#basically the bolkonskys are repressed as hell and could both use a kuragin to help burst that metaphorical dam.

[sneakystorms]

Can you tell us more about Marya being a horny mess please? It's such an interesting interpretation of her character and has extra bonus points for the potential to make Tolstoy livid 🤭

Sure! Honestly i don't even feel like I'm going against tolstoy on this one because it's an interpretation i somewhat extrapolated from her canon characterisation.

One of my favourite marya moments (and there are many) is when she gets annoyed at mmelle bourienne for something or else, and her internal response to this is horror at herself for harbouring anything but the most amicable of emotions. So she forces herself to be friendly with amelie, but the repressed animosity is left to fester until it grows into disproportional hatred. A similar thread appears in her relationship to her father - because she believes she has no right to be anything less than loving and appreciative, she represses her negative emotions for him, but they continue to work their way in her subconscious. Speaking of her father, he has a very direct role in reinforcing this pattern of behaviour - when he mocks marya for dressing up for anatole, for enjoying the thought of romance or being courted, this causes such intense shame in her that she tries even harder to rid herself of any romantic inclinations, which is reflected in her social isolation once in moscow. I also love the moment where marya sees anatole making out with amelie and, rather than react in justifiable anger, appears more sympathetic to Amelie than ever, swearing to help her and anatole realise their love for each other. I read this as marya internalising shame so fully that she's relieved at an "excuse" not to indulge in that which she desires, because years of self denial have resulted in pursuit of her own wishes appearing frightening. Although i certainly am not opposed to reading this scene as her lesbianism peeking through and making her all too happy to have a reason to give up on her relationship with anatole lmao

All this to say that marya is an incredible portrayal of freudian repression a hundred years before freud, and particularly of the way one can repress shameful or impossible to realise desires and sublimate them - redirect their libidinal energy - into other, more acceptable pursuits. For freud this is most often art, but in Marya's case i think you can read her as sublimating all her shameful desires or emotions into religion, which is of course a highly moral thing for her to obsess over, providing an even stronger barrier against sinful thoughts than something like an artistic hobby might have. But as always in freud, urges that have been rejected by and banished from the conscious seep into the unconscious, where they threaten to fester and develop. Iirc the metaphor freud uses is that of a blocked water passage which causes the stream to leak through whatever other paths or cracks it can find - this is how you get repressed urges manifesting in weird, roundabout ways like dreams or odd fetishes.

This is kind of what i see happening to marya - both with her anger, which escapes in her teaching nikolushka, and with her desire for sex and romance. But I'm also throwing in a half-serious observational tidbit about how christians who have an unhealthy relationship with their own faith and repress their "sinful" urges sometimes go on to attach so much importance to rituals of self-protection, self-cleansing or self-punishment in hopes of saving themselves from sin that those very rituals end up as subconscious escape routes for the repressed horniness and other undesirable things. This is how you get jokes about medieval catholics being little too into lashing, or about people for whom the religious bliss that comes from prayer borders on the erotic, or about those who are a little too obsessed with staying virgins until marriage...

That's kind of what i was alluding to with the "kinky in that way some xtians are" comment (or however i phrased it). But that's only an aside, the main point is my girl is pushing down all her horniness and one day, hopefully, that bottle is gonna burst and as far as I'm concerned it might as well burst in Helene's nimble fingers. I also think she'd find it fun and gratifying to mess with Marya's head by convincing her that the wild gay sex they're having doesn't count or isn't really sin or something like that, which is obviously a narrative marya would cling to if she did ever slip up and give in to the throes of sodomy