Reading for Tuesday, June 9

Now we’ve actually jumped quite a few years forward here, because Nikolai and Marya now have two kids. Who are named, bizarrely enough, Natasha and Andrei. (Though the translation refers to little Andrei as Andryusha, which is a bit like a Russian nickname for Andrei, so you may not have realised straight away what his proper name was.)

This is on top of Andrei’s surviving son, who was also called Nikolai. Maybe it’s just Tolstoy’s way of showing how history repeats itself?

I don’t know.

I tell you what I do know, and that is that Nikolai is quite a sook, and I really was feeling sorry for Marya in this chapter.

But then again – hasn’t he always been? Do we expect him to change? Not really . . .