Work Text:
I.
When Masha comes down to breakfast with Nikolai Bolkonsky’s diamond on her ring finger, her cousins congratulate her and her fiance looks hopefully across at her, but there is something despairing in Aunt Marya’s eyes. Her smile is brittle and her congratulations halting. Everyone but the bride is too busy talking about the wedding to notice.
Later, Aunt Marya holds the diamond up to the light and tells Masha how Lisa Meinen died. She explains her father’s petty cruelties, her brother’s careless disregard, and that her nephew has never once asked her about his mother. Tilting her head back to the ceiling, she explains that her own mother died also bearing a child, that she herself can hardly remember her and heard nothing of her from the day she was buried. Her expression--distant and subtly distraught--is haunting. Masha tries very hard not to tremble.
“What I meant to tell you,” says Countess Marya just as they are about to go downstairs for dinner, “is that it is not an easy thing to be a Princess Bolkonskaya.”
Masha remembers those words as she says her marriage vows--because of course she marries him. Saying no is not an option, not when she is a fortuneless girl with a traitor for a father, living on the charity of relatives. As the wedding procession passes through the nave of the church, she catches her aunt’s sad smile. It is not an easy thing to be a Countess Bezukhova, she thinks, but Aunt Marya wouldn’t know anything about that.
II.
Natasha is in every way the very image of her aunt. The same flashing eyes, not at all like her mother’s tragic, pensive ones, the same grace of movement, the same infectious laugh. The same degree of adoration from Count Rostov, who she knows with quiet guilt to love her more than any of his sons. The same passionate nature, which applies equally to the English poetry she reads beneath the covers at night and the mazurka she dances with her father at her name-day ball.
It also applies to the young men who pull her into corners at imperial receptions and slide their hands lower than they should when she waltzes. She likes being courted by them at her mother’s Sunday teas, with poems and posies and anxious declarations of love, and she likes kissing them against the corridor wall even more. Some of them, she knows, are motivated by profit--she knows they whisper about her, about Rostov charm and Bolkonsky money--but the way they moan her name is entirely her own achievement. When Lieutenant Anatole Kuragin, named for his uncle, comes to Moscow after two years stationed in Moldavia, he nearly undoes her completely.
But Natasha has heard the stories. (She is glad, in retrospect, that with the exception of dear little Petya, none of her cousins are boys. She has seen first-hand what can result from that sort of attachment.) So when Anatole Kuragin comes to her late one night and begs her to tell him to go back to his regiment, she looks first at the ceiling and then at the stars, and she thinks about what Cousin Sonya told her. And then she turns her eyes directly on his and tells him yes, he rather should.
III.
He doesn’t know when he started hating his uncle. It can’t, logically, have been there forever, but he can’t ever remember not feeling complete revulsion for his aunt’s husband. At university, and years later--alcoholism and poetry in Paris or Vienna, the romantic aimlessness of exile--Nikolai speaks of him as the epitome of the unthinking and conventional. In the dim air of a Dresden salon he does his best impression of Count Rostov’s rage, stomping around heavy-footed and waving his cigar in the air, the way he remembers his uncle raging when his sons or his serfs or Nikolai displeased him. The resemblance is extraordinary. His audience falls apart with laughter.
“My father never liked him,” he says, once the hilarity has subsided. “And neither did Count Bezukhov.” (They have heard of Count Bezukhov, his exile, his treatise, and the reference is impressive.)
He has always known the antipathy to be mutual, which is why he’s surprised when an imperial pardon arrives from St. Petersburg, with an addendum stating it “thanks in no small part to the tireless efforts of your relative Count Rostov.” He doesn’t know why Count Rostov would do this--would expend what must have been significant political influence on it--and at first he considers ignoring it, but in the end he does go back to Moscow, partly to see his aunt again and partly to fulfill his promise to Count Bezukhov of marrying his oldest daughter.
When he returns, he expects a monstrous aristocrat, but what he finds is an old man with a grave voice who goes every morning over the ledgers for his estates. The count still argues against land reform at dinner parties and refuses to buy a new book for his library until he has finished the last, but he is fair in his judgments, and it is clear even to Nikolai that he adores his family. Once, during his second week back, Nikolai is suddenly seized with a profound sense of guilt for his careless mockery, but he pushes it away as quickly as it comes. What’s done is done, he tells himself. There can be no turning back.
IV.
Andrei is intelligent from the very beginning, and knows it. Everyone tells him so--first his governess, then his tutor, then his professors at the university and his supervisors in the bureaucratic service. Not brilliant in the way his sister Sophie is, with her astronomical charts and voracious intellectual fixations, but clever, perceptive, able to see and understand things other people don’t. Too smart for his own good. He can comprehend an argument about the origin of human evil, he can prevent a scandal in a ballroom, he can read the shades of sadness in his mother’s eyes. His sisters adore him and his brother won’t live up to him and his father takes him around Otradnoe in the summer and tells him how glad he is the estates will be in good hands.
At first he thinks it’s only because of his name that Uncle Pierre tells him so many stories, but later, when Uncle Pierre is gone and it’s Mother leading him by the hand through the corridors of Bald Hills, he realizes there’s more to it than that. He knows he bears a resemblance to his namesake uncle, something in the shape of his face, and Natasha tells him he has a certain gravity of expression that matches the portrait hanging in the stairwell at Bald Hills. And then there’s the way his parents look at each other when someone mentions Andrei Bolkonsky’s name, the look he remembers flitting across Aunt Natasha’s features. (He was young, only twelve, the last time he saw her, but he remembers.) The official story--heroism, a noble death, the romance with Aunt Natasha--does not add up. Nikolai is no help, and Nikolai is vaguely contemptuous of Andrei anyway, thinks him too much a Rostov to be making inquiries about his father. It is not the sort of thing that can be asked in a letter to Irkutsk. He suspects his mother might know the truth, but he knows that when she looks at him she sees her dead brother, and he is not willing to bring sorrow to her for the sake of information.
So he waits. He watches. He looks for signs: mixed anger and sympathy in his father’s voice, Prince Ippolit Kuragin laughing, oh yes, the one who married Lisa Meinen. The secret will come out eventually. Sooner or later, they all do.
V.
They call him Petya mainly, little Petya, Petrushka. No one but his French tutor has ever called him Pierre. His sisters get married without consulting him. His boy cousins teach him politics and how to hold a sabretache, but even from the very beginning it is clear that he is not one of them. He will not inherit anything, has no Bald Hills or Otradnoe awaiting his majority; he is not even Count Bezukhov anymore. He is only Pyotr Petrovich with a last name everyone glosses over, and he cannot escape it. His sister Marya can shed her past like a cloak and become Princess Bolkonskaya, but he will be Pyotr Petrovich forever.
He finds friends in the strangest of places. Prince Boris Drubetskoy, Foreign Minister, visits for a week on his way to Astrakhan and tells him opportunities are always there if he’s willing to seize them. Sonya Alexandrovna looks at him sympathetically over dinner tables. Plans form unbidden in his mind.
In the summer he turns twenty, when Count Rostov dies and Anastasia Kuragina tells him she is breaking off their liasion, he decides to put his plans into action. He goes up to Otradnoe one weekend and asks Andrei if he could get him a commission in the army, and before he can respond Andrei’s wife, the Foreign Minister’s daughter, comes in and tells him she can.
Masha says he ought to write to Father before he leaves for Warsaw. He imagines a letter traveling ever eastward across blank, frozen land.
“You didn’t write to him when you got married.”
“Yes, but this is different. Come, Petya, you’re named after him.”
It isn’t true, but he writes anyway, a brief, cursory letter that will give little comfort to anyone in the vast stretch of Siberia. Petya doesn’t care. His future is pointing him westward, and he has never believed in the significance of names.