lisiya-gori

[lisiya-gori]

About halfway through War and Peace, and … I really like Princess Marya. She puts up with so much shit from her dad and her “friend”, tries so hard to be the best person she can be (sadly often to her own detriment), and … she doesn’t deserve all this shit. She has self-loathing for just being human, for having flaws or negative thoughts/feelings, and it’s not her fault. Her father’s an abusive prick, and her companion picked the father over Marya (probably also to survive, but still). She’s socially awkward among her peers, because her dad doesn’t let her have a social life, and she can’t relate to any of them.

Marya’s trying to be a good aunt to Andrei’s son, but she’s beginning to echo some of her dad’s behavior with him, and she’s aware of that cycle beginning. And like her, little Nikolai forgives his guardian for the unjust behavior. It makes me concerned for both of them. I’m only 48% through, but I hope Marya can stop the cycle and I hope things start looking up for her. She deserves good things.

[lisiya-gori]

war and peace things we don’t talk about enough:

nikolai at tilsit

old prince bolkonsky being exiled to his estates by paul i and deciding to just stay there out of spite

dolokhov’s persian adventures

the overall themes of entropy and decay in the rostov family’s arc

lise being baltic german (and also her mustache)

the symbolism of sonya having a patronymic but no last name and boris having a last name but no patronymic

the entire marya/anatole proposal scene

whatever the fuck was going on with kirill bezukhov

that one time marya hangs out with a trans man and andrei is canonically transphobic about it

actually pretty much every time a main character interacts with someone outside the aristocracy

the anna milkhailovna-natalya rostova friendship and its disintegration

whatever we're expected to believe ippolit does after 1805

[lisiya-gori]

rotating the kuragins in my mind...

[lisiya-gori]

while the society portrayed in war and peace is unquestionably hierarchical, there's also a sort of pervasive noblesse oblige hospitality ethic evidenced by the fact that every aristocratic household we see has a couple of Weird Guys who just hang out there indefinitely. dmitri vasilievich with the rostovs, mikhail the architect at bald hills. even characters like mlle. bourienne fit this bill to some extent. sometimes they have the barest pretext of a job, sometimes not even that. these people are always the first to be cut from adaptations because they don't actually do anything, but in the book they're almost always around. the extent of this social norm is shown when nikolai brings dolokhov and denisov over to his parents' house and they just have to kind of let them hang out there for six months, even though all they do is raid the liquor cabinet and act inappropriately toward teenage girls

[lisiya-gori]

crazy how every time a female character gets cliche misogynistic writing we have to explain to people again that fictional characters are not real and do not choose things for themselves.

[lisiya-gori]

[lisiya-gori]

man with excellent self restraint dismayed to realize that not wanting anything is more likely a depression symptom than a carefully honed skill that atones for other aspects of his character

[lisiya-gori]

I love that marya gets a “good” ending specifically because she doesn’t actually do anything, moral or immoral, to deserve it. the thing that changes her life is that her father and brother both die and she becomes a legally independent single rich woman, which isn’t something she anticipated or even wanted. it’s pure circumstance. that’s just how life works sometimes. that’s just how it is

[lisiya-gori]

lise would have actually been such a good mom to nikolenka. not because all women are inherently natural mothers or whatever, I just think she in particular would have really enjoyed parenthood for all of its joys and its challenges. lise, from what little we see of her, is such an empathetic, relational person, and with her marriage to andrei already disintegrating I think she would get a lot out of having that level of closeness with someone. I think she would have loved watching her son grow and change and surprise her. and most importantly I think she would have stood up for nikolenka against his grandfather, and to a lesser extent against his father and aunt. when we see her, she's very newly into a marriage that's shaping up to be disastrous, she's pregnant for the first time in a world without modern medicine, and she's stranded in the middle of nowhere with people she doesn't know. I think that, given the opportunity to grow through those challenges, she would have been such a valuable alternative perspective for nikolenka to have, on his family and on the world in general

and of course nikolenka never thinks about this. he doesn't think about lise at all, because he never knew her, and the bolkonskys don't care enough to keep her memory alive for him. the greatest tragedy of his life happened when he was barely an hour old. instead he gets marya, who does love him and who tries very hard but who will always know him as one more familial obligation forced on her out of duty. the epilogue tells us that marya (ocd queen that she is) is constantly comparing her love for nikolenka to her love for her own children with nikolai and worrying because she doesn't quite love him in the same way. when of course she would feel differently about him than about her own children that she actively chose to have! and of course nikolenka himself would pick up on that (certainly it's one reason why he has such an antagonistic relationship with nikolai). and of course he would leave home as soon as he could and get involved with something idealistic and dangerous and be exiled as an enemy of the state at age twenty. the absence of lise, more than even the absence of andrei, is the defining tragedy of his entire life

[lisiya-gori]

the first time you’re introduced to marya as a character is vasili kuragin telling anna pavlovna she’s from a good family and rich and that’s all that matters, and in the end that’s actually true. those are ultimately the defining facts of her life

[lisiya-gori]

being doomed by the narrative is cool and all but i like when a character is doomed just by being a fucking idiot. sorry that happened to you but it is entirely your own fault and you could have just chosen to not do all that

[lisiya-gori]

it’s weird to say that I’m becoming disillusioned with tolstoy’s writing of women, but the fact is that he never wrote a single other character as good as marya bolkonskaya. I suspect that was because she was so aggressively family coded (based in theory on his mom and arguably in looks/behavior on his sister) that it overrode the urge to see every fictional woman in terms of whether or not he was attracted to her and why. marya gets married but it’s not the center of her arc or the main thing she struggles with, she considers existential questions of meaning, purpose, and obligation in a way that not a lot of female characters get to do. and yes, a lot of that is bound up in her being materially well-off to the point that she doesn’t HAVE to get married. but that in itself is kind of the point. and marya (afaik) is the only significantly developed character he ever does this with

[lisiya-gori]

pov you're marya bolkonskaya in 1813

[lisiya-gori]

I can’t draw, so you’re going to have to bear with me here. bolkonsky family sitting at the dinner table, old prince, marya, andrei, mlle b, nikolenka in his high chair, a few assorted hangers on. everyone is stiff, blank-faced, not looking at each other. mutual thought bubble above andrei and marya’s heads and it’s just the le meurtre de laïus par oedipe by joseph blanc

[lisiya-gori]

#Like something so sinister about Hélène is that she charms all of society into actually believing she is extremely smart and virtuous #but they actually just value her physical beauty and tolstoy repeatedly gives examples of vacuous things she says that people find profound #And that is just not in Great Comet they just play her totally villianesque — @veloursbanane

LOVE these tags like the main thing truly is the corrupting force of society. great comet hélène is positioned as innately and uniquely evil meanwhile in the novel we are constantly surrounded by the presence of what Makes her the way she is. each character is so aggressively a product of their environment, hélène's being her family and the ever-presence of society's gaze, that removing them from that context is not only confusing but also pretty boring tbh

[lisiya-gori]

every day i cry because people ignore the fact that lise bolkonskaya is hairy girl representation

[lisiya-gori]

one day I'm really going to start marya posting, and then you'll all see