Generations of Russians have — at least so Russians believe — been ‘in love with’ Natasha Rostova, the vivacious, honest, sensitive, passionate heroine of War and Peace. Such characters take on a semi-autonomous life in their readers’ memory and imaginations (assisted, as the case may be, by stage, film and television adaptations).

In this extra-textual life, the characters do things even when the narrative eye is not upon them, and they might choose to behave otherwise than they seem to do (this is what the genre of realism asks us to believe, in any case). Were the reader to somehow enter the fictional universe, therefore, they might elicit the character’s love; or, if they are characters (assisted, as the case may be, by paintings, posters and figurines) who imaginatively exist outside of not only the words, but the universes of their literary works, then such a relationship might be managed — is indeed managed — in an imaginary version of the reader’s present.

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"Iris Murdoch argued that: ‘love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real’."