Our 16-year-old son, who is homeschooled, is taking an online course called Big Books, Big Papers . He is currently reading one of the most famous big books, Tolstoy’s War and Peace. I was looking over his shoulder this morning and found this brief description which he had written of one of Tolstoy’s immortal characters:

It is through Tolstoy’s minor characters, such as Anna Pavlovna, that he shows his true mastery at capturing the pace of life. Without her presence, the party is simply a collection of aristocrats chatting about “high-society” and the weather. She adds an incredible dynamic to the scene by the way she brings out the true nature of the characters around her. She is a simple and single-minded character, bustling about constantly to please her guests and maintain balance among them. The hostess adjusts dials and knobs to produce a formula for the most proper and refined of social situations. With the arrival of each guest, Anna Palvona closely follows her social equation, factoring in the variables (her guests) and then positioning them in a way that produces a solution that is both entertaining and intellectual, but never too much of either. The others, under her casual ministrations, slowly develop at a pace that reflects all real social gatherings. In the words of Tolstoy, Anna Pavlovna is like “the owner of a spinning mill who, having put his workers in their places,  strolls about the establishment, watching out for the idle spindle or the odd one squealing much too loudly, and hastens to go and slow it down or start it up at the proper speed.”

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