I interpreted it as her being curious at what could be, but getting afraid and turning cold to hide her own feelings, not daring to surrender to them. After all, despite her age and presence as a mature, experienced woman, she's never been in love before - and perhaps her age and general mentality are exactly why she doesn't dare to anymore, now.
Like Camilla, I'm not sure what to make of her sudden supposed attraction to Arkady, though. It felt wrong to me, and kind of like a weak point in the novel - like it's just intended to force things to come to a head one way or the other between Arkady and Katya. Discounting that possibility and assuming it really does fit, I can only conclude it's an even subtler part of the tragedy of Odintsova's failure to give in to her feelings for Bazarov - it's cruel, certainly, but on some level it makes sense.
Well (have to type this before I forget), Turgenev did say that she was like all women who haven't loved, who feel they need to find something w/o knowing what it is... or something like that. Maybe she was so old (relative) when she picked up on it, that it frightened her, and she pulled back from it. In that case, her "attraction" to Arkady makes sense, because she's backing up to something she understands and can control. More importantly, she'd be back in a situation that allows her to keep her own feelings calm and familiar.
I don't think I'd call it suicide, either (as in, like Tom, unlike you and Camilla obviously), but he certainly didn't seem to mind it so much once it had happened.
I think I can agree to move to the middle ground on that one. It still seemed unduly rash to me. If not suicide, he certainly was flirting with death.
Russian Book Club: Fathers and Sons by Turgenev.
- 17/10/2010 01:39:16 AM
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Bazarov
- 17/10/2010 02:12:03 PM
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*NM*
oh, and
- 17/10/2010 06:42:38 PM
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Re: oh, and
- 18/10/2010 12:09:10 AM
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Arkady
- 17/10/2010 02:15:54 PM
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Well, that makes sense
- 17/10/2010 05:12:09 PM
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Re: Well, that makes sense
- 18/10/2010 12:04:05 AM
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See, I liked Arkady
- 17/10/2010 06:08:57 PM
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Oh...Rebekah, I was going to mention that I saw your post only much later because I was very drunk.
- 17/10/2010 05:13:41 PM
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Good book.
- 17/10/2010 06:37:16 PM
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I didn't think Odintsova trapped him.
- 18/10/2010 11:03:37 PM
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Re: I didn't think Odintsova trapped him.
- 19/10/2010 05:13:26 AM
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I loved it. Great book.
- 18/10/2010 10:49:27 PM
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I think it's very relevant. It's also unusually un-Russian.
- 18/10/2010 11:54:03 PM
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Yeah... the Russian nobility at the time seems to have been kind of un-Russian, really.
- 20/10/2010 04:03:34 PM
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It felt very Russian to me as well
- 20/10/2010 04:12:50 PM
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There was little of the usual ... histrionics that happen in Russian novels.
- 22/10/2010 07:02:12 PM
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I really wish I'd bought a properly annotated version.
- 22/10/2010 07:07:16 PM
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The answer to that is to just read a great book on Nineteenth Century Russian history.
- 22/10/2010 10:55:06 PM
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Not just Russian, though, there's a lot of mentions of other European history.
- 22/10/2010 11:19:28 PM
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Nikolai and Pavel - I love them.
- 22/10/2010 07:14:11 PM
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Perhaps it's Pavel's "The Chap"-ish nature that makes the novel seem less Russian to me.
- 22/10/2010 10:53:56 PM
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