Who Is Who
In War and Peace, one person can have three names. Pierre is also Count Bezukhov, and when someone is being formal, Count Peter Kirilovich. Nicholas Rostov is Nikolenka to his family. Princess Mary is Masha to her brother. I read the Project Gutenberg text, in the Maude translation, and I will tell you where each family first shows up.
This video tells you where the main people end up, so it has spoilers for fates. I’ll go family by family, then the people who belong to nobody, and then the real people.
The Rostovs
The Rostovs are the warm, messy family in Moscow. We meet them in book one, chapter eleven, when the countess is receiving guests who came to congratulate her on a name day. Count Ilya Rostov is the father. He is generous, he loves a party, and he is bad with money. His wife is the countess. They have four children.
Vera is the eldest daughter, four years older than Natasha, and already behaves like a grown-up. She marries Colonel Berg, who is very pleased with his own furniture. Nicholas is the eldest son, a hussar, impulsive and loyal. Natasha is the one the book follows longest, and she is named about twelve hundred times. Petya is the youngest, a boy who keeps trying to join the army.
And then there is Sonya, the count’s fifteen-year-old niece in the first chapters, who plays with Nicholas like a kitten. She loves him. That is her whole story, and it is one of the hardest in the book.
The Rostovs are a tree with a leak. They spend more than they have, and when the count dies in eighteen thirteen, his debts are double the value of the property.
The Bolkonskys
The Bolkonskys live at Bald Hills, forty miles east of Smolensk. Old Prince Nicholas Andreevich Bolkonsky is a general in chief, nicknamed the King of Prussia, whom an earlier emperor exiled to the country. He runs the house by a strict timetable. He is proud and sharp-tongued, and the one he is hardest on is his daughter.
That is Princess Mary. Her own father tells people she is plain enough as it is. She is devout, she has luminous eyes, and her companion is Mademoiselle Bourienne, a French woman who is always watching what is on offer. Her brother is Prince Andrew, clever and weary, married to Lise, called the little princess, a charming woman with a downy lip.
Here is how their tree ends. Lise dies in childbirth, leaving a baby, also named Nicholas. The old prince has his final stroke as Napoleon’s army nears. Andrew dies of his wound at Yaroslavl, and Mary marries Nicholas Rostov. Young Nicholas Bolkonsky, who is afraid of the dark, is the last person we see in the story.
The Bezukhovs
Pierre has the strangest tree, because at first he has no name. We see him in book one, chapter six, at the first party, a stout young man with huge red hands who does not know how to enter a drawing room. He is the illegitimate son of the old Count Cyril Bezukhov, and when the count dies, Pierre unexpectedly inherits his name and his money.
Around him is another family, the Kuragins. Prince Vasili Kuragin is the schemer, a man of the world for whom getting on has become a habit. His children are Hippolyte, who laughs at his own jokes, Anatole, the handsome rake who runs up debts, and Helene, the beauty. Vasili pushes Pierre into marrying Helene, and it ends badly. Helene dies in Petersburg in book twelve. Anatole loses a leg at Borodino. And Pierre is free.
Pierre is named nearly two thousand times, more than anyone. He is big, clumsy and kind, and he is always asking what life is for. He tries the Freemasons, marries wrong, wanders onto a battlefield, and gets arrested. In the end he marries Natasha Rostova.
The Others
Three people move around those families.
Dolokhov is the cold officer with glassy eyes who duels Pierre and wins a fortune from Nicholas at cards. Denisov is Nicholas’s hussar friend, who cannot pronounce the letter R, and the book spells it that way, sounding like a w. Boris Drubetskoy is the only son of Anna Mikhaylovna, who begs favors for him from the first chapters. He spends his youth deciding which of two rich heiresses to chase.
Bilibin is the diplomat who jokes in French, and Prince Andrew stays with him in Brunn in book two. Count Rostopchin is the commander in chief of Moscow in eighteen twelve, and he is named a hundred and twenty-four times, mostly while the city empties.
And behind everyone is Anna Pavlovna Scherer, the maid of honor who hosts the first party and opens the book. Everyone in that room is one of her guests.
The Real People
Napoleon and General Kutuzov are real historical men. Napoleon is named five hundred and seventy-five times, and Kutuzov five hundred and twenty-nine.
In Tolstoy’s telling, they are opposites. Napoleon thinks he commands history. Kutuzov, old and sleepy at council, seems to understand that he cannot. I have only read parts of those chapters closely, so treat that as my reading, not a full verdict.
The last person is the least frequent. Platon Karataev appears only sixty-four times, a round peasant soldier who tells stories to Pierre in captivity. He changes Pierre more than almost anyone. My reading, and it is an opinion, is that he is the book’s quiet answer to the question Pierre keeps asking.
Who Does Not Make It
Here are the family losses in order, with where to find them. Lise dies in book four, chapter nine, in the bedroom at Bald Hills. Old Prince Bolkonsky dies after his second stroke, book ten, chapter eight, and is buried two chapters later. Helene dies in book twelve, chapter two, and Andrew dies in the same book, chapter sixteen.
Petya Rostov is killed in book fourteen, chapter eleven, in his first real action with the partisans. Platon Karataev is shot in chapter fourteen of the same book, and Pierre understands it a chapter later. And Count Rostov dies in the first epilogue, chapter five, in eighteen thirteen.
That is seven people from the three families and their circle. Among the survivors are Pierre, Natasha, Nicholas, Mary, Sonya, the countess, Vera and Denisov. The Rostovs get the last happy event, and the book says so.
Who Marries Whom
Here is the whole map, in one breath. Pierre marries Helene, and later Natasha. Prince Andrew marries Lise, and later gets engaged to Natasha. Nicholas marries Mary. Vera marries Berg. Sonya is still living in the family house at the end.
That is the tree. Three old houses, two weddings in eighteen thirteen, and a boy asleep upstairs.
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