u/poetic-bee

I read W&P some time ago and while I loved the majority of the book, the ending left a very bad taste in my mouth and still makes me somewhat angry when I think about it.

What I hated was basically everything Tolstoy wrote about Natasha. It feels like he somewhat accidentally wrote a good female character and then decided to nuke her by the end. What are some of your opinions on the ending?

To add:
I know lots of people love Anna Karenina but since it’s a Tolstoy book primarily concerned with a woman, I’m a little apprehensive about starting it after W&P. Does that book feature a lot of the same attitudes that Tolstoy clearly held about women, or is it an enjoyable read overall? It’s not that I refuse to “read problematic authors” (especially when they’re dead), but I think that if it’s written with the same spirit as the W&P epilogue, I might simply not enjoy reading it. What are your thoughts?

I was rewatching the BBC miniseries and it had me thinking about this. It’s clear that simply bringing Lydia home without her marrying Wickham would have been a terrible scandal. Gossip travels quick and clearly everyone knew that she had run away with him - and so obviously they must have slept together and she is now tarnished forever unless she marries him.

But I wonder - if Lydia had not gone with Wickham voluntarily but was instead forced or essentially abducted, would it still have been seen as socially expected for her to marry him? Or would she have been seen as a victim? Would she have been able to return home and marry someone else one day? Would her sisters feel the effects of that?

I’m Czech and I know basically no religious people. I thought religion was something people did in the past but not anymore until I was about 9.

The official data also shows that we have very low numbers of religious people. A lot of people will say that it’s to do with communist repression of religion - but this doesn’t seem a sufficient explanation to me, since we were one country with Slovakia during that period, and Slovakia is much more religious than us nowadays. Other Eastern bloc and ex-Soviet countries are also more religious than us.

So my question is, what are the historical factors that have contributes to this? What made us different from other countries that are culturally similar to us? Was this tendency present before WWII? Or did it emerge after we became a socialist country?