All happy families are not alike

The epilogues to "War and Peace": part 2 is a bit of a slog, and I think many readers would give up on these, had we not already committed to 1,200 pages so what's 30 more? But Part 1, the kind of reprise that we see now in so many movies (did it begin with American Graffiti?), takes us 7 years forward, and we see the Rostov and the Bezukov families now, grown and established - and of course interlocked by marriage and friendship. They're all staying together for the moment at Nikolai's estate or farm really, Natasha with her 3 children while Pierre is away in Petersburg. Marya and Nikolai also have 3(?) children, plus the retinue of attendant women, the old mother-in-law, and Andrei's orphaned son. What's interesting is how thoroughly conventional they have become, yet they are still recognizably themselves, their personalities sharpened by age in some ways, softened in others. Nikolai a very successful farmer and landowner, greatly admired by his muzhiks/serfs (in a totally paternalistic way). Pierre is involved in some kind of political movement in Petersburg, challenging the mysticism that the czar (Alexander?) has taken up. The women have become conventional, cliche'd hausfraus - devoted to children and to building their husbands' egos and self-esteem, yet really in control of all that goes on, as in many a sitcom of the '50s. But they are also very passionate, some beautiful and quite true passages of spousal conversation full of ellipses and understandings that need not be spoken - very accurate, more so than anywhere I've ever read. Nikolai and Pierre do not at all agree on politics - Nikolai actually says that if Pierre were to challenge the government, he (Nikolai) would shoot him if ordered to. And Pierre's ideas are so vague and dreamy, almost like Lawrentian fascism - government run by a small group of men pledged to the good (what men? whose good? who picked them?). Andrei's son worships Pierre - a lot of potential conflicts here - as if Tolstoy was starting yet a 5th volume, or a nother novel that he never wrote. I can't be the first to notice this, but the tensions and conflicts brewing in this seemingly happy domestic setting actually give the lie to the famous first line of Anna Karenina: all happy families are, in fact, not alike.