Watchful and Natural Guardians (Call Your Mother)

Day 152 of A Year of War and Peace

Anatole Kuragin is Robert Lovelace. Robert Lovelace is the villain of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady, a notorious rake who first adbucts and then rapes the eponymous hero of that great eighteenth-century epistolary English novel. Mr. Lovelace, like Anatole Kuragin, cares only about gaiety and women. To this end he develops a system of libertinism based, in part, on his understanding that wickedness is a stronger bond than the ties of virtue, “as if it were the nature of the human mind to be villainous.” If today’s chapter of War and Peace proves anything it’s that Anatole Kuragin is a convert to the Lovelace system.

Anatole is a reckless, unrepentant debtor. He’s a burden to his father. His father agrees to once more pay half of his debts but only on the condition that Anatole go straight to Moscow and find a suitably rich heiress to marry. Anatole accepts his father’s money and heads to Moscow. Once there, however, he displays no intention whatsoever of seeking a suitably rich heiress to marry. Instead he carouses about with gipsy-girls and French actresses. So maybe he’s not as dumb as he is mischievous.

There is another reason, aside from his rake’s philosophy, that precludes Anatole from marrying. The reason is that it turns out he’s already married. A few years ago he married a poor Polish girl. Naturally, he’s abandoned her and arranged with her father payment of a large sum of money in exchange for the right to live freely as a bachelor back in Russia. Class act, this guy.

Once in Moscow, he also falls in with Dolokhov, not exactly a man of exemplary virtues himself. And it is with Dolokhov that Anatole unveils his Lovelace-like designs for Natasha Rostov: he plans to make love to her.

We already know from yesterday’s reading that he is well on his way down that path. If Natasha wishes to resist his advances and if Anatole himself wants to reform his ways then the two of them should take a page from one of Clarissa’s letters wherein she articulates her practice of virtuous living similar to some of the stoic philosophy of A Year of War and Peace:

So, my dear, were we perfect, which no one can be, we could not be happy in this life, unless those with whom we have to deal (those, more especially, who have any control upon us) were governed by the same principles. What have we then to do but, as I have hinted above, to choose right, and pursue it steadily, and leave the issue to Providence?

How best then for Natasha and Anatole to choose right? Echoing yesterday’s meditation they should find someone worthy to model their behavior after. It seems to me Anatole’s father has some good advice for him while old countess Rostov can provide for Natasha.

DAILY MEDITATION