![]() ![]() More importantly, and rarely for the time, she’s allowed to make mistakes, most notably in her troubled relationship with the duplicitous Anatole Kuragin. Natasha’s vitality courses through War and Peace – like that other wartime heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, she refuses to let tough times grind her down but instead rises splendidly to the occasion, treating the wounded, keeping up her family’s fading spirits, and confronting her complicated feelings for Andrei with a new-found maturity. Instead, my second reading of War and Peace was all about the impulsive Natasha Rostova, the heroine Tolstoy first introduces as a giggling girl of 13 desperate to gulp down all of life in great hungry bursts. Caught in the throes of a dying relationship, I found that my one-time hero barely registered. James Norton as Prince Andrei in the new BBC adaptation. Running out of fresh films, I found a second-hand copy of War and Peace and settled down for a comforting reunion with Andrei. While he diligently attended German classes, I spent my time bunking off at the cinema. I was in my early 20s and living in Berlin with my university boyfriend, an experiment that was turning sour as rapidly as we were running out of money. I read War and Peace again almost a decade later. But back then it was basically all about Prince Andrei. I probably would have mentioned there was a lot about the Napoleonic wars and thrown in a couple of other characters. ![]() Had you asked me that summer what War and Peace was about, I would almost certainly have replied it was a book about a man named Andrei Bolkonsky who loses his heart when he least expects to. ![]() This Andrei, riven with doubt and hoping that glory won on the battlefield will lend his life meaning, was the man. Yes, he might seem bored, a little arrogant and somewhat over-convinced of his own superiority, but beneath that languid façade beat a passionate heart. Later that summer, I would thrill to Rhett Butler’s refusal to give a damn and admire Ash Pelham-Martyn’s battle against prejudice and for his true love, but neither of them could hold a candle to Andrei. To my teenage mind there had never been a more perfect hero. ![]()
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