Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky

Prince Andrei Nikolayevich Bolkonsky is a fictional character in Leo Tolstoy's 1869 novel War and Peace. He is the son of famed Russian general Nikolai Bolkonsky, who raises Andrei and his sister Maria Bolkonskaya on a remote estate. Andrei is best friends with Pierre Bezukhov. Possible prototype He is possibly based on Tolstoy's cousin Prince Sergey Volkonsky, who was a hero of the Napoleonic Wars and later a Decembrist. However, author Laura Jepsen's view is that unlike "many of the other characters for whom the author found living prototypes, Prince Andrei is entirely fictitious". Life and death At the beginning of the novel, the handsome and intellectual Andrei, disillusioned with married life and finding his wife preoccupied with trivialities, becomes an officer in the Third Coalition against his idol, Napoleon Bonaparte. When he goes to war, he leaves his pregnant wife, Lise, at Bald Hills in the countryside with his father and sister. Andrei is wounded at the Battle of Austerlitz. He has an epiphany while lying on the battlefield gazing up at the vastness of the blue sky, realising the triviality of human affairs under the immobile eyes of nature and that he has the potential to be happy. Shortly afterwards, Andrei is rescued from the battlefield by Napoleon, who takes a liking to him, although Andrei no longer sees him as a great man but as "...a small, insignificant man compared with what was happening between his soul and this lofty, infinite sky with clouds racing across it...with his petty vanity and joy in victory." However, Prince Andrei is not listed among the dead or the officers taken prisoner, leading his father and sister to assume the worst. Neither inform Lise that he is unaccounted-for, fearing to cause her any anxiety in the final stages of her pregnancy. Andrei arrives, fully recovered, while his wife is in labour and sees her briefly before she dies in childbirth. The child, a boy, survives. Andrei, who, despite everything, had cared deeply for his wife (as he confides later to Pierre), is guilt-stricken and depressed. Completely disillusioned with his former wartime ambitions, Andrei spends the following few years at home, raising his son and serving under his father.