie, and raising her nephew Nikolenka (Prince Andrei and Liza’s son), and visiting with the holy wanderers who come to Bald Hills. Reflecting at one point on the sadness that fills her home, she realizes that spinsterhood is looking more and more like not only her best option, but her only one. And so she resolves to leave Bald Hills altogether and spend the rest of her days traveling the Russian countryside in rags, like one of her beloved holy wanderers, collecting a caftan, a black kerchief, and bast shoes for the journey. But in the end, she just can’t go through with it: “[S]eeing her father and especially little [Nikolenka], her intention would weaken, she would weep in quiet and feel she was a sinful woman: she loved her father and her nephew more than God” (487). How shall we understand Marya’s decision?
“No backbone,” winces one of my students recently. “Stockholm syndrome!” exclaims another reader to whom I’ve posed the same question, referring, of course, to the psychological phenomenon in which a hostage who is in captivity for long enough begins to mistake her captor for a protector.
As the chorus of judgment and well-meaning criticism gains strength during such discussions, so does my discomfort. “Yikes!” I think to myself. “Am I myself such a product of a rigid upbringing, my entire being stamped indelibly by the notion that Thou Shalt Respect Thy Mother and Father, no matter what?” Maybe so, for to this day I remain unconvinced by readings of Princess Marya either as a chauvinist Tolstoyan fantasy of the ideal docile woman, or as somebody who really needs to get a life and begin standing up for herself.
The fact is, this character, who was inspired by Tolstoy’s own late mother, does stand up for what she believes with every bit as much courage as we may find in a whole host of independent-minded nineteenth-century literary heroines, from Lizzy Bennet to Jane Eyre. It just so happens that what she believes, far from any notions of universal freedom or entitlement, is that the bonds of blood are thicker than even the sturdiest pair of bast shoes, and that sticking out a fundamentally imperfect family situation is, well, preferable to bolting.
But if this is a kind of wisdom Tolstoy seems quite clearly intent on privileging over various others in his novel, then why is it that he himself could not heed it in the course of his own life? Scholars, psychologists, and writers—even directors—have been debating this question for more than a century now, and still haven’t come up with a satisfactory answer. That, in turn, prompts another question: Is it possible that the troubled relationship between Princess Marya and her father anticipated—perhaps even drew upon—the one slowly deteriorating between Tolstoy and his wife? Might Tolstoy not have sensed more than a little bit of himself in Prince Bolkonsky? And might that not in turn have prompted him to endow the princess with the qualities of stolid tolerance so abundantly demonstrated by his wife? Surely he understood that it required gargantuan patience to live with someone like himself. And therefore, it is also hard to imagine that, deep down, he wasn’t grateful to have found someone equal to the task.
The fact is, without his family, Tolstoy would have been a very different kind of artist, if indeed an artist at all. His family was, quite simply, the wellspring of his imagination, and Sonya nursemaid to his abundant talents. He knew it, too: “I am a husband and a father, who is fully satisfied with his situation,” Tolstoy wrote to his relative Alexandrine (“Granny”) in 1863, around the time he started working on War and Peace. “I only feel my family circumstances, and don’t think about them. This condition gives me an awful lot of intellectual scope. I’ve never felt my intellectual powers, and even all my moral powers, so free and so capable of work.” Later, in a letter written shortly after his marriage, he compares himself to an apple tree that had once sprouted in all directions: but “now that it’s trimmed, tied, and supported, its trunk and roots can grow without hindrance. And that’s how I grow.”
Yet nearly five decades after writing War and Peace, this avowedly well-nourished and well-supported man would find himself feeling stifled, and, like his character, would outfit himself in a caftan, kerchief, and bast shoes. Tolstoy, however, made good on those preparations, and left home. He wasn’t sure, in his final hours, that he’d made the right decision: “I do not understand what it is I am supposed to do,” he kept repeating—among the truest of utterances he made during those very conflicted last twenty years of his life.
Does any of us really know what we are supposed to do in a thorny family situation of the sort Tolstoy contended with? We struggle, we search, we hit impasses. But the minute we seize the solution we feel sure we’ve finally figured out—as Tolstoy did on that fall night of 1910—we lose our capacity to embrace alternative possibilities. Fortunately, he’d already left us War and Peace, a novel all about the possibilities lying right smack between such extreme measures. And if in the end Tolstoy was unable to embrace this wisdom in his own life, he at least created in Princess Marya a character who can be seen as its embodiment.
Marya’s brother Andrei, by contrast, after his father’s destructive interference in his relationship with Natasha, descends into a downward spiral of bitterness and depression. Upon returning to Moscow and discovering that his fiancée has been unfaithful, Andrei launches into a tirade against his father, against Natasha’s seducer Anatole, even against Mlle Bourienne, who now openly flirts with the old prince right under Princess Marya’s nose. Marya implores her brother to rise above it all, but try as he might, he cannot follow her path of all-forgiving love. His heart having grown cold, he sees only ugliness and deceit wherever he looks, not least in his own childhood home: Princess Marya is “ ‘a pathetic, innocent being’ ” who “ ‘stays to be devoured by a senile old man’ ” unable to change vicious habits. And as for Andrei’s own son, well, he’s growing up in a dog-eat-dog world, “ ‘in which he will be the same as everybody else, the deceived or the deceiver’ ” (632).
But is that the lesson we are meant to learn from this situation? Princess Marya feels her brother’s pain, all right; she just doesn’t share his interpretation. Nor would she have agreed with the assessment of her father by one of Tolstoy’s most outspoken contemporaries. “[I]n the course of the whole of his life,” wrote the publicist V. V. Bervi-Flerovsky in a scathing 1868 character assassination of the male side of the Bolkonsky family, “he never, even unintentionally, expressed a human feeling towards his own daughter.” But what could be more human, Princess Marya knows, than a proud old man painfully aware that his glory has passed? Or a widower at once desperate for his daughter’s affection and constitutionally incapable of receiving, let alone returning, it? Or a frail father who fumbles around for his spectacles lying right next to him, who makes a false step with his weakening legs while looking up quickly to make sure nobody has noticed, who suddenly drops his napkin, dozes off, and hangs his tired, gray head over his plate at the dinner table? “ ‘He’s old and weak, and I dare to judge him!’ she would think in such moments” (541). In which position Tolstoy would say there is not weakness, but rather wisdom.
Even that seemingly cold, old prince, in one of the novel’s poignant moments, acknowledges his daughter’s unique gifts: “ ‘Thank you . . . daughter, dear friend . . . for everything, everything,’ ” mumbles the dying Prince Bolkonsky clumsily with his stroke-injured tongue, even as the invading French troops approach Bald Hills. “ ‘Forgive me . . . thank you . . . forgive me . . . thank you!’ ” (716).
Now, I’m uncomfortably aware that my endorsement of Princess Marya has something to do with the fact that her situation hits rather close to home for me. You see, like Princess Marya, I grew up in a house filled more with the aura of intellectual sophistication than, say, the aroma of fresh-baked pies. The many paintings and sculptures I was not to touch sometimes gave me the impression that I was a visitor in a precious art gallery, much as Princess Marya feels like an uncertain guest in her old father’s less-than-welcoming mansion.
Envious of friends who came from more ebullient, Rostov-like homes, I looked forward to Saturday playdates with Teddy, who had the latest toys and coolest gadgets; craved the afternoons with Chris, who would invite me home after school, treating me to forbidden delicacies like Doritos and Twinkies. One day, at the ripe age of eleven, I got up the courage to run away, making it as far as the Four Corners, about a mile away from home, only to realize that my feet hurt and I didn’t even have enough money for a Slurpee. And so I borrowed the neighborhood pharmacist’s phone, and minutes later the escape attempt ended with my dad dutifully showing up in the car to whisk me back to my four-thousand-square-foot prison overlooking Bear Lake, as I slunk down in the front seat, utterly defeated.
At least I came to discover a sense of purpose in my discontent, my listless, melancholy ambles through the house inevitably leading to my dad’s large leather library chair, where I’d install myself, flipping carefully through the hundreds of leather-bound classics from his well-kept bookshelves. At sixteen, I even started penning verse about “my private passions and silent sufferings”; indeed, had I been as religiously inclined as Princess Marya, I might well have taken up the study of Talmud, rather than Tolstoy.
“All happy families are alike,” he writes in the famous opening sentence of Anna Karenina. “Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” So which kind was mine? I’ve often wondered, secretly hoping I belonged to the latter, more distinctive category.
Scouring my memory bank, I mentally tallied my grievances against my parents, siblings, even relatives. Hundreds of hours and tens of thousands of dollars of therapy later, I can say that the hurts were certainly there; nor do I mean to minimize their impact. But do they earn me membership in Tolstoy’s unhappy-family category? I’m afraid not. Having recently become a father myself, I’ve gained firsthand exposure to the challenges of child-rearing, and, as a result, a deeper appreciation of the many subtle manifestations of my parents’ love for me that once went unnoticed. In the years since I first ventured forth from my cocoonlike existence on Bear Lake, I have met folks from broken families in which terribly destructive things actually do occur—things that make my weeklong grounding for scratching a painting, or even those dreadful pummelings from my older brother, appear rather insignificant by comparison.
The Kaufmans, then, like the Bolkonskys, while far from perfect, were by Tolstoy’s standards a fairly happy lot. As are nearly all the families in War and Peace, for that matter. Even as their world is imploding under the weight of external pressures, most of them stay together. The Bolkonskys have their share of problems, true, but given all the horrible things that can and do happen in the world—watching your capital burn to the ground, for instance, or having the one you love die at your side—putting up with an insufferable old father would surely seem a small price to pay for the deeper consolations that one’s family alone may provide.
After her father’s death, the newly liberated princess has a whole set of practical decisions to make. Does she stay or leave in advance of the invading French army? Should she free the peasants now rebelling? Things are chaotic, and she is terrified to step into a leadership role for which she is unprepared. Yet step into that position she must, and she finds guidance in the knowledge that she is acting not for herself, but on behalf of her father and brother. “Whatever they would have said, whatever they would have done now, she felt it necessary to do the same” (725).
Tolstoy’s male chauvinism, many would suggest, is evident in this passage; and such an assessment would not be entirely baseless. Then again, very much in evidence, too, is his insight into the facts of life: with Russia in the throes of war, her peasants rebelling and human relationships hanging in the balance, the one thing the princess has to fall back on is her connection to her family roots. Surely this is something that those of us living through our own troubled times might relate to. National hardship at any time, really, allows fresh insight into the meaning of family. The general mood in this country after September 11, 2001, for example, may not have been unlike that in Russia following Napoleon’s invasion; I know it affected me personally. For years I had prided myself on being my own man. Then the attacks happened. Coming home alone to my apartment in Los Angeles, or sitting on airplanes, wondering whether I’d even make it to my destination in one piece, I suddenly realized that being “my own man” wasn’t so important to me anymore; I wanted to be somebody else’s man: a husband, a father, a son, a brother. No longer did all those family traditions—all the Shabbat dinners, the handcrafted birthday cards—seem quite such . . . an imposition. In fact, I found a strange sense of comfort knowing that I was a member of what I’d always supposed must be the world’s most annoying family.
The old world may be disintegrating in War and Peace, but a fresh one is emerging, in much the same way as a dying-out beehive, which, appearing lifeless and inert, has already begun to gestate new life forms: the essential work of pairing, pollination, and reproduction having been completed, the queen bee is already off reproducing her eggs elsewhere. The novel is full, in fact, of such biological metaphors, with a particular emphasis on bee propagation and bird behavior. Playing, no doubt, off the fact that the word for “family” in Russian (sem’ia) is nearly identical to the word for “seed” (semia), Tolstoy emphasizes that family is the indestructible seed that, no matter what else is happening in the world, continually renews itself by adhering to a set of laws as universal as the processes of nature itself.
We see this process of transformation at work in the Rostov home right around the time Princess Marya buries her father. Life by this point is dangerous and chaotic. Natasha wants to give up the carts to the wounded soldiers; her mother’s refusal results in a family argument ultimately resolved by the demands of the moment. In the final hours before they leave their home, the sense of imminent danger ever more palpable, Natasha becomes a managerial force in the house, overseeing the packing and issuing a number of instructions that even other members of her family begin to heed. The role of mother hen protecting her own before the storm, comes naturally to her, but of course it has taken a situation of extreme duress to propel her all the way into it. “ ‘The eggs . . . the eggs are teaching the hen . . .’ [Count Rostov] said through happy tears, and he embraced his wife, [who, embarrassed by her earlier refusal to give up the carts,] was glad to hide her ashamed face on his chest” (862).
By the time she turns twenty, life has dealt Natasha enough blows to temper her erstwhile joie de vivre with a hardy realism. Given all she’s been through, it is hardly surprising that she fails to exude her once-infectious charm; indeed, after getting married, she even starts letting herself go, to the disappointment of some of her former society acquaintances and, indeed, many readers. But while somebody like the beautiful seductress Hélène Kuragin may continue to prance about the continent in search of multiple husbands who might inject her cheerless life with shots of instant adoration, all Natasha really needs now is one good man, a point Tolstoy makes by means of a rather unusual metaphor:
If the purpose of dinner is nourishment, and the purpose of marriage is the family, then the whole question is solved simply by not eating more than the stomach can digest and not having more wives and husbands than are needed for a family, that is, one of each. Natasha needed a husband. A husband was given her. And the husband gave her a family. And not only did she see no need for another, better husband, but as all her inner forces were directed at serving this husband and family, she could not even imagine and saw no interest in imagining how it would be if it were different. (1156)
While it may be tempting, then, to order any number of the entrees on the menu so as not to miss out on anything, that indulgence in the short term will surely lead to nausea, and over time, to obesity, an epidemic as prevalent today as venereal disease was in Tolstoy’s day. So, too, with family life, the writer says. There might be a hundred mouthwatering reasons to put an end to that whole messy business, and either go it alone or to try it out with some more enticing combination of individuals. But there is one very good reason to stick it out, or, at least, to resist the all-too-familiar urge to escape from the messiness of marriage in the vague hopes of finding “something better out there”: because only by doing so—by placing real limitations on our rampant desires—may we feed the soul what it needs to survive and flourish.
I. troika: Russian sleigh drawn by a team of three horses.
II. mummer: merrymaker in a costume during festive occasions.
