Yeah, it’s even more confusing given that they’re all Russian nobility as well, so addressed by their titles at points. There are points where there’ll be a sentence like “Aha, replied the prince” and you have to thumb back a couple of pages trying to remember which one of the dozens of potential princes or counts, or even which of the multiple Prince Balkonsky’s is being referred to!
I don’t think it’s too important to ‘get’ much more than the gist from that opening chapter. The early parts of the book are a dizzying array of names and relationships. I think that if you’ve taken from Chapter 1 that the Kuragin family have been introduced with Prince Vasili trying to marry his kids into money and stop them being a drain on his pocket. Helene is physically beautiful; Hipolyte looks like his sister, but conversely the idiosyncracies that make her attractive make him ugly; Anatole Kuragin is a bit of a shit, and they want to set him up with Princess Bolkonsky. Her father is Prince Bolkonsky (another of the main families) who is old and rich, but is also belligerent and rarely comes to St Petersburg - making matchmaking daunting.
Chapters 2 & 3 introduce Pierre Bezukhov (the third of the five main families) who is the central character of the novel and you start to get a sense of how he’s doesn’t quite fit and it lacking in the grace and social norms of high society. He’s also illegitimate, which makes him even more of a misfit.
