Anonymity 1924 is a very sad chapter. The Count is coming to terms with time, life, changes, reality and how he is being left behind. Sweet little Nina is now fourteen years old and has a new partner to experiment with. The Count is no longer needed to entertain her. The waiter is now the Bishop from below promoted, the wine is no longer known by any name other than simply red or white. All that kept him busy, happy, and feeling self worth, is fading away and the new Russia is now taking form. I wanted to cry a few tears as I read this chapter. Our dashing, fun spirited Count has diminished before our eyes. My heart is saddened for him. This is difficult to read:
pg. 131 Dreams of invisibility are as old as folklore. By means of some talisman or potion, or with the help of the gods themselves, the corporeal presence of the hero is rendered insubstantial, and for the duration of the spell he may wander among his fellow men unseen.
The Count is no longer seen as important, he is bumped into by passerbys, Nina does not have time for him any longer, the waiter is condescending to him with responding "Of course, of course." Mishka has cancelled their dinner and gone off to St. Petersburg to be with Katherine, and then he finds out the wine no longer has labels possibly due to his correcting the Bishop who had worked downstairs and has now been promoted. He can not quite grasp everything.
These paragraphs are heart gripping and so very poetic:
pg 144 Yes, a bottle of wine was the ultimate distillation of time and place; a poetic expression of individuality itself. Yet here it was, cast back into the sea of anonymity, that realm of averages and unknowns.
And suddenly, the Count had his own moment of lucidity. Just as Mishka had come to understand the present as the natural by-product of the past, and could see with perfect clarity how it would shape the future, the Count now understood his place in the passage of time.
As we age, we are bound to find comfort from the notion that it takes generations for a way of life to fade. We are familiar with the songs our grandparents favored, after all, even though we never danced to them ourselves. At festive holidays, the recipes we pull from the drawer are routinely decades old, and in some cases even written in the hand of a relative long since dead. And the objects in our homes? The oriental coffee tables and well-worn desks that have been handed down from generations to generation? Despite being "out of fashion," not only do they add beauty to our daily lives, they lend material credibility to our presumption that the pass of an era will be glacial.
But under certain circumstances, the Count finally acknowledged, this process can occur in the comparative blink of and eye. Popular upheaval, political turmoil, industrial progress__any combination of these can cause the evolution of a society to leapfrog generations, sweeping aside aspects of the past that might otherwise have lingered for decades. And this must be especially so, when those with newfound power are men who distrust any form of hesitation or nuance, and who prize self-assurance above all.
For years now, with a bit of a smile the Count had remarked that this or that was behind him__like his days of poetry or travel or romance. But in so doing, he had never really believed it. In his heart of hearts, he had imagined that, even if unattended to, these aspects of his were lingering somewhere on the periphery, waiting to be recalled. But looking at the bottle in his hand, the Count was struck by the realization that, in fact, it was all behind him. Because the Bolsheviks, who were so intent upon recasting the future from a mold of their own making, would not rest until every last vestige of his Russia had been uprooted, shattered or erased.
He remembers the embossed seal on the bottle of wine in the cellar and picks it up:
pg 145 On the twenty-second of June 1926__ the tenth anniversary of Helena's death__Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov would drink to his sister's memory. Then he would shed this mortal coil, once and for all.
These paragraphs really hit home for me. My hubby and I are constantly saying how things have changed and there is nothing we can do about it. Our grandchildren are growing up, going on with their teenage years, sports, friends and activities not needing or wanting to spend the sleepovers at Nonnie and Papa's house anymore. We still have our Zak and Zoey who can't wait to come, but I measured their growth and it made my heart leap at how my sweet Zak is nearing my shoulders. Like the Count, I reach back into my memories of the kids childhoods and the grandchildren's and I just want time to stand still. We went to an organized meeting last night to oppose having a new jail built, just a mile or so from our neighborhood. The room was standing room only, and as someone pointed out the youngest in the room may have been around forty-five years old. I looked around, and sure enough, I being sixty-five years old was among the rest of the elderly willing to fight to keep this jail out of our area. Where was the younger generation? Why aren't they concerned that a jail in this area will bring down their property values, increase crime, and cause families to move out of our neighborhoods to the outskirts of our town. Like the Count, I realized last night, the County is hell bent on putting this jail in our area so they can revitalize the downtown area with a "green" project, and they do not want the existing jail downtown to remain. Times they are a changing, and there seems so little we can do to prevent it. We will join forces with this organized group called NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) and pray the levy for funding this project is voted down in November. In the meantime, we are looking at houses listed in the county our son just moved to last summer. It's not my first choice, even though it is a beautiful little town, but we will consider it if the levy goes through. I am relating far too closely with the Count, in this chapter.
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