2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25
Prince Vasily Kuragin is one of the significant characters in the epic novel "War and Peace". His family, soulless and rude, impudent and acting ahead when there is an opportunity to get rich, is opposed to the delicate and kind-hearted Rostov family and the intellectual Bolkonsky family. Vasily Kuragin does not live by thoughts, but rather by instincts.
When he meets an influential person, he tries to get close to him, and this happens automatically for him.
Appearance of Prince Vasily Sergeevich
We first meet him in Anna Pavlovna's salon, where all the intellectual and what a wretched color of St. Petersburg gathers. While no one has arrived yet, he has useful and confidential conversations with an aging forty-year-old "enthusiast". Important and official, carrying his head high, he arrived in a court uniform with stars (he managed to receive awards without doing anything useful for the country). Vasily Kuragin is bald, fragrant, sedate and, despite his sixty years, graceful.
His movements are always free and familiar. Nothing can take him out of his statebalance. Vasily Kuragin has grown old, having spent his whole life in the world, and brilliantly controls himself. His flat face is covered in wrinkles. This all becomes known from the first chapter of the first part of the novel.
Prince Cares
He has three children whom he loves little. In the same chapter, he himself says that he does not have parental love for children, but he considers it his great task to attach them well in life.
In a conversation with Anna Pavlovna, as if inadvertently, he asks who is destined for the post of first secretary in Vienna. This is his main purpose of visiting Scherer. He needs to attach his silly son Hippolyte to a warm place. But, by the way, he agrees that Anna Pavlovna will try to marry off his dissolute son Anatole to the rich and noble Maria Bolkonskaya, who lives with her father on the Bald Mountains estate. Vasily Kuragin received at least one benefit from this evening, since he was not used to a useless pastime for himself. In general, he knows how to use people. He is always attracted to those who are above him, and the prince has a rare gift - to catch a moment when you can and should use people.
The ugly deeds of the prince
In the first part, starting from chapter XVIII, Vasily Kuragin tries, having arrived in Moscow, to take possession of Pierre's inheritance, destroying his father's will. Julie Karagina wrote in more or less detail about this ugly story of Maria Bolkonskaya in a letter. Having received nothing and having played a “nasty role,” as Julie put it, Prince Vasily Kuragin left for Petersburg embarrassed. But he doesn't last longwas in this state.
He seemed to absent-mindedly made an effort to bring Pierre closer to his daughter, and successfully completed this business with a wedding. Pierre's money should serve the prince's family. So it should be, according to Prince Vasily. An attempt to marry the rake of Anatole to the meek, ugly Princess Marya also cannot be called a worthy deed: he only cares about the rich dowry that his son can receive at the same time. But his such immoral family degenerates. Hippolyte is just a fool who no one takes seriously. Ellen is dying. Anatole, having undergone a leg amputation, is unknown whether he will survive or not.
Kuragin's character
He is a self-confident, empty and indifferent person. In the tone of his voice, behind decency and participation, mockery always shines through. He always tries to get close to people of high position. So, for example, everyone knows that he is on good terms with Kutuzov, and they turn to him for help in order to attach his sons to adjutants. But he was used to refusing everyone, so that at the right moment, and we have already talked about this, he could use favors only for himself. Such small dashes, scattered in the text of the novel, describe a secular man - Vasily Kuragin. L. Tolstoy's characterization of him is very unflattering, and with its help the author describes the high society as a whole.
Vasily Kuragin appears before us as a great intriguer, accustomed to living thoughts about career, money and profit. "War and Peace" (moreover, the world in the time of Tolstoy was written through the letter i, which is unusual for us, and meant not only the world as the absencewar, but also, to a greater extent, the universe, and there was no direct antithesis in this title) - a work in which the prince is shown against the backdrop of high society receptions and in his house, where there is no warmth and cordial relations. The epic novel contains monumental pictures of life and hundreds of characters, one of which is Prince Kuragin.
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