Classics of Russian Literature | Family Life Meets Military Life (Lecture 18)

Lecture 18: What happens when good family people with rich domestic experience meet the hideous bloodshed of a massive war, the most massive one Europe had known up to the year 1812? How did Napoleon’s Grande Armée affect the nation with the largest land mass in the world? Tolstoy shows us how through his extraordinary characters. Nikolai Rostov, the young man filled with sincere patriotism, seeks glorious death for the sake of the tsar and the fatherland. But when the French soldiers shoot at him, he wonders why anyone would want to kill such a nice person as himself. Andrei Bolkonsky discovers the nature of true courage and fortitude, plus the blue sky over the Battle of Austerlitz. This discovery is intensified at the Battle of Borodino, paradigm of all modern mass battles, from Gettysburg to Stalingrad. And a great deal of this experience is seen through the eyes of the loveliest feminine creature in 19th-century literature, whom no one can resist loving: Natasha Rostova.

Suggested Reading:
John Bayley, Tolstoy and the Novel.