Chilling words: "Don't you recognize her?"

At last, in the final chapters of the 4th (and last) volume of "War and Peace," Pierre calls on Princess Marya and there beside her is a woman in black, one of the attending companions whom Marya had often collected (the flirtatious French woman, Julie Karagin) Pierre assumes. We know better. And Marya astonishes him with these chilling words: "Don't you recognize her?" Only then do we realize how much the youthful Natasha has changed, aged, suffered. Pierre does not recognize her at first, but then - because of her suffering, her maturing you might say - he is overcome by love for her. The three of them stay up talking till dawn. Natasha tells for the first time of the death of Andrei and Pierre recounts for the first time his weeks in captivity. This novel, after so much suffering and pain and misapprehension, is destined for a happy ending of a sort - a comedy emerging from the tragic, as if Hamlet were to end with a wedding, bodies still strewn about the stage. Yet life is not a genre. Life is full of mixtures and contradictions and uncertainties and mysteries. Pierre, listening to Natasha, realizes the depth of his own love for Andrei and he compares that with his love for the peasant Karataev, shot to death on the prisoner march. The two are, were, so different, yet his feelings toward them unite the two and they are in some way the same. Life is the same way; "War and Peace" is the same way - right down to its title, a linking of contradictions and opposites, forming of two opposites a greater and more complex, and unnameable, single entity.