A modern reader might well be unsure about some of Tolstoy’s characters. Are we meant to like them? Feel for them? We have lots of characters who feel things a great deal – they are in floods of tears or filled to bursting with emotions at every juncture. What are we to make of these characters? This is all to do with the cult of sensibility: a mid-18th century movement that celebrated a response to life full of high emotion. Characters who feel things deeply, having a strong emotional reaction to art, distressing news, or sad events, will be liked by the readers of the time. So Natasha Rostov, for example, the young girls who feels things so keenly, is being set up as one of our heroes – the original reader would have expected great things from her, as well as from the young men who are so profoundly affected by the war, nationalism and love of the Emperor.

 

Wellington Reading Group