character
Prince Andrei Bolkonsky
Prince Andrei
also: князь Андрей, Prince Andrei
A central character of Tolstoy's "War and Peace". Chekhov praises his naturalness alongside Pierre and Nikolai Rostov, then, drawing on his own medical training, singles out the account of Prince Andrei's gangrenous battle wound -- despite constant care from a doctor, Natasha, and Sonya -- as evidence of how primitive the era's medicine actually was.
Reading notes
- To A. S. Suvorin, 26 October 1891. Moscow. §9 the wound of a prince... gave off the smell of a corpse
Chekhov reads Prince Andrei's battlefield wound as a physician rather than as a literary critic: a wealthy, well-attended patient's wound turning gangrenous despite constant medical care is, to him, less a narrative detail than direct evidence of how primitive medical practice still was in the period the novel depicts.