War and Peace quotes

“What can one say about it?” replied the prince in a cold, listless tone. “What has been decided? They have decided that Buonaparte has burnt his boats, and I believe that we are ready to burn ours.”

Prince Vasíli always spoke languidly, like an actor repeating a stale part.

Anna Pávlovna Schérer on the contrary, despite her forty years, overflowed with animation and impulsiveness.

Prince Vasíli always spoke languidly, like an actor repeating a stale part. Anna Pávlovna Schérer on the contrary, despite her forty years, overflowed with animation and impulsiveness.

To be an enthusiast had become her social vocation and, sometimes even when she did not feel like it, she became enthusiastic in order not to disappoint the expectations of those who knew her.

The subdued smile which, though it did not suit her faded features, always played round her lips expressed, as in a spoiled child, a continual consciousness of her charming defect, which she neither wished, nor could, nor considered it necessary, to correct.

“What would you have me do?” he said at last. “You know I did all a father could for their education, and they have both turned out fools.

Ippolit is at least a quiet fool, but Anatole is an active one.

That is the only difference between them.” He said this smiling in a way more natural and animated than usual, so that the wrinkles round his mouth very clearly revealed something unexpectedly coarse and unpleasant.

“Papa, we shall be late,” said Princess Elèn, turning her beautiful head and looking over her classically molded shoulder as she stood waiting by the door.

Influence in society, however, is a capital which has to be economized if it is to last.

Prince Vasíli knew this, and having once realized that if he asked on behalf of all who begged of him, he would soon be unable to ask for himself, he became chary of using his influence.

He put on the air of one who finds it impossible to reply to such nonsense, but it would in fact have been difficult to give any other answer than the one Prince Andréy gave to this naive question.

“If no one fought except on his own conviction, there would be no wars,” he said.

“And that would be splendid,” said Pierre.

“What for? I don’t know. I must. Besides that I am going …” He paused.

“I am going because the life I am leading here does not suit me!”

Suddenly the angry, squirrel-like expression of the princess’ pretty face changed into a winning and piteous look of fear.

Her beautiful eyes glanced askance at her husband’s face, and her own assumed the timid, deprecating expression of a dog when it rapidly but feebly wags its drooping tail.

“Mon Dieu, mon Dieu!” she muttered, and lifting her dress with one hand she went up to her husband and kissed him on the forehead.

And if Pierre was often struck by Andréy’s lack of capacity for philosophical meditation (to which he himself was particularly addicted), he regarded even this not as a defect but as a sign of strength.

Even in the best, most friendly and simplest relations of life, praise and commendation are essential, just as grease is necessary to wheels that they may run smoothly.

“My part is played out,” said Prince Andréy. “What’s the use of talking about me? Let us talk about you,” he added after a silence, smiling at his reassuring thoughts.

“besides,” thought he, “all such ‘words of honor’ are conventional things with no definite meaning, especially if one considers that by tomorrow one may be dead, or something so extraordinary may happen to one that honor and dishonor will be all the same!”

Pierre often indulged in reflections of this sort, nullifying all his decisions and intentions.

He went to Kurágin’s.

But he immediately recalled his promise to Prince Andréy not to go there.

Then, as happens to people of weak character, he desired so passionately once more to enjoy that dissipation he was so accustomed to that he decided to go.

The thought immediately occurred to him that his promise to Prince Andréy was of no account, because before he gave it he had already promised Prince Anatole to come to his gathering;

(She used the word “diplomat,” which was just then much in vogue among the children, in the special sense they attached to it.) “Why does she bother me?” And she added, turning to Véra, “

You’ll never understand it, because you’ve never loved anyone. You have no heart!

You are a Madame de Genlis and nothing more” (this nickname, bestowed on Véra by Nikoláy, was considered very stinging), “and your greatest pleasure is to be unpleasant to people! Go and flirt with Berg as much as you please,” she finished quickly.

“I know, I know,” answered Prince Vasíli in his monotonous voice. “

I never could understand how Nathalie made up her mind to marry that unlicked bear!

A perfectly absurd and stupid fellow, and a gambler too, I am told.”

It was the eldest who was reading—the one who had met Anna Mikháylovna. The two younger ones were embroidering: both were rosy and pretty and they differed only in that one had a little mole on her lip which made her much prettier.

Pierre was received as if he were a corpse or a leper.

The eldest princess paused in her reading and silently stared at him with frightened eyes; the second assumed precisely the same expression;

Berg always spoke quietly, politely, and with great precision.

His conversation always related entirely to himself; he would remain calm and silent when the talk related to any topic that had no direct bearing on himself.

He could remain silent for hours without being at all put out of countenance himself or making others uncomfortable, but as soon as the conversation concerned himself he would begin to talk circumstantially and with evident satisfaction.

“It’s all about the war,” the count shouted down the table. “You know my son’s going, Márya Dmítrievna? My son is going.”

“I have four sons in the army but still I don’t fret. It is all in God’s hands. You may die in your bed or God may spare you in a battle,”

replied Márya Dmítrievna’s deep voice, which easily carried the whole length of the table.

Márya Dmítrievna and the countess burst out laughing, and all the guests joined in.

Everyone laughed, not at Márya Dmítrievna’s answer but at the incredible boldness and smartness of this little girl who had dared to treat Márya Dmítrievna in this fashion.

Natásha only desisted when she had been told that there would be pineapple ice. Before the ices, champagne was served round.

… he told me himself … but still I should not cry,” and she showed a paper she held in her hand—with the verses Nikoláy had written, “still, I should not cry, but you can’t … no one can understand … what a soul he has!”

And she began to cry again because he had such a noble soul.

“It’s all very well for you … I am not envious … I love you and Borís also,” she went on, gaining a little strength; “he is nice … there are no difficulties in your way.

“Just look at the master! A regular eagle he is!” loudly remarked the nurse, as she stood in one of the doorways.

The count danced well and knew it.

But his partner could not and did not want to dance well. Her enormous figure stood erect, her powerful arms hanging down (she had handed her reticule to the countess), and only her stern but handsome face really joined in the dance.

No, mon cousin,” she added with a sigh, “I shall always remember that in this world one must expect no reward, that in this world there is neither honor nor justice.

In this world one has to be cunning and cruel.

”

His hands were symmetrically placed on the green silk quilt, the palms downward. When Pierre came up the count was gazing straight at him, but with a look the significance of which could not be understood by mortal man.

Either this look meant nothing but that as long as one has eyes they must look somewhere, or it meant too much.

Pierre hesitated, not knowing what to do, and glanced inquiringly at his guide. Anna Mikháylovna made a hurried sign with her eyes, glancing at the sick man’s hand and moving her lips as if to send it a kiss.

But the princess never saw the beautiful expression of her own eyes—the look they had when she was not thinking of herself.

As with everyone, her face assumed a forced unnatural expression as soon as she looked in a glass.

She went on reading:

“Yes, Father, I have come to you and brought my wife who is pregnant,” said Prince Andréy, following every movement of his father’s face with an eager and respectful look. “How is your health?”

“Only fools and rakes fall ill, my boy. You know me: I am busy from morning till night and abstemious, so of course I am well.”

“Thank God,” said his son smiling.

The little princess during the whole discussion and the rest of the dinner sat silent, glancing with a frightened look now at her father-in-law and now at Princess Márya. When they left the table she took her sister-in-law’s arm and drew her into another room.

“What a clever man your father is,” said she; “perhaps that is why I am afraid of him.”

“Oh, he is so kind!” answered Princess Márya.

All these traveling effects of Prince Andréy’s were in very good order: new, clean, and in cloth covers carefully tied with tapes.

When starting on a journey or changing their mode of life, men capable of reflection are generally in a serious frame of mind.

At such moments one reviews the past and plans for the future. Prince Andréy’s face looked very thoughtful and tender. With his hands behind him he paced briskly from corner to corner of the room, looking straight before him and thoughtfully shaking his head.

I like being alone. … Father likes her very much. She and Mikháil Ivánovich are the two people to whom he is always gentle and kind, because he has been a benefactor to them both. As Sterne says: ‘

We don’t love people so much for the good they have done us, as for the good we have done them.

’ Father took her when she was homeless after losing her own father. She is very good-natured, and my father likes her way of reading. She reads to him in the evenings and reads splendidly.”

And the latter—unconscious that he was being reflected in the hussar officer as in a looking glass—started, moved forward, and answered: “Highly satisfied, your excellency!”

“We all have our weaknesses,” said Kutúzov smiling and walking away from him.

“He used to have a predilection for Bacchus.”

“Well, young man?” he said with a sigh, and from under his lifted brows he glanced into Rostóv’s eyes.

Some flash as of an electric spark shot from Telyánin’s eyes to Rostóv’s and back, and back again and again in an instant.

“Come here,” said Rostóv, catching hold of Telyánin’s arm and almost dragging him to the window. “That money is Denísov’s; you took it …” he whispered just above Telyánin’s ear.

and sometimes like a log floating down the river, an officers’ or company’s baggage wagon, piled high, leather covered, and hemmed in on all sides, moved across the bridge.

“It’s as if a dam had burst,” said the Cossack hopelessly.

“Are there many more of you to come?”

“

One step beyond that boundary line which resembles the line dividing the living from the dead lies uncertainty, suffering, and death.

And what is there? Who is there?—there beyond that field, that tree, that roof lit up by the sun? No one knows, but one wants to know.

“Why run risks, Captain? You should dismount,” he said.

“Oh, every bullet has its billet,” answered Váska Denísov, turning in his saddle.

Meanwhile Nesvítski, Zherkóv, and the officer of the suite were standing together out of range of the shots, watching, now the small group of men with yellow shakos, dark-green jackets braided with cord, and blue riding breeches, who were swarming near the bridge, and then …

“Oh! Oh!” groaned Nesvítski as if in fierce pain, seizing the officer of the suite by the arm. “Look! A man has fallen! Fallen, fallen!”

“If I were Tsar I would never go to war,” said Nesvítski, turning away.

The French guns were hastily reloaded. The infantry in their blue uniforms advanced toward the bridge at a run. Smoke appeared again but at irregular intervals, and grapeshot cracked and rattled onto the bridge.

At that instant the sun began to hide behind the clouds, and other stretchers came into view before Rostóv.

And the fear of death and of the stretchers, and love of the sun and of life, all merged into one feeling of sickening agitation.

“O Lord God! Thou who art in that heaven, save, forgive, and protect me!” Rostóv whispered.

He was one of those, who, liking work, knew how to do it, and despite his indolence would sometimes spend a whole night at his writing table. He worked well whatever the import of his work.

It was not the question “What for?” but the question “How?” that interested him.

What the diplomatic matter might be he did not care, but it gave him great pleasure to prepare a circular, memorandum, or report, skillfully, pointedly, and elegantly.

Bilíbin’s services were valued not only for what he wrote, but also for his skill in dealing and conversing with those in the highest spheres.

Bilíbin liked conversation as he liked work, only when it could be made elegantly witty.

In society he always awaited an opportunity to say something striking and took part in a conversation only when that was possible. His conversation was always sprinkled with wittily original, finished phrases of general interest.

Bolkónski, very modestly without once mentioning himself, described the engagement and his reception by the Minister of War.

“They received me and my news as one receives a dog in a game of skittles,” said he in conclusion.

Bilíbin smiled and the wrinkles on his face disappeared.

Suddenly, however, he was struck by a voice coming from the shed, and its tone was so sincere that he could not but listen.

“No, friend,” said a pleasant and, as it seemed to Prince Andréy, a familiar voice, “what I say is that if it were possible to know what is beyond death, none of us would be afraid of it. That’s so, friend.”

Another, a younger voice, interrupted him: “Afraid or not, you can’t escape it anyhow.”

“Whose company?” asked Prince Bagratión of an artilleryman standing by the ammunition wagon.

He asked, “Whose company?” but he really meant, “Are you frightened here?” and the artilleryman understood him.

“Captain Túshin’s, your excellency!” shouted the red-haired, freckled gunner in a merry voice, standing to attention.

“Please, your excellency, for God’s sake!” he kept saying, glancing for support at an officer of the suite who turned away from him. “There, you see!” and he drew attention to the bullets whistling, singing, and hissing continually around them.

He spoke in the tone of entreaty and reproach that a carpenter uses to a gentleman who has picked up an ax: “We are used to it, but you, sir, will blister your hands.”

He spoke as if those bullets could not kill him, and his half-closed eyes gave still more persuasiveness to his words. The staff officer joined in the colonel’s appeals, but Bagratión did not reply;

“When I saw, your excellency, that their first battalion was disorganized, I stopped in the road and thought: ‘I’ll let them come on and will meet them with the fire of the whole battalion’—and that’s what I did.”

The general had so wished to do this and was so sorry he had not managed to do it that it seemed to him as if it had really happened.

Perhaps it might really have been so? Could one possibly make out amid all that confusion what did or did not happen?

Flakes of falling snow were fluttering in that light. Túshin had not returned, the doctor had not come. He was alone now, except for a soldier who was sitting naked at the other side of the fire, warming his thin yellow body.

“Nobody wants me!” thought Rostóv. “There is no one to help me or pity me. Yet I was once at home, strong, happy, and loved.”

He sighed and, doing so, groaned involuntarily.

Prince Vasíli was not a man who deliberately thought out his plans. Still less did he think of injuring anyone for his own advantage.

He was merely a man of the world who had got on and to whom getting on had become a habit.

Schemes and devices for which he never rightly accounted to himself, but which formed the whole interest of his life, were constantly shaping themselves in his mind, arising from the circumstances and persons he met.

Pierre signed the deed and after that the princess grew still kinder. The younger sisters also became affectionate to him, especially the youngest, the pretty one with the mole, who often made him feel confused by her smiles and her own confusion when meeting him.

It seemed so natural to Pierre that everyone should like him, and it would have seemed so unnatural had anyone disliked him, that he could not but believe in the sincerity of those around him.

Besides, he had no time to ask himself whether these people were sincere or not. He was always busy and always felt in a state of mild and cheerful intoxication. He felt as though he were the center of some important and general movement;

He did not see her marble beauty forming a complete whole with her dress, but all the charm of her body only covered by her garments.

And having once seen this he could not help being aware of it, just as we cannot renew an illusion we have once seen through.

“So you have never noticed before how beautiful I am?” Elèn seemed to say. “You had not noticed that I am a woman? Yes, I am a woman who may belong to anyone—to you too,” said her glance.

Yes, I am a woman who may belong to anyone—to you too,” said her glance. And at that moment Pierre felt that Elèn not only could, but must, be his wife, and that it could not be otherwise.

He knew this at that moment as surely as if he had been standing at the altar with her.

How and when this would be he did not know, he did not even know if it would be a good thing (he even felt, he knew not why, that it would be a bad thing), but he knew it would happen.

Pierre dropped his eyes, lifted them again, and wished once more to see her as a distant beauty far removed from him, as he had seen her every day until then, but he could no longer do it.

He could not, any more than a man who has been looking at a tuft of steppe grass through the mist and taking it for a tree can again take it for a tree after he has once recognized it to be a tuft of grass.

She was terribly close to him. She already had power over him, and between them there was no longer any barrier except the barrier of his own will.

“Elèn!” he said aloud and paused.

“Something special is always said in such cases,” he thought, but could not remember what it was that people say.

He looked at her face. She drew nearer to him. Her face flushed.

Anatole, having taken off his overcoat, sat with arms akimbo before a table on a corner of which he smilingly and absentmindedly fixed his large and handsome eyes.

He regarded his whole life as a continual round of amusement which someone for some reason had to provide for him.

And he looked on this visit to a churlish old man and a rich and ugly heiress in the same way. All this might, he thought, turn out very well and amusingly. “And why not marry her if she really has so much money?

If a man lacking in self-confidence remains dumb on a first introduction and betrays a consciousness of the impropriety of such silence and an anxiety to find something to say, the effect is bad. But

Anatole was dumb, swung his foot, and smilingly examined the princess’ hair.

It was evident that he could be silent in this way for a very long time. “If anyone finds this silence inconvenient, let him talk, but I don’t want to,” he seemed to say.

… (she did not even for a moment consider what she should do), but all this had long been familiar to her, and now that Anatole had appeared it just grouped itself around him and she wished and tried to please him as much as possible.

The little princess, like an old war horse that hears the trumpet, unconsciously and quite forgetting her condition, prepared for the familiar gallop of coquetry, without any ulterior motive or any struggle, but with naive and lighthearted gaiety.

Although in female society Anatole usually assumed the role of a man tired of being run after by women, his vanity was flattered by the spectacle of his power over these three women.

At first he heard the sound of indifferent voices, then Anna Mikháylovna’s voice alone in a long speech, then a cry, then silence, then both voices together with glad intonations, and then footsteps. Anna Mikháylovna opened the door.

Her face wore the proud expression of a surgeon who has just performed a difficult operation and admits the public to appreciate his skill.

“It is done!” she said to the count, pointing triumphantly to the countess, who sat holding in one hand the snuffbox with its portrait and in the other the letter, and pressing them alternately to her lips.

Besides, to tell everything as it really happened, it would have been necessary to make an effort of will to tell only what happened.

It is very difficult to tell the truth, and young people are rarely capable of it.

His hearers expected a story of how beside himself and all aflame with excitement, he had flown like a storm at the square, cut his way in, slashed right and left, how his saber had tasted flesh and he had fallen exhausted, and so on.

… freshly washed and shaven face and his weapons clean and polished to the utmost, and every horse groomed till its coat shone like satin and every hair of its wetted mane lay smooth—felt that no small matter was happening, but an important and solemn affair.

Every general and every soldier was conscious of his own insignificance, aware of being but a drop in that ocean of men, and yet at the same time was conscious of his strength as a part of that enormous whole.

From early morning strenuous activities and efforts had begun and by ten o’clock all had been brought into due order. The ranks were drawn up on the vast field. The whole army was extended in three lines:

Late that night, when all had separated, Denísov with his short hand patted his favorite, Rostóv, on the shoulder.

“As there’s no one to fall in love with on campaign, he’s fallen in love with the Tsar,” he said.

“Denísov, don’t make fun of it!” cried Rostóv. “It is such a lofty, beautiful feeling, such a …”

Weyrother evidently felt himself to be at the head of a movement that had already become unrestrainable.

He was like a horse running downhill harnessed to a heavy cart.

Whether he was pulling it or being pushed by it he did not know, but rushed along at headlong speed with no time to consider what this movement might lead to.

When the monotonous sound of Weyrother’s voice ceased,

Kutúzov opened his eye as a miller wakes up when the soporific drone of the mill wheel is interrupted.

He listened to what Langeron said, as if remarking, “So you are still at that silly business!” quickly closed his eye again, and let his head sink still lower.

The column moved forward without knowing where and unable, from the masses around them, the smoke and the increasing fog, to see either the place they were leaving or that to which they were going.

A soldier on the march is hemmed in and borne along by his regiment as much as a sailor is by his ship.

However far he has walked, whatever strange, unknown, and dangerous places he reaches, just as a sailor is always surrounded by the same decks, masts, and rigging of his ship, so the soldier always has around him the same comrades, the same ranks, the same …

But when they had marched for about an hour in the dense fog, the greater part of the men had to halt and an unpleasant consciousness of some dislocation and blunder spread through the ranks.

How such a consciousness is communicated is very difficult to define, but it certainly is communicated very surely, and flows rapidly, imperceptibly, and irrepressibly, as water does in a creek.

Had the Russian army been alone without any allies, it might perhaps have been a long time before this consciousness of mismanagement became a general conviction, but as it was, the disorder was readily and naturally attributed to the stupid Germans, and everyone was convinced …

In the Emperors’ suite were the picked young orderly officers of the Guard and line regiments, Russian and Austrian. Among them were grooms leading the Tsar’s beautiful relay horses covered with embroidered cloths.

As when a window is opened a whiff of fresh air from the fields enters a stuffy room, so a whiff of youthfulness, energy, and confidence of success reached Kutúzov’s cheerless staff with the galloping advent of all these brilliant young men.

“Why aren’t you beginning, Mikháil Ilariónovich?” said the Emperor Alexander hurriedly to Kutúzov, glancing courteously at the same time at the Emperor Francis.

how differently do those clouds glide across that lofty infinite sky! How was it I did not see that lofty sky before? And how happy I am to have found it at last!

Yes! All is vanity, all falsehood, except that infinite sky.

There is nothing, nothing, but that. But even it does not exist, there is nothing but quiet and peace. Thank God! …”

Everything seemed so futile and insignificant in comparison with the stern and solemn train of thought that weakness from loss of blood, suffering, and the nearness of death aroused in him.

Looking into Napoleon’s eyes Prince Andréy thought of the insignificance of greatness, the unimportance of life which no one could understand, and the still greater unimportance of death, the meaning of which no one alive could understand or explain.

The Emperor without waiting for an answer turned away and said to one of the officers as he went: “Have these gentlemen attended to and taken to my bivouac; let my doctor, Larrey, examine their wounds. Au revoir, Prince Repnín!”

Either to a Power indefinable, incomprehensible, which I not only cannot address but which I cannot even express in words—the Great All or Nothing—” said he to himself, “or to that God who has been sewn into this amulet by Márya!

There is nothing certain, nothing at all except the unimportance of everything I understand, and the greatness of something incomprehensible but all-important.

”

The Moscovites felt that something was wrong and that to discuss the bad news was difficult, and so it was best to be silent.

But after a while, just as a jury comes out of its room, the bigwigs who guided the club’s opinion reappeared, and everybody began speaking clearly and definitely.

Reasons were found for the incredible, unheard-of, and impossible event of a Russian defeat, everything became clear, and in all corners of Moscow the same things began to be said.

Moreover, paying such honor to Bagratión was the best way of expressing disapproval and dislike of Kutúzov.

“Had there been no Bagratión, it would have been necessary to invent him,” said the wit Shinshín, parodying the words of Voltaire.

Kutúzov no one spoke of, except some who abused him in whispers, calling him a court weathercock and an old satyr.

“I knew she was a depraved woman,” he repeated, “but dared not admit it to myself. And now there’s Dólokhov sitting in the snow with a forced smile and perhaps dying, while meeting my remorse with some forced bravado!”

Pierre was one of those people who, in spite of an appearance of what is called weak character, do not seek a confidant in their troubles. He digested his sufferings alone.

“It is all, all her fault,” he said to himself; “but what of that? Why did I bind myself to her? Why did I say ‘Je vous aime’ to her, which was a lie, and worse than a lie?

Then Robespierre was beheaded for being a despot. Who is right and who is wrong? No one!

But if you are alive⁠—live: tomorrow you’ll die as I might have died an hour ago.

And is it worth tormenting oneself, when one has only a moment of life in comparison with eternity?”

… candles, and, seeing the prince was lying on the sofa, looked at him, noticed his perturbed face, shook his head, and going up to him silently kissed him on the shoulder and left the room without snuffing the candles or saying why he had entered.

The most solemn mystery in the world continued its course.

Evening passed, night came, and the feeling of suspense and softening of heart in the presence of the unfathomable did not lessen but increased. No one slept.

“I know people consider me a bad man!” he said. “Let them!

I don’t care a straw about anyone but those I love; but those I love, I love so that I would give my life for them, and the others I’d throttle if they stood in my way.

I have an adored, a priceless mother, and two or three friends—you among them—and as for the rest I only care about them in so far as they are harmful or useful. And most of them are harmful, especially the women.

Natásha no less proud of her first long dress and of being at a real ball was even happier. They were both dressed in white muslin with pink ribbons.

Natásha fell in love the very moment she entered the ballroom. She was not in love with anyone in particular, but with everyone.

Whatever person she happened to look at she was in love with for that moment.

But now, in the solitude of the journey, they seized him with special force. No matter what he thought about, he always returned to these same questions which he could not solve and yet could not cease to ask himself.

It was as if the thread of the chief screw which held his life together were stripped, so that the screw could not get in or out, but went on turning uselessly in the same place.

The postmaster came in and began obsequiously to beg his excellency to wait only two hours, when, come what might, he would let his excellency have the courier horses.

he thought. “God could not have put into her heart an impulse that was against His will. My wife—as she once was—did not struggle, and perhaps she was right. Nothing has been found out, nothing discovered,” Pierre again said to himself. “

All we can know is that we know nothing. And that’s the height of human wisdom.

”

… had gone, Pierre did not go to bed or order horses but paced up and down the room, pondering over his vicious past, and with a rapturous sense of beginning anew pictured to himself the blissful, irreproachable, virtuous future that seemed to him so easy.

It seemed to him that he had been vicious only because he had somehow forgotten how good it is to be virtuous.

Not a trace of his former doubts remained in his soul. He firmly believed in the possibility of the brotherhood of men united in the aim of supporting one another in the path of virtue, and that is how Freemasonry presented itself to him.

“I begin ab ovo. ‘The enemy of the human race,’ as you know, attacks the Prussians.

The Prussians are our faithful allies who have only betrayed us three times in three years.

We take up their cause, but it turns out that ‘the enemy of the human race’ pays no heed to our fine speeches and in his rude and savage way throws himself on the Prussians without giving them time to finish the parade they had …

“

The field marshal is angry with the Emperor and he punishes us all, isn’t it logical?

“This is the first act. Those that follow are naturally increasingly interesting and entertaining. After the field marshal’s departure it appears that we are within sight of the enemy and must give battle.

Twice the marauders even attack our headquarters, and the commander in chief has to ask for a battalion to disperse them. During one of these attacks they carried off my empty portmanteau and my dressing gown.

The Emperor proposes to give all commanders of divisions the right to shoot marauders, but I much fear this will oblige one half the army to shoot the other.

”

At last he saw him: the rosy boy had tossed about till he lay across the bed with his head lower than the pillow, and was smacking his lips in his sleep and breathing evenly.

Prince Andréy was as glad to find the boy like that, as if he had already lost him.

He bent over him and, as his sister had taught him, tried with his lips whether the child was still feverish. The soft forehead was moist. Prince Andréy touched the head with his hand; even the hair was wet, so profusely had the child perspired.

Again whole days, weeks, and months of his life passed in as great a rush and were as much occupied with evening parties, dinners, lunches, and balls, giving him no time for reflection, as in Petersburg.

Instead of the new life he had hoped to lead he still lived the old life, only in new surroundings.

Of the three precepts of Freemasonry Pierre realized that he did not fulfill the one which enjoined every Mason to set an example of moral life, and that of the seven virtues he lacked two—morality and the love of death.

“Yes, we know that, but the harm I am conscious of in myself is something I cannot inflict on others,” said Prince Andréy, growing more and more animated and evidently wishing to express his new outlook to Pierre. He spoke in French. “

I only know two very real evils in life: remorse and illness. The only good is the absence of those evils.

To live for myself avoiding those two evils is my whole philosophy now.”

… to a peasant who passed by them taking off his cap) “from his animal condition and awaken in him spiritual needs, while it seems to me that animal happiness is the only happiness possible, and that is just what you want to deprive him of.

I envy him, but you want to make him what I am, without giving him my means.

Then you say, ‘lighten his toil.’ But as I see it, physical labor is as essential to him, as much a condition of his existence, as mental activity is to you or me. You can’t help thinking.

there were none of those uncertain and undefined money relations with his father, and nothing to recall that terrible loss to Dólokhov. Here, in the regiment, all was clear and simple.

The whole world was divided into two unequal parts: one, our Pávlograd regiment; the other, all the rest.

And the rest was no concern of his. In the regiment, everything was definite: who was lieutenant, who captain, who was a good fellow, who a bad one, and most of all, who was a comrade.

“And how we’ve been begging, your honor,” said the old soldier, his jaw quivering. “He’s been dead since morning.

After all we’re men, not dogs.

”

“

I cannot do it, General. I cannot, because the law is stronger than I

,” and he raised his foot to the stirrup.

… rolled his eyes and persistently gazed at his own monarch), looked round at the Emperor Alexander to imply that what he was now doing was done for the sake of his ally, and the small white hand holding the Order touched one of Lázarev’s buttons.

It was as if Napoleon knew that it was only necessary for his hand to deign to touch that soldier’s breast for the soldier to be forever happy, rewarded, and distinguished from everyone else in the world.

Napoleon merely laid the cross on Lázarev’s breast and, dropping his hand, turned toward Alexander as though sure that the cross would adhere there. And it really did.

“Spring, love, happiness!” this oak seemed to say. “

Are you not weary of that stupid, meaningless, constantly repeated fraud?

Always the same and always a fraud? There is no spring, no sun, no happiness!

“Sónya! Sónya!” he again heard the first speaker. “Oh, how can you sleep? Only look how glorious it is! Ah, how glorious! Do wake up, Sónya!” she said almost with tears in her voice. “

There never, never was such a lovely night before!

”

“Do just come and see what a moon! … Oh, how lovely! Come here. … Darling, sweetheart, come here! There, you see?

I feel like sitting down on my heels, putting my arms round my knees like this, straining tight, as tight as possible, and flying away!

Like this. …”

That is what follows from the fact that it is cold; and not that a child who needs fresh air should remain at home,” he would add with extreme logic, as if punishing someone for those secret illogical emotions that stirred within him.

At such moments Princess Márya would think how intellectual work dries men up.

He sometimes noticed with dissatisfaction that he repeated the same remark on the same day in different circles.

But he was so busy for whole days together that he had no time to notice that he was thinking of nothing.

As he had done on their first meeting at Kochubéy’s, Speránski produced a strong impression on Prince Andréy on the Wednesday, when he received him tête-à-tête at his own house and talked to him long and confidentially.

At the same time he felt that the deeper the ground sank under him the closer bound he involuntarily became to the order.

When he had joined the Freemasons he had experienced the feeling of one who confidently steps onto the smooth surface of a bog. When he put his foot down it sank in.

To make quite sure of the firmness of the ground, he put his other foot down and sank deeper still, became stuck in it, and involuntarily waded knee-deep in the bog.

Pierre, who knew she was very stupid, sometimes attended, with a strange feeling of perplexity and fear, her evenings and dinner parties, where politics, poetry, and philosophy were discussed.

At these parties his feelings were like those of a conjuror who always expects his trick to be found out at any moment.

But whether because stupidity was just what was needed to run such a salon, or because those who were deceived found pleasure in the deception, at any rate it remained unexposed and Elèna Vasílievna Bezúkhova’s reputation as a lovely and clever woman became so firmly …

… in Petersburg were Borís, Pierre whom the count had met in the street and dragged home with him, and Berg who spent whole days at the Rostóvs’ and paid the eldest daughter, Countess Véra, the attentions a young man pays when he intends to propose.

Not in vain had Berg shown everybody his right hand wounded at Austerlitz and held a perfectly unnecessary sword in his left.

He narrated that episode so persistently and with so important an air that everyone believed in the merit and usefulness of his deed, and he had obtained two decorations for Austerlitz.

“Little countess!” the count’s voice called from behind the door. “You’re not asleep?” Natásha jumped up, snatched up her slippers, and ran barefoot to her own room.

It was a long time before she could sleep. She kept thinking that no one could understand all that she understood and all there was in her.

“Sónya?” she thought, glancing at that curled-up, sleeping little kitten with her enormous plait of hair. “No, how could she? She’s virtuous. She fell in love with Nikólenka and does not wish to know anything more. Even Mamma does not understand.

“I have never enjoyed myself so much before!” she said, and Prince Andréy noticed how her thin arms rose quickly as if to embrace her father and instantly dropped again.

Natásha was happier than she had ever been in her life. She was at that height of bliss when one becomes completely kind and good and does not believe in the possibility of evil, unhappiness, or sorrow.

At that ball Pierre for the first time felt humiliated by the position his wife occupied in court circles. He was gloomy and absentminded. A deep furrow ran across his forehead, and standing by a window he stared over his spectacles seeing no one.

Prince Andréy looked at the laughing Speránski with astonishment, regret, and disillusionment. It seemed to him that this was not Speránski but someone else.

Everything that had formerly appeared mysterious and fascinating in Speránski suddenly became plain and unattractive.

At dinner the conversation did not cease for a moment and seemed to consist of the contents of a book of funny anecdotes. Before Magnítski had finished his story someone else was anxious to relate something still funnier.

Prince Andréy did not laugh and feared that he would be a damper on the spirits of the company, but no one took any notice of his being out of harmony with the general mood. They all seemed very gay.

He tried several times to join in the conversation, but his remarks were tossed aside each time like a cork thrown out of the water, and he could not jest with them.

There was nothing wrong or unseemly in what they said, it was witty and might have been funny, but it lacked just that something which is the salt of mirth, and they were not even aware that such a thing existed.

He tried several times to join in the conversation, but his remarks were tossed aside each time like a cork thrown out of the water, and he could not jest with them.

There was nothing wrong or unseemly in what they said, it was witty and might have been funny, but it lacked just that something which is the salt of mirth, and they were not even aware that such a thing existed.

After dinner Speránski’s daughter and her governess rose. He patted the little girl with his white hand and kissed her. And that gesture, too, seemed unnatural to Prince Andréy.

“I must use my freedom while I feel so much strength and youth in me,” he said to himself. “Pierre was right when he said one must believe in the possibility of happiness in order to be happy, and now I do believe in it.

Let the dead bury their dead, but while one has life one must live and be happy!

” thought he.

“You can get to know something, you can ask for something. See how I managed from my first promotion.” (

Berg measured his life not by years but by promotions.

) “My comrades are still nobodies, while I am only waiting for a vacancy to command a regiment, and have the happiness to be your husband.”

Véra at the same time smiling with a sense of superiority over her good, conscientious husband, who all the same understood life wrongly, as according to Véra all men did. Berg, judging by his wife, thought all women weak and foolish.

Véra, judging only by her husband and generalizing from that observation, supposed that all men, though they understand nothing and are conceited and selfish, ascribe common sense to themselves alone.

Berg rose and embraced his wife carefully, so as not to crush her lace fichu for which he had paid a good price, kissing her straight on the lips.

The old people sat with the old, the young with the young, and the hostess at the tea table, on which stood exactly the same kind of cakes in a silver cake basket as the Panins had at their party.

Everything was just as it was everywhere else.

“I should not have believed anyone who told me that I was capable of such love,” said Prince Andréy. “It is not at all the same feeling that I knew in the past.

The whole world is now for me divided into two halves: one half is she, and there all is joy, hope, light: the other half is everything where she is not, and there is all gloom and darkness.

…”

“Yes, yes,” Pierre assented, looking at his friend with a touched and sad expression in his eyes.

The brighter Prince Andréy’s lot appeared to him, the gloomier seemed his own.

Once she came to her mother, tried to say something, and suddenly began to cry.

Her tears were those of an offended child who does not know why it is being punished.

The countess began to soothe Natásha, who after first listening to her mother’s words, suddenly interrupted her:

Passing a mirror she glanced into it.

“There, that’s me!” the expression of her face seemed to say as she caught sight of herself. “Well, and very nice too! I need nobody.”

A footman wanted to come in to clear away something in the room but she would not let him, and having closed the door behind him continued her walk. That morning she had returned to her favorite mood—love of, and delight in, herself.

What had she to do with the justice or injustice of other people?

She had to endure and love, and that she did.

During the winter Prince Andréy had come to Bald Hills and had been gay, gentle, and more affectionate than Princess Márya had known him for a long time past.

And such a state of obligatory and irreproachable idleness is the lot of a whole class—the military.

The chief attraction of military service has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and irreproachable idleness.

Nikoláy Rostóv experienced this blissful condition to the full when, after 1807, he continued to serve in the Pávlograd regiment, in which he already commanded the squadron he had taken over from Denísov.

“But you know, my dear boy, it’s a pity you got excited! Mítenka has told me all about it.”

“I knew,” thought Nikoláy, “that I should never understand anything in this crazy world.”

“You were angry that he had not entered those 700 rubles. But they were carried forward—and you did not look at the other page.”

Five minutes later Danílo and Uvárka were standing in Nikoláy’s big study.

Though Danílo was not a big man, to see him in a room was like seeing a horse or a bear on the floor among the furniture and surroundings of human life.

Danílo himself felt this, and as usual stood just inside the door, trying to speak softly and not move, for fear of breaking something in the master’s apartment, and he hastened to say all that was necessary so as to get from under that ceiling, …

“This, you see, is how I am finishing my days …

Death will come. That’s it, come on! Nothing will remain. Then why harm anyone?

”

… as peasants sing, with full and naive conviction that the whole meaning of a song lies in the words and that the tune comes of itself, and that apart from the words there is no tune, which exists only to give measure to the words.

As a result of this the unconsidered tune, like the song of a bird, was extraordinarily good.

Natásha was in ecstasies over “Uncle’s” singing. She resolved to give up learning the harp and to play only the guitar. She asked “Uncle” for his guitar and at once found the chords of the song.

“And then I was saying to myself all the way, ‘How well Anísyushka carried herself, how well!’ ” And Nikoláy heard her spontaneous, happy, ringing laughter.

“And do you know,” she suddenly said, “I know that I shall never again be as happy and tranquil as I am now.”

“Rubbish, nonsense, humbug!” exclaimed Nikoláy, and he thought: “How charming this Natásha of mine is! I have no other friend like her and never shall have. Why should she marry? We might always drive about together!”

… boston, at which—spreading out his cards so that everybody could see them—he let himself be plundered of hundreds of rubles every day by his neighbors, who looked upon an opportunity to play a rubber with Count Ilyá Andréevich as a most profitable source of income.

The count moved in his affairs as in a huge net, trying not to believe that he was entangled but becoming more and more so at every step, and feeling too feeble to break the meshes or to set to work carefully and patiently to disentangle them.

The countess, with her loving heart, felt that her children were being ruined, that it was not the count’s fault for he could not help being what he was—that (though he tried to hide it) he himself suffered from the consciousness of his own and …

“

Mamma, I want him. Why should I be wasted like this, Mamma?

”

The light was so strong and the snow sparkled with so many stars that one did not wish to look up at the sky and the real stars were unnoticed.

The sky was black and dreary, while the earth was gay.

“I am a fool, a fool! what have I been waiting for?” thought Nikoláy, and running out from the porch he went round the corner of the house and along the path that led to the back porch. He knew Sónya would pass that way.

The log walls of the barn and its snow-covered roof, that looked as if hewn out of some precious stone, sparkled in the moonlight. A tree in the garden snapped with the frost, and then all was again perfectly silent.

His bosom seemed to inhale not air but the strength of eternal youth and gladness.

From the back porch came the sound of feet descending the steps, the bottom step upon which snow had fallen gave a ringing creak and he heard the voice of an old maidservant saying, “Straight, straight, along the path, Miss. Only, don’t look back.”

when he saw those old Moscow ladies, the Moscow balls, and the English Club, he felt himself at home in a quiet haven.

In Moscow he felt at peace, at home, warm and dirty as in an old dressing gown.

Moscow society, from the old women down to the children, received Pierre like a long-expected guest whose place was always ready awaiting him.

For Moscow society Pierre was the nicest, kindest, most intellectual, merriest, and most magnanimous of cranks, a heedless, genial nobleman of the old Russian type.

His purse was always empty because it was open to everyone.

Benefit performances, poor pictures, statues, benevolent societies, gypsy choirs, schools, subscription dinners, sprees, Freemasons, churches, and books—no one and nothing met with a refusal from him, and had it not been for two friends who had borrowed large sums from him and taken him under …

I have tried, and have always found that they too in the depths of their souls understand it as I do, and only try not to see it. So it appears that it must be so! But I—what is to become of me?” thought he.

He had the unfortunate capacity many men, especially Russians, have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to be able to take a serious part in it.

Every sphere of work was connected, in his eyes, with evil and deception. Whatever he tried to be, whatever he engaged in, the evil and falsehood of it repulsed him and blocked every path of activity. Yet he had to live and to find occupation.

But under the influence of wine he said to himself: “It doesn’t matter. I’ll get it unraveled. I have a solution ready, but have no time now—I’ll think it all out later on!”

But the later on never came.

In the morning, on an empty stomach, all the old questions appeared as insoluble and terrible as ever, and Pierre hastily picked up a book, and if anyone came to see him he was glad.

Sometimes he remembered how he had heard that soldiers in war when entrenched under the enemy’s fire, if they have nothing to do, try hard to find some occupation the more easily to bear the danger.

To Pierre all men seemed like those soldiers, seeking refuge from life: some in ambition, some in cards, some in framing laws, some in women, some in toys, some in horses, some in politics, some in sport, some in wine, and some in governmental affairs.

“Nothing is trivial, and nothing is important, it’s all the same—only to save oneself from it as best one can,” thought Pierre. “Only not to see it, that dreadful it!”

“Nothing is trivial, and nothing is important, it’s all the same—only to save oneself from it as best one can,” thought Pierre. “

Only not to see it, that dreadful it!

”

Just then Julie, who by the death of her brothers had become one of the richest heiresses in Moscow, was in the full whirl of society pleasures. She was surrounded by young men who, she fancied, had suddenly learned to appreciate her worth.

Julie was at that stage in the life of a society woman when she feels that her last chance of marrying has come and that her fate must be decided now or never.

On Thursdays Princess Márya remembered with a mournful smile that she now had no one to write to, since Julie—whose presence gave her no pleasure—was here and they met every week.

“

Bonaparte treats Europe as a pirate does a captured vessel,

” said Count Rostopchín, repeating a phrase he had uttered several times before. “One only wonders at the long-suffering or blindness of the crowned heads.

“

My dear fellow, with our five hundred thousand troops it should be easy to have a good style,

” returned Count Rostopchín.

“How can we fight the French, Prince?” said Count Rostopchín. “Can we arm ourselves against our teachers and divinities? Look at our youths, look at our ladies!

The French are our Gods: Paris is our Kingdom of Heaven.

”

“

Oh, my God, Count, there are moments when I would marry anybody!

” she cried suddenly to her own surprise and with tears in her voice.

Anatole had very soon abandoned his wife and, for a payment which he agreed to send to his father-in-law, had arranged to be free to pass himself off as a bachelor.

Anatole was always content with his position, with himself, and with others.

He was instinctively and thoroughly convinced that it was impossible for him to live otherwise than as he did and that he had never in his life done anything base.

He was incapable of considering how his actions might affect others or what the consequences of this or that action of his might be.

He was convinced that, as a duck is so made that it must live in water, so God had made him such that he must spend thirty thousand rubles a year and always occupy a prominent position in society.

He believed this so firmly that others, looking at him, were persuaded of it too and did not refuse him either a leading place in society or money, which he borrowed from anyone and everyone and evidently would not repay.

… to his ideas there was nothing dishonorable in these tastes, and he was incapable of considering what the gratification of his tastes entailed for others, he honestly considered himself irreproachable, sincerely despised rogues and bad people, and with a tranquil conscience carried his head high.

Rakes, those male Magdalenes, have a secret feeling of innocence similar to that which female Magdalenes have, based on the same hope of forgiveness.

“All will be forgiven her, for she loved much; and all will be forgiven him, for he enjoyed much.”

“Three days?” said Natásha. “

It seems to me I’ve loved him a hundred years. It seems to me that I have never loved anyone before.

You can’t understand it. … Sónya, wait a bit, sit here,” and Natásha embraced and kissed her.

“I had heard that it happens like this, and you must have heard it too, but it’s only now that I feel such love. It’s not the same as before.

As soon as I saw him I felt he was my master and I his slave, and that I could not help loving him.

Yes, his slave! Whatever he orders I shall do. You don’t understand that. What can I do? What can I do, Sónya?” cried Natásha with a happy yet frightened expression.

“He knows all about it,” said Márya Dmítrievna pointing to Pierre and addressing Natásha. “Let him tell you whether I have told the truth.”

Natásha looked from one to the other as a hunted and wounded animal looks at the approaching dogs and sportsmen.

“Natálya Ilyníchna,” Pierre began, dropping his eyes with a feeling of pity for her and loathing for the thing he had to do, “whether it is true or not should make no difference to you, because …”

Pierre laughed and said it was nonsense for he had just come from the Rostóvs’. He asked everyone about Anatole. One man told him he had not come yet, and another that he was coming to dinner.

Pierre felt it strange to see this calm, indifferent crowd of people unaware of what was going on in his soul.

He paced through the ballroom, waited till everyone had come, and as Anatole had not turned up did not stay for dinner but drove home.

“Yes,” returned Prince Andréy hastily. “

I said that a fallen woman should be forgiven, but I didn’t say I could forgive her. I can’t.

”

… 1811 an intensified arming and concentrating of the forces of Western Europe began, and in 1812 these forces—millions of men, reckoning those transporting and feeding the army—moved from the west eastwards to the Russian frontier, toward which since 1811 Russian forces had been similarly drawn.

On the twelfth of June, 1812, the forces of Western Europe crossed the Russian frontier and war began, that is, an event took place opposed to human reason and to human nature.

Millions of men perpetrated against one another such innumerable crimes, frauds, treacheries, thefts, forgeries, issues of false money, burglaries, incendiarisms, and murders as in whole centuries are not recorded in the annals of all the law courts of the world, but which those who committed …

There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life, which is the more free the more abstract its interests, and his elemental hive life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him.

Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.

A deed done is irrevocable, and its result coinciding in time with the actions of millions of other men assumes an historic significance.

“The king’s heart is in the hands of the Lord.”

A king is history’s slave.

History, that is, the unconscious, general, hive life of mankind, uses every moment of the life of kings as a tool for its own purposes.

… he who says that Napoleon went to Moscow because he wanted to, and perished because Alexander desired his destruction, and he who says that an undermined hill weighing a million tons fell because the last navvy struck it for the last time with his mattock.

In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself.

Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.

“The King of Naples!” It was, in fact, Murat, now called “King of Naples.”

Though it was quite incomprehensible why he should be King of Naples, he was called so, and was himself convinced that he was so, and therefore assumed a more solemn and important air than formerly.

He was so sure that he really was the King of Naples that when, on the eve of his departure from that city, while walking through the streets with his wife, some Italians called out to him: “Viva il re!”

Davout was to Napoleon what Arakchéev was to Alexander—though not a coward like Arakchéev, he was as precise, as cruel, and as unable to express his devotion to his monarch except by cruelty.

In the organism of states such men are necessary, as wolves are necessary in the organism of nature, and they always exist, always appear and hold their own, however incongruous their presence and their proximity to the head of the government may be.

This inevitability alone can explain how the cruel Arakchéev, who tore out a grenadier’s mustache with his own hands, whose weak nerves rendered him unable to face danger, and who was neither an educated man nor a courtier, was able to maintain his powerful position …

Better quarters could have been found him, but Marshal Davout was one of those men who purposely put themselves in most depressing conditions to have a justification for being gloomy. For the same reason they are always hard at work and in a hurry.

“How can I think of the bright side of life when, as you see, I am sitting on a barrel and working in a dirty shed?” the expression of his face seemed to say.

The chief pleasure and necessity of such men, when they encounter anyone who shows animation, is to flaunt their own dreary, persistent activity. Davout allowed himself that pleasure when Balashëv was brought in.

It was plain that Balashëv’s personality did not interest him at all.

Evidently only what took place within his own mind interested him. Nothing outside himself had any significance for him, because everything in the world, it seemed to him, depended entirely on his will.

“I do not, and did not, desire war,” he continued, “but it has been forced on me. Even now” (he emphasized the word) “I am ready to receive any explanations you can give me.”

To the alleged insanity of the Swedes, Balashëv wished to reply that when Russia is on her side Sweden is practically an island: but Napoleon gave an angry exclamation to drown his voice.

Napoleon was in that state of irritability in which a man has to talk, talk, and talk, merely to convince himself that he is in the right.

Balashëv began to feel uncomfortable: as envoy he feared to demean his dignity and felt the necessity of replying; but, as a man, he shrank before the transport of groundless wrath that had evidently seized Napoleon.

Napoleon met Balashëv cheerfully and amiably. He not only showed no sign of constraint or self-reproach on account of his outburst that morning, but, on the contrary, tried to reassure Balashëv.

It was evident that he had long been convinced that it was impossible for him to make a mistake, and that in his perception whatever he did was right, not because it harmonized with any idea of right and wrong, but because he did it.

The Emperor was in very good spirits after his ride through Vílna, where crowds of people had rapturously greeted and followed him.

He was now concerned only with the nearest practical matters unrelated to his past interests, and he seized on these the more eagerly the more those past interests were closed to him.

It was as if that lofty, infinite canopy of heaven that had once towered above him had suddenly turned into a low, solid vault that weighed him down, in which all was clear, but nothing eternal or mysterious.

Of the activities that presented themselves to him, army service was the simplest and most familiar. As a general on duty on Kutúzov’s staff, he applied himself to business with zeal and perseverance and surprised Kutúzov by his willingness and accuracy in work.

An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people.

A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known.

The German’s self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth—science—which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth.

On the contrary, the deviations made from his theory were, in his opinion, the sole cause of the whole disaster, and with characteristically gleeful sarcasm he would remark, “There, I said the whole affair would go to the devil!”

Pfuel was one of those theoreticians who so love their theory that they lose sight of the theory’s object⁠—its practical application.

His love of theory made him hate everything practical, and he would not listen to it. He was even pleased by failures, for failures resulting from deviations in practice from the theory only proved to him the accuracy of his theory.

Of all those present, evidently he alone was not seeking anything for himself, nursed no hatred against anyone, and only desired that the plan, formed on a theory arrived at by years of toil, should be carried out.

He was ridiculous, and unpleasantly sarcastic, but yet he inspired involuntary respect by his boundless devotion to an idea.

Besides this, the remarks of all except Pfuel had one common trait that had not been noticeable at the council of war in 1805: there was now a panic fear of Napoleon’s genius, which, though concealed, was noticeable in every rejoinder.

The best generals I have known were, on the contrary, stupid or absentminded men. Bagratión was the best, Napoleon himself admitted that. And of Bonaparte himself! I remember his limited, self-satisfied face on the field of Austerlitz.

Not only does a good army commander not need any special qualities, on the contrary he needs the absence of the highest and best human attributes⁠—love, poetry, tenderness, and philosophic inquiring doubt.

He should be limited, firmly convinced that what he is doing is very important (otherwise he will not have sufficient patience), and only then will he be a brave leader.

He should be limited, firmly convinced that what he is doing is very important (otherwise he will not have sufficient patience), and only then will he be a brave leader.

God forbid that he should be humane, should love, or pity, or think of what is just and unjust.

It is understandable that a theory of their ‘genius’ was invented for them long ago because they have power! The success of a military action depends not on them, but on the man in the ranks who shouts, ‘We are lost!’ or who shouts, ‘Hurrah!’

God forbid that he should be humane, should love, or pity, or think of what is just and unjust. It is understandable that a theory of their ‘genius’ was invented for them long ago because they have power!

The success of a military action depends not on them, but on the man in the ranks who shouts, ‘We are lost!’ or who shouts, ‘Hurrah!’

And only in the ranks can one serve with assurance of being useful.”

Formerly, when going into action, Rostóv had felt afraid; now he had not the least feeling of fear.

He was fearless, not because he had grown used to being under fire (one cannot grow used to danger), but because he had learned how to manage his thoughts when in danger.

He had grown accustomed when going into action to think about anything but what would seem most likely to interest him—the impending danger.

… perceptible, as they were given in small doses), but they were useful, necessary, and indispensable because they satisfied a mental need of the invalid and of those who loved her—and that is why there are, and always will be, pseudo-healers, wise women, homeopaths, and allopaths.

They satisfied that eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, and that something should be done, which is felt by those who are suffering.

They satisfied the need seen in its most elementary form in a child, when it wants to have a place rubbed that has been hurt.

It comforted her to reflect that she was not better as she had formerly imagined, but worse, much worse, than anybody else in the world. But this was not enough. She knew that, and asked herself, “What next?” But there was nothing to come.

There was no joy in life, yet life was passing.

Natásha apparently tried not to be a burden or a hindrance to anyone, but wanted nothing for herself. She kept away from everyone in the house and felt at ease only with her brother Pétya.

Whatever worldly baseness presented itself to him, he said to himself:

“Well, supposing N. N. has swindled the country and the Tsar, and the country and the Tsar confer honors upon him, what does that matter? She smiled at me yesterday and asked me to come again, and I love her, and no one will ever know it.”

And his soul felt calm and peaceful.

“And have you heard?” Shinshín asked. “

Prince Golítsyn has engaged a master to teach him Russian. It is becoming dangerous to speak French in the streets.

”

“Why are you going? Why are you upset?” asked Natásha, and she looked challengingly into Pierre’s eyes.

“Because I love you!” was what he wanted to say, but he did not say it, and only blushed till the tears came, and lowered his eyes.

“Because it is better for me to come less often … because … No, simply I have business. …”

Napoleon began the war with Russia because he could not resist going to Dresden, could not help having his head turned by the homage he received, could not help donning a Polish uniform and yielding to the stimulating influence of a June morning, and could not refrain from bursts of anger in the presence of Kurákin and then of Balashëv.

Alexander refused negotiations because he felt himself to be personally insulted. Barclay de Tolly tried to command the army in the best way, because he wished to fulfill his duty and earn fame as a great commander.

… moved by fear or vanity, rejoiced or were indignant, reasoned, imagining that they knew what they were doing and did it of their own free will, but they all were involuntary tools of history, carrying on a work concealed from them but comprehensible to us.

Such is the inevitable fate of men of action, and the higher they stand in the social hierarchy the less are they free.

The actors of 1812 have long since left the stage, their personal interests have vanished leaving no trace, and nothing remains of that time but its historic results.

Had that event not occurred these hints would have been forgotten, as we have forgotten the thousands and millions of hints and expectations to the contrary which were current then but have now been forgotten because the event falsified them.

There are always so many conjectures as to the issue of any event that however it may end there will always be people to say: “I said then that it would be so,” quite forgetting that amid their innumerable conjectures many were to quite the contrary effect.

Conjectures as to Napoleon’s awareness of the danger of extending his line, and (on the Russian side) as to luring the enemy into the depths of Russia, are evidently of that kind, and only by much straining can historians attribute such conceptions to Napoleon and …

Here besides the law of retrospection, which regards all the past as a preparation for events that subsequently occur, the law of reciprocity comes in, confusing the whole matter.

A good chessplayer having lost a game is sincerely convinced that his loss resulted from a mistake he made and looks for that mistake in the opening, but forgets that at each stage of the game there were similar mistakes and that none of his moves were perfect.

He only notices the mistake to which he pays attention, because his opponent took advantage of it.

Finding himself in the company of Napoleon, whose identity he had easily and surely recognized, Lavrúshka was not in the least abashed but merely did his utmost to gain his new master’s favor.

He knew very well that this was Napoleon, but Napoleon’s presence could no more intimidate him than Rostóv’s, or a sergeant major’s with the rods, would have done, for he had nothing that either the sergeant major or Napoleon could deprive him of.

So he rattled on, telling all the gossip he had heard among the orderlies. Much of it true. But when Napoleon asked him whether the Russians thought they would beat Bonaparte or not, Lavrúshka screwed up his eyes and considered.

One instance, which had occurred some twenty years before, was a movement among the peasants to emigrate to some unknown “warm rivers.” Hundreds of peasants, among them the Boguchárovo folk, suddenly began selling their cattle and moving in whole families toward the southeast.

As birds migrate to somewhere beyond the sea, so these men with their wives and children streamed to the southeast, to parts where none of them had ever been.

They set off in caravans, bought their freedom one by one or ran away, and drove or walked toward the “warm rivers.”

Alpátych did not insist further.

He had managed people for a long time and knew that the chief way to make them obey is to show no suspicion that they can possibly disobey.

Having wrung a submissive “I understand” from Dron, Alpátych contented himself with that, though he not only doubted but felt almost certain that without the help of troops the carts would not be forthcoming.

Involuntarily she thought their thoughts and felt their feelings. What they would have said and what they would have done she felt bound to say and do. She went into Prince Andréy’s study, trying to enter completely into his ideas, and considered her position.

The demands of life, which had seemed to her annihilated by her father’s death, all at once rose before her with a new, previously unknown force and took possession of her.

Agitated and flushed she paced the room, sending now for Mikháil Ivánovich and now for Tíkhon or Dron. Dunyásha, the nurse, and the other maids could not say in how far Mademoiselle Bourienne’s statement was correct.

Suddenly his face assumed a subtle expression, he shrugged his shoulders with an air of perplexity.

“And with such fine fellows to retreat and retreat! Well, goodbye, General,”

he added, and rode into the yard past Prince Andréy and Denísov.

“I am sorry, for I need you. But you’re right, you’re right! It’s not here that men are needed.

Advisers are always plentiful, but men are not.

The regiments would not be what they are if the would-be advisers served there as you do. I remember you at Austerlitz. … I remember, yes, I remember you with the standard!”

Everything in haste, but more haste, less speed. Kámenski would have been lost if he had not died. He stormed fortresses with thirty thousand men.

It is not difficult to capture a fortress but it is difficult to win a campaign.

For that, not storming and attacking but patience and time are wanted. Kámenski sent soldiers to Rustchuk, but I only employed these two things and took more fortresses than Kámenski and made them Turks eat horseflesh!” He swayed his head.

“We shall if everybody wants it; it can’t be helped. …

But believe me, my dear boy, there is nothing stronger than those two: patience and time, they will do it all.

But the advisers n’entendent pas de cette oreille, voilà le mal. Some want a thing—others don’t. What’s one to do?” he asked, evidently expecting an answer. “Well, what do you want us to do?” he repeated and his eye shone with a deep, shrewd look.

… depressing and painful to think of the danger, since it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant.

In solitude a man generally listens to the first voice, but in society to the second.

So it was now with the inhabitants of Moscow. It was long since people had been as gay in Moscow as that year.

“Well then, sell it,” said he. “What’s to be done? I can’t draw back now!”

The worse everything became, especially his own affairs, the better was Pierre pleased and the more evident was it that the catastrophe he expected was approaching.

Hardly anyone he knew was left in town. Julie had gone, and so had Princess Márya. Of his intimate friends only the Rostóvs remained, but he did not go to see them.

But later on, to fit what had occurred, the historians provided cunningly devised evidence of the foresight and genius of the generals who, of all the blind tools of history were the most enslaved and involuntary.

The ancients have left us model heroic poems in which the heroes furnish the whole interest of the story, and we are still unable to accustom ourselves to the fact that for our epoch histories of that kind are meaningless.

On the other question, how the battle of Borodinó and the preceding battle of Shevárdino were fought, there also exists a definite and well-known, but quite false, conception. All the historians describe the affair as follows:

And from the height of this perception all that had previously tormented and preoccupied him suddenly became illumined by a cold white light without shadows, without perspective, without distinction of outline.

All life appeared to him like magic-lantern pictures at which he had long been gazing by artificial light through a glass.

Now he suddenly saw those badly daubed pictures in clear daylight and without a glass. “Yes, yes!

…

Success never depends, and never will depend, on position, or equipment, or even on numbers, and least of all on position.

”

“

A battle is won by those who firmly resolve to win it!

Why did we lose the battle at Austerlitz? The French losses were almost equal to ours, but very early we said to ourselves that we were losing the battle, and we did lose it.

“Not take prisoners,” Prince Andréy continued: “That by itself would quite change the whole war and make it less cruel. As it is we have played at war—that’s what’s vile! We play at magnanimity and all that stuff.

Such magnanimity and sensibility are like the magnanimity and sensibility of a lady who faints when she sees a calf being killed: she is so kindhearted that she can’t look at blood, but enjoys eating the calf served up with sauce.

They talk to us of the rules of war, of chivalry, of flags of truce, of mercy to the unfortunate and so on. It’s all rubbish! I saw chivalry and flags of truce in 1805; they humbugged us and we humbugged them.

And then the determination of the troops would be quite different. Then all these Westphalians and Hessians whom Napoleon is leading would not follow him into Russia, and we should not go to fight in Austria and Prussia without knowing why.

War is not courtesy but the most horrible thing in life; and we ought to understand that and not play at war.

We ought to accept this terrible necessity sternly and seriously. It all lies in that: get rid of falsehood and let war be war and not a game. As it is now, war is the favorite pastime of the idle and frivolous.

How does God above look at them and hear them?” exclaimed Prince Andréy in a shrill, piercing voice. “

Ah, my friend, it has of late become hard for me to live. I see that I have begun to understand too much.

And it doesn’t do for man to taste of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. … Ah, well, it’s not for long!” he added.

strange as these suppositions appear, yet human dignity—which tells me that each of us is, if not more at least not less a man than the great Napoleon—demands the acceptance of that solution of the question, and historic investigation abundantly confirms it.

At the battle of Borodinó Napoleon shot at no one and killed no one. That was all done by the soldiers.

Therefore it was not he who killed people.

“This poor army!” he suddenly remarked. “It has diminished greatly since Smolénsk.

Fortune is frankly a courtesan, Rapp. I have always said so and I am beginning to experience it.

But the Guards, Rapp, the Guards are intact?” he remarked interrogatively.

“Do you know, Rapp, what military art is?” asked he. “

It is the art of being stronger than the enemy at a given moment. That’s all.

”

“

At eight hundred leagues from France, I will not have my Guard destroyed!

” he said, and turning his horse rode back to Shevárdino.

“Can this be death?” thought Prince Andréy, looking with a quite new, envious glance at the grass, the wormwood, and the streamlet of smoke that curled up from the rotating black ball. “

I cannot, I do not wish to die. I love life⁠—I love this grass, this earth, this air.

…” He thought this, and at the same time remembered that people were looking at him.

But the French did not make that effort. Some historians say that Napoleon need only have used his Old Guards, who were intact, and the battle would have been won.

To speak of what would have happened had Napoleon sent his Guards is like talking of what would happen if autumn became spring.

It could not be. Napoleon did not give his Guards, not because he did not want to, but because it could not be done.

Absolute continuity of motion is not comprehensible to the human mind.

Laws of motion of any kind become comprehensible to man only when he examines arbitrarily selected elements of that motion; but at the same time, a large proportion of human error comes from the arbitrary division of continuous motion into discontinuous elements.

But the mind of man not only refuses to believe this explanation, but plainly says that this method of explanation is fallacious, because in it a weaker phenomenon is taken as the cause of a stronger.

The sum of human wills produced the Revolution and Napoleon, and only the sum of those wills first tolerated and then destroyed them.

“But every time there have been conquests there have been conquerors; every time there has been a revolution in any state there have been great men,” says history. And, indeed, human reason replies:

And, indeed, human reason replies: every time conquerors appear there have been wars, but this does not prove that the conquerors caused the wars and that it is possible to find the laws of a war in the personal activity of a single man.

Whenever I look at my watch and its hands point to ten, I hear the bells of the neighboring church; but because the bells begin to ring when the hands of the clock reach ten, I have no right to assume that the movement of the bells is caused by the position of the hands of the watch.

Whenever I see the movement of a locomotive I hear the whistle and see the valves opening and wheels turning; but I have no right to conclude that the whistling and the turning of wheels are the cause of the movement of the engine.

“

My head, be it good or bad, must depend on itself,

” said he, rising from the bench, and he rode to Filí where his carriages were waiting.

“Russia’s ancient and sacred capital!” he suddenly said, repeating Bennigsen’s words in an angry voice and thereby drawing attention to the false note in them. “

Allow me to tell you, your excellency, that that question has no meaning for a Russian.

” (He lurched his heavy body forward.) “Such a question cannot be put; it is senseless! The question I have asked these gentlemen to meet to discuss is a military one. The question is that of saving Russia.

“

Well, gentlemen, I see that it is I who will have to pay for the broken crockery,

” said he, and rising slowly he moved to the table. “Gentlemen, I have heard your views. Some of you will not agree with me. But I,” he paused, “by the authority entrusted to me by my Sovereign and country, order a retreat.”

“Gentlemen, I have heard your views. Some of you will not agree with me. But I,” he paused, “by the authority entrusted to me by my Sovereign and country, order a retreat.”

After that the generals began to disperse with the solemnity and circumspect silence of people who are leaving, after a funeral.

Some of the generals, in low tones and in a strain very different from the way they had spoken during the council, communicated something to their commander in chief.

Had she attempted concealment, or tried to extricate herself from her awkward position by cunning, she would have spoiled her case by acknowledging herself guilty. But

Elèn, like a really great man who can do whatever he pleases, at once assumed her own position to be correct, as she sincerely believed it to be, and that everyone else was to blame.

The first time the young foreigner allowed himself to reproach her, she lifted her beautiful head and, half turning to him, said firmly: “That’s just like a man—selfish and cruel! I expected nothing else.

Meeting Elèn at a ball she stopped her in the middle of the room and, amid general silence, said in her gruff voice: “So wives of living men have started marrying again!

Perhaps you think you have invented a novelty? You have been forestalled, my dear!

It was thought of long ago. It is done in all the brothels,” and with these words Márya Dmítrievna, turning up her wide sleeves with her usual threatening gesture and glancing sternly round, moved across the room.

“To endure war is the most difficult subordination of man’s freedom to the law of God,” the voice had said. “Simplicity is submission to the will of God; you cannot escape from Him. And they are simple. They do not talk, but act.

The spoken word is silver but the unspoken is golden. Man can be master of nothing while he fears death, but he who does not fear it possesses all.

If there were no suffering, man would not know his limitations, would not know himself. The hardest thing (Pierre went on thinking, or hearing, in his dream) is to be able in your soul to unite the meaning of all. To unite all?”

It was felt that everything would suddenly break up and change, but up to the first of September nothing had done so.

As a criminal who is being led to execution knows that he must die immediately, but yet looks about him and straightens the cap that is awry on his head, so Moscow involuntarily continued its wonted life, though it knew that the time of its destruction was near when the conditions of life to which its people were accustomed to submit would be completely upset.

During the three days preceding the occupation of Moscow the whole Rostóv family was absorbed in various activities.

Pétya and Natásha on the contrary, far from helping their parents, were generally a nuisance and a hindrance to everyone. Almost all day long the house resounded with their running feet, their cries, and their spontaneous laughter.

They laughed and were gay not because there was any reason to laugh, but because gaiety and mirth were in their hearts and so everything that happened was a cause for gaiety and laughter to them.

Pétya was in high spirits because having left home a boy he had returned (as everybody told him) a fine young man, because he was at home, because he had left Bélaya Tsérkov where there was no hope of soon taking part in a battle …

On the first of September he had come to Moscow from the army.

He had nothing to do in Moscow, but he had noticed that everyone in the army was asking for leave to visit Moscow and had something to do there.

So he considered it necessary to ask for leave of absence for family and domestic reasons.

He went down that staircase and out into the yard. No one had seen him. But there were some carriages waiting, and as soon as Pierre stepped out of the gate the coachmen and the yard porter noticed him and raised their caps to him.

When he felt he was being looked at he behaved like an ostrich which hides its head in a bush in order not to be seen: he hung his head and quickening his pace went down the street.

Of all the affairs awaiting Pierre that day the sorting of Osip Alexéevich’s books and papers appeared to him the most necessary.

By the indefinite signs which, even at a distance, distinguish a living body from a dead one, Napoleon from the Poklónny Hill perceived the throb of life in the town and felt, as it were, the breathing of that great and beautiful body.

Every Russian looking at Moscow feels her to be a mother; every foreigner who sees her, even if ignorant of her significance as the mother city, must feel her feminine character, and Napoleon felt it.

“Cette ville asiatique aux innombrables églises, Moscou la sainte. La voilà donc enfin, cette fameuse ville! Il était temps,” said he, and dismounting he ordered a plan of Moscow to be spread out before him, and summoned Lelorgne d’Ideville, the interpreter.

Meanwhile Moscow was empty. There were still people in it, perhaps a fiftieth part of its former inhabitants had remained, but it was empty.

It was empty in the sense that a dying queenless hive is empty.

In a queenless hive no life is left though to a superficial glance it seems as much alive as other hives.

Meanwhile Moscow was empty. There were still people in it, perhaps a fiftieth part of its former inhabitants had remained, but it was empty. It was empty in the sense that a dying queenless hive is empty.

In a queenless hive no life is left though to a superficial glance it seems as much alive as other hives.

The bees circle round a queenless hive in the hot beams of the midday sun as gaily as around the living hives; from a distance it smells of honey like the others, and bees fly in and out in the same way.

He did not drive into the town, but put up at an inn in the Dorogomílov suburb.

The coup de théâtre had not come off.

“To preserve the tranquillity of the city,” explains Count Rostopchín. “Why were bundles of useless papers from the government offices, and Leppich’s balloon and other articles removed?” “To leave the town empty,” explains Count Rostopchín.

One need only admit that public tranquillity is in danger and any action finds a justification.

All the horrors of the reign of terror were based only on solicitude for public tranquillity.

“Why were bundles of useless papers from the government offices, and Leppich’s balloon and other articles removed?” “To leave the town empty,” explains Count Rostopchín. One need only admit that public tranquillity is in danger and any action finds a justification.

All the horrors of the reign of terror were based only on solicitude for public tranquillity.

On what, then, was Count Rostopchín’s fear for the tranquillity of Moscow based in 1812? What reason was there for assuming any probability of an uprising in the city? The inhabitants were leaving it and the retreating troops were filling it.

The inhabitants left against his wishes. If the government offices were removed, this was only done on the demand of officials to whom the count yielded reluctantly. He was absorbed in the role he had created for himself.

As is often the case with those gifted with an ardent imagination, though he had long known that Moscow would be abandoned he knew it only with his intellect, he did not believe it in his heart and did not adapt himself mentally to this new position of affairs.

All his painstaking and energetic activity (in how far it was useful and had any effect on the people is another question) had been simply directed toward arousing in the masses his own feeling of patriotic hatred of the French.

“My commands? Let them go away, that’s all. … And let the lunatics out into the town.

When lunatics command our armies God evidently means these other madmen to be free.

”

But as soon as a storm arises and the sea begins to heave and the ship to move, such a delusion is no longer possible.

The ship moves independently with its own enormous motion, the boat hook no longer reaches the moving vessel, and suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man.

Rostopchín felt this, and it was this which exasperated him.

But after the exclamation of surprise that had escaped from Vereshchágin he uttered a plaintive cry of pain, and that cry was fatal. The barrier of human feeling, strained to the utmost, that had held the crowd in check suddenly broke.

The crime had begun and must now be completed.

The plaintive moan of reproach was drowned by the threatening and angry roar of the crowd.

The thought which tranquillized Rostopchín was not a new one.

Since the world began and men have killed one another no one has ever committed such a crime against his fellow man without comforting himself with this same idea.

This idea is le bien public, the hypothetical welfare of other people.

Since the world began and men have killed one another no one has ever committed such a crime against his fellow man without comforting himself with this same idea. This idea is le bien public, the hypothetical welfare of other people.

To a man not swayed by passion that welfare is never certain, but he who commits such a crime always knows just where that welfare lies.

And Rostopchín now knew it.

Moscow was burned because it found itself in a position in which any town built of wood was bound to burn, quite apart from whether it had, or had not, a hundred and thirty inferior fire engines.

Deserted Moscow had to burn as inevitably as a heap of shavings has to burn on which sparks continually fall for several days.

A town built of wood, where scarcely a day passes without conflagrations when the house owners are in residence and a police force is present, cannot help burning when its inhabitants have left it and it is occupied by soldiers who smoke pipes, make campfires …

At the gate stood Gerásim, the cook, and two Frenchmen. Their laughter and their mutually incomprehensible remarks in two languages could be heard. They were looking at the glow seen in the town.

There was nothing terrible in the one small, distant fire in the immense city.

Gazing at the high starry sky, at the moon, at the comet, and at the glow from the fire, Pierre experienced a joyful emotion. “There now, how good it is, what more does one need?” thought he.

Soon after that Natásha heard her mother’s even breathing. Natásha did not move, though her little bare foot, thrust out from under the quilt, was growing cold on the bare floor.

As if to celebrate a victory over everybody, a cricket chirped in a crack in the wall.

A cock crowed far off and another replied nearby. The shouting in the tavern had died down; only the moaning of the adjutant was heard. Natásha sat up.

The boards of the floor creaked. Stepping cautiously from one foot to the other she ran like a kitten the few steps to the door and grasped the cold door handle.

It seemed to her that something heavy was beating rhythmically against all the walls of the room: it was her own heart, sinking with alarm and terror and overflowing with love.

She opened the door and stepped across the threshold and onto the cold, damp earthen floor of the passage. The cold she felt refreshed her.

“Yes—love,” he thought again quite clearly. “But not love which loves for something, for some quality, for some purpose, or for some reason, but the love which I—while dying—first experienced when I saw my enemy and yet loved him.

I experienced that feeling of love which is the very essence of the soul and does not require an object.

Now again I feel that bliss. To love one’s neighbors, to love one’s enemies, to love everything, to love God in all His manifestations.

I experienced that feeling of love which is the very essence of the soul and does not require an object. Now again I feel that bliss.

To love one’s neighbors, to love one’s enemies, to love everything, to love God in all His manifestations.

It is possible to love someone dear to you with human love, but an enemy can only be loved by divine love. That is why I experienced such joy when I felt that I loved that man. What has become of him? Is he alive?

“

When loving with human love one may pass from love to hatred, but divine love cannot change.

No, neither death nor anything else can destroy it. It is the very essence of the soul. Yet how many people have I hated in my life? And of them all, I loved and hated none as I did her.”

“The path to Warsaw, perhaps,” Prince Ippolit remarked loudly and unexpectedly. Everybody looked at him, understanding what he meant. Prince Ippolit himself glanced around with amused surprise. He knew no more than the others what his words meant.

During his diplomatic career he had more than once noticed that such utterances were received as very witty, and at every opportunity he uttered in that way the first words that entered his head.

“It may turn out very well,” he thought, “but if not, they’ll know how to arrange matters.”

In historic events the rule forbidding us to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is specially applicable.

Only unconscious action bears fruit, and he who plays a part in an historic event never understands its significance.

If he tries to realize it his efforts are fruitless.

Only unconscious action bears fruit, and he who plays a part in an historic event never understands its significance. If he tries to realize it his efforts are fruitless.

The more closely a man was engaged in the events then taking place in Russia the less did he realize their significance.

In Petersburg and in the provinces at a distance from Moscow, ladies, and gentlemen in militia uniforms, wept for Russia and its ancient capital and talked of self-sacrifice and so on;

From the moment she recognized that dear, loved face, a new life force took possession of her and compelled her to speak and act apart from her own will. From the time Rostóv entered, her face became suddenly transformed.

It was as if a light had been kindled in a carved and painted lantern and the intricate, skillful, artistic work on its sides, that previously seemed dark, coarse, and meaningless, was suddenly shown up in unexpected and striking beauty.

For the first time all that pure, spiritual, inward travail through which she had lived appeared on the surface.

… Sónya, and that was all clear and simple just because it had all been thought out and he knew all there was in Sónya, but it was impossible to picture a future with Princess Márya, because he did not understand her but simply loved her.

Reveries about Sónya had had something merry and playful in them, but to dream of Princess Márya was always difficult and a little frightening.

“How she prayed!” he thought. “It was plain that her whole soul was in her prayer. Yes, that was the prayer that moves mountains, and I am sure her prayer will be answered. Why don’t I pray for what I want?” he suddenly thought.

… name,” and under that appellation, which to Pierre seemed terrible, they were now leading him somewhere with unhesitating assurance on their faces that he and all the other prisoners were exactly the ones they wanted and that they were being taken to the proper place.

Pierre felt himself to be an insignificant chip fallen among the wheels of a machine whose action he did not understand but which was working well.

He and the other prisoners were taken to the right side of the Virgin’s Field, to a large white house with an immense garden not far from the convent.

“

Where there’s law there’s injustice

,” put in the little man.

and you, young woman, you bow down too; and you, grandchildren, also bow down before him! Do you understand?’ he says. That’s how it is, dear fellow. Fate looks for a head. But we are always judging, ‘that’s not well—that’s not right!’

Our luck is like water in a dragnet: you pull at it and it bulges, but when you’ve drawn it out it’s empty!

That’s how it is.”

Lord Jesus Christ, holy Saint Nikoláy, Frola and Lavra! Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on us and save us!” he concluded, then bowed to the ground, got up, sighed, and sat down again on his heap of straw. “That’s the way.

Lay me down like a stone, O God, and raise me up like a loaf,

” he muttered as he lay down, pulling his coat over him.

But his life, as he regarded it, had no meaning as a separate thing. It had meaning only as part of a whole of which he was always conscious.

His words and actions flowed from him as evenly, inevitably, and spontaneously as fragrance exhales from a flower.

He could not understand the value or significance of any word or deed taken separately.

“How are you, Márya? How did you manage to get here?” said he in a voice as calm and aloof as his look.

Had he screamed in agony, that scream would not have struck such horror into Princess Márya’s heart as the tone of his voice.

“And have you brought Nikolúshka?” he asked in the same slow, quiet manner and with an obvious effort to remember.

“

Love hinders death. Love is life.

All, everything that I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only because I love. Everything is united by it alone.

Man’s mind cannot grasp the causes of events in their completeness, but the desire to find those causes is implanted in man’s soul.

And without considering the multiplicity and complexity of the conditions any one of which taken separately may seem to be the cause, he snatches at the first approximation to a cause that seems to him intelligible and says: “This is the cause!”

“The First Column will march here and here,” “the Second Column will march there and there,” and so on; and on paper, all these columns arrived at their places at the appointed time and destroyed the enemy.

Everything had been admirably thought out as is usual in dispositions, and as is always the case, not a single column reached its place at the appointed time.

When the necessary number of copies of the dispositions had been prepared, an officer was summoned and sent to deliver them to Ermólov to deal with.

“The Grand Marshal of the palace,” wrote the governor, “complains bitterly that in spite of repeated orders, the soldiers continue to commit nuisances in all the courtyards and even under the very windows of the Emperor.”

That army, like a herd of cattle run wild and trampling underfoot the provender which might have saved it from starvation, disintegrated and perished with each additional day it remained in Moscow. But it did not go away.

It began to run away only when suddenly seized by a panic caused by the capture of transport trains on the Smolénsk road, and by the battle of Tarútino.

“

A promise is own brother to performance!

I said Friday and here it is, ready,” said Platón, smiling and unfolding the shirt he had sewn.

The women’s vehicles drove by. Behind them came more carts, soldiers, wagons, soldiers, gun carriages, carriages, soldiers, ammunition carts, more soldiers, and now and then women.

Pierre did not see the people as individuals but saw their movement.

All these people and horses seemed driven forward by some invisible power. During the hour Pierre watched them they all came flowing from the different streets with one and the same desire to get on quickly;

Forests and fields beyond the camp, unseen before, were now visible in the distance. And farther still, beyond those forests and fields, the bright, oscillating, limitless distance lured one to itself. Pierre glanced up at the sky and the twinkling stars in its faraway depths.

“And all that is me, all that is within me, and it is all I!” thought Pierre. “And they caught all that and put it into a shed boarded up with planks!”

He smiled, and went and lay down to sleep beside his companions.

and we are told of many geniuses and heroes of that period of the campaign, but of Dokhtúrov nothing or very little is said and that dubiously.

And this silence about Dokhtúrov is the clearest testimony to his merit.

It is natural for a man who does not understand the workings of a machine to imagine that a shaving that has fallen into it by chance and is interfering with its action and tossing about in it is its most important part.

and we are told of many geniuses and heroes of that period of the campaign, but of Dokhtúrov nothing or very little is said and that dubiously. And this silence about Dokhtúrov is the clearest testimony to his merit.

It is natural for a man who does not understand the workings of a machine to imagine that a shaving that has fallen into it by chance and is interfering with its action and tossing about in it is its most important part.

The man who does not understand the construction of the machine cannot conceive that the small connecting cogwheel which revolves quietly is one of the most essential parts of the machine, and not the shaving which merely harms and hinders the working.

“They must understand that we can only lose by taking the offensive. Patience and time are my warriors, my champions,” thought Kutúzov.

He knew that an apple should not be plucked while it is green.

It will fall of itself when ripe, but if picked unripe the apple is spoiled, the tree is harmed, and your teeth are set on edge.

“They must understand that we can only lose by taking the offensive. Patience and time are my warriors, my champions,” thought Kutúzov. He knew that an apple should not be plucked while it is green.

It will fall of itself when ripe, but if picked unripe the apple is spoiled, the tree is harmed, and your teeth are set on edge.

Like an experienced sportsman he knew that the beast was wounded, and wounded as only the whole strength of Russia could have wounded it, but whether it was mortally wounded or not was still an undecided question.

A man in motion always devises an aim for that motion.

To be able to go a thousand miles he must imagine that something good awaits him at the end of those thousand miles. One must have the prospect of a promised land to have the strength to move.

A man in motion always devises an aim for that motion. To be able to go a thousand miles he must imagine that something good awaits him at the end of those thousand miles.

One must have the prospect of a promised land to have the strength to move.

The promised land for the French during their advance had been Moscow, during their retreat it was their native land.

Beyond a certain limit no mechanical disruption of the body could hasten the process of decomposition.

A lump of snow cannot be melted instantaneously.

There is a certain limit of time in less than which no amount of heat can melt the snow. On the contrary the greater the heat the more solidified the remaining snow becomes.

… to fight and face danger felt by all the men composing an army, quite independently of whether they are, or are not, fighting under the command of a genius, in two- or three-line formation, with cudgels or with rifles that repeat thirty times a minute.

Men who want to fight will always put themselves in the most advantageous conditions for fighting.

The spirit of an army is the factor which multiplied by the mass gives the resulting force. To define and express the significance of this unknown factor—the spirit of an army—is a problem for science.

Nothing Pétya could have seen now would have surprised him.

He was in a fairy kingdom where everything was possible.

He looked up at the sky. And the sky was a fairy realm like the earth. It was clearing, and over the tops of the trees clouds were swiftly sailing as if unveiling the stars.

However, he did not look at them now, but thought of other things.

Only now did Pierre realize the full strength of life in man and the saving power he has of transferring his attention from one thing to another, which is like the safety valve of a boiler that allows superfluous steam to blow off when the pressure exceeds a certain limit.

He did not see and did not hear how they shot the prisoners who lagged behind, though more than a hundred perished in that way. He did not think of Karatáev who grew weaker every day and evidently would soon have to share that fate.

“How am I?

If we grumble at sickness, God won’t grant us death

,” replied Platón, and at once resumed the story he had begun.

“

Life is everything. Life is God.

Everything changes and moves and that movement is God. And while there is life there is joy in consciousness of the divine. To love life is to love God.

“Life is everything. Life is God. Everything changes and moves and that movement is God. And while there is life there is joy in consciousness of the divine. To love life is to love God.

Harder and more blessed than all else is to love this life in one’s sufferings, in innocent sufferings.

”

“C’est grand!” say the historians, and there no longer exists either good or evil but only “grand” and “not grand.”

Grand is good, not grand is bad.

Grand is the characteristic, in their conception, of some special animals called “heroes.”

“Du sublime (he saw something sublime in himself) au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas,” said he. And the whole world for fifty years has been repeating: “Sublime! Grand! Napoléon le Grand!” Du sublime au ridicule il n’y a qu’un pas.

And it occurs to no one that to admit a greatness not commensurable with the standard of right and wrong is merely to admit one’s own nothingness and immeasurable meanness.

For us with the standard of good and evil given us by Christ, no human actions are incommensurable. And there is no greatness where simplicity, goodness, and truth are absent.

For us with the standard of good and evil given us by Christ, no human actions are incommensurable.

And there is no greatness where simplicity, goodness, and truth are absent.

… when our own army had melted away to half before reaching Krásnoe and a whole division would have been needed to convoy the corps of prisoners, and when our men were not always getting full rations and the prisoners already taken were perishing of hunger.

All the profound plans about cutting off and capturing Napoleon and his army were like the plan of a market gardener who, when driving out of his garden a cow that had trampled down the beds he had planted, should run to the gate and hit the cow on the head.

The only thing to be said in excuse of that gardener would be that he was very angry. But not even that could be said for those who drew up this project, for it was not they who had suffered from the trampled beds.

… cut off an army—to bar its road—is quite impossible, for there is always plenty of room to avoid capture and there is the night when nothing can be seen, as the military scientists might convince themselves by the example of Krásnoe and of the Berëzina.

It is only possible to capture prisoners if they agree to be captured, just as it is only possible to catch a swallow if it settles on one’s hand.

Men can only be taken prisoners if they surrender according to the rules of strategy and tactics, as the Germans did.

Thirdly it was impossible, because the military term “to cut off” has no meaning.

One can cut off a slice of bread, but not an army.

To cut off an army—to bar its road—is quite impossible, for there is always plenty of room to avoid capture and there is the night when nothing can be seen, as the military scientists might convince themselves by the example of Krásnoe and of the …

Secondly it was attained by the guerrilla warfare which was destroying the French, and thirdly by the fact that a large Russian army was following the French, ready to use its strength in case their movement stopped.

The Russian army had to act like a whip to a running animal.

And the experienced driver knew it was better to hold the whip raised as a menace than to strike the running animal on the head.

Continued abstention from speech, and constant avoidance of everything that might lead up to the subject—this halting on all sides at the boundary of what they might not mention—brought before their minds with still greater purity and clearness what they were both feeling.

But pure and complete sorrow is as impossible as pure and complete joy.

Princess Márya, in her position as absolute and independent arbiter of her own fate and guardian and instructor of her nephew, was the first to be called back to life from that realm of sorrow in which she had dwelt for the first fortnight.

Alpátych came to Yaroslávl with reports on the state of their affairs and with advice and suggestions that they should return to Moscow to the house on the Vozdvízhenka Street, which had remained uninjured and needed only slight repairs.

Life did not stand still and it was necessary to live.

Hard as it was for Princess Márya to emerge from the realm of secluded contemplation in which she had lived till then, and sorry and almost ashamed as she felt to leave Natásha alone, yet the cares of life demanded her attention and she involuntarily …

Natásha’s wound healed in that way. She thought her life was ended, but her love for her mother unexpectedly showed her that the essence of life—love—was still active within her.

Love awoke and so did life.

Prince Andréy’s last days had bound Princess Márya and Natásha together; this new sorrow brought them still closer to one another. Princess Márya put off her departure, and for three weeks looked after Natásha as if she had been a sick child.

… of slime that covered her soul and seemed to her impenetrable, delicate young shoots of grass were already sprouting, which taking root would so cover with their living verdure the grief that weighed her down that it would soon no longer be seen or noticed.

The wound had begun to heal from within.

At the end of January Princess Márya left for Moscow, and the count insisted on Natásha’s going with her to consult the doctors.

Such is the fate not of great men (grands hommes) whom the Russian mind does not acknowledge, but of those rare and always solitary individuals who, discerning the will of Providence, submit their personal will to it.

The hatred and contempt of the crowd punish such men for discerning the higher laws.

For Russian historians, strange and terrible to say, Napoleon—that most insignificant tool of history who never anywhere, even in exile, showed human dignity—Napoleon is the object of adulation and enthusiasm; he is grand.

That simple, modest, and therefore truly great, figure could not be cast in the false mold of a European hero—the supposed ruler of men—that history has invented.

To a lackey no man can be great, for a lackey has his own conception of greatness.

“Worse off than our poorest beggars. While they were strong we didn’t spare ourselves, but now we may even pity them.

They are human beings too.

Isn’t it so, lads?”

“

But after all who asked them here? Serves them right, the bloody bastards!

” he cried, suddenly lifting his head.

“They are men too,” said one of them as he wrapped himself up in his coat. “

Even wormwood grows on its own root.

”

They all grew silent.

The stars, as if knowing that no one was looking at them, began to disport themselves in the dark sky: now flaring up, now vanishing, now trembling, they were busy whispering something gladsome and mysterious to one another.

And by old habit he asked himself the question: “Well, and what then? What am I going to do?” And he immediately gave himself the answer: “

Well, I shall live. Ah, how splendid!

”

that God is here and everywhere. In his captivity he had learned that in Karatáev God was greater, more infinite and unfathomable than in the Architect of the Universe recognized by the Freemasons.

He felt like a man who after straining his eyes to see into the far distance finds what he sought at his very feet.

All his life he had looked over the heads of the men around him, when he should have merely looked in front of him without straining his eyes.

He felt like a man who after straining his eyes to see into the far distance finds what he sought at his very feet.

All his life he had looked over the heads of the men around him, when he should have merely looked in front of him without straining his eyes.

In the past he had never been able to find that great inscrutable infinite something. He had only felt that it must exist somewhere and had looked for it. In everything near and comprehensible he had seen only what was limited, petty, commonplace, and senseless.

“Yes, of course that’s true,” said Pierre with a cheerful smile. “

I don’t need all that at all. By being ruined I have become much richer.

”

“They even tell me wonders I myself never dreamed of! Márya Abrámovna invited me to her house and kept telling me what had happened, or ought to have happened, to me. Stepán Stepánych also instructed me how I ought to tell of my experiences.

In general I have noticed that it is very easy to be an interesting man (I am an interesting man now); people invite me out and tell me all about myself.

”

We were not an exemplary couple,” he added quickly, glancing at Natásha and noticing on her face curiosity as to how he would speak of his wife, “but her death shocked me terribly.

When two people quarrel they are always both in fault, and one’s own guilt suddenly becomes terribly serious when the other is no longer alive.

And then such a death … without friends and without consolation! I am very, very sorry for her,” he concluded, and was pleased to notice a look of glad approval on Natásha’s face.

“People speak of misfortunes and sufferings,” remarked Pierre, “but if at this moment I were asked: ‘Would you rather be what you were before you were taken prisoner, or go through all this again?’ then for heaven’s sake let me again have captivity and horseflesh!

We imagine that when we are thrown out of our usual ruts all is lost, but it is only then that what is new and good begins. While there is life there is happiness.

There is much, much before us. I say this to you,” he added, turning to Natásha.

“Well, good night,” said Natásha.

And the same mischievous smile lingered for a long time on her face as if it had been forgotten there.

On the contrary I was then wiser and had more insight than at any other time, and understood all that is worth understanding in life, because … because I was happy.”

Pierre’s insanity consisted in not waiting, as he used to do, to discover personal attributes which he termed “good qualities” in people before loving them; his heart was now overflowing with love, and by loving people without cause he discovered indubitable causes for loving them.

… their accounts a reaction took place at that time in Russia also, and the chief culprit was Alexander I, the same man who according to them was the chief cause of the liberal movement at the commencement of his reign, being the savior of Russia.

There is no one in Russian literature now, from schoolboy essayist to learned historian, who does not throw his little stone at Alexander for things he did wrong at this period of his reign.

“He ought to have acted in this way and in that way. In this case he did well and in that case badly.

Their activity would not have existed: there would have been no life, there would have been nothing.

If we admit that human life can be ruled by reason, the possibility of life is destroyed.

But what is chance? What is genius?

The words chance and genius do not denote any really existing thing and therefore cannot be defined.

Those words only denote a certain stage of understanding of phenomena. I do not know why a certain event occurs; I think that I cannot know it; so I do not try to know it and I talk about chance.

I think that I cannot know it; so I do not try to know it and I talk about chance. I see a force producing effects beyond the scope of ordinary human agencies; I do not understand why this occurs and I talk of genius.

To a herd of rams, the ram the herdsman drives each evening into a special enclosure to feed and that becomes twice as fat as the others must seem to be a genius.

And it must appear an astonishing conjunction of genius with a whole series of extraordinary chances that this ram, who instead of getting into the general fold every evening goes into a special enclosure where there are oats—that this very ram, swelling with fat, is …

… which a year earlier might have ruined him, has reached its extreme limit, and his presence there now as a newcomer free from party entanglements can only serve to exalt him—and though he himself has no plan, he is quite ready for his new role.

He had no plan, he was afraid of everything, but the parties snatched at him and demanded his participation.

He alone—with his ideal of glory and grandeur developed in Italy and Egypt, his insane self-adulation, his boldness in crime and frankness in lying—he alone could justify what had to be done.

This man is still needed to justify the final collective act.

The last role is played. The actor is bidden to disrobe and wash off his powder and paint: he will not be wanted any more.

And some years pass during which he plays a pitiful comedy to himself in solitude on his island, justifying his actions by intrigues and lies when the justification is no longer needed, and displaying to the whole world what it was that people had mistaken …

The manager having brought the drama to a close and stripped the actor shows him to us.

“See what you believed in! This is he! Do you now see that it was not he but I who moved you?”

But dazed by the force of the movement, it was long before people understood this.

… is a sphere complete in itself, and yet at the same time only a part of a whole too immense for man to comprehend, so each individual has within himself his own aims and yet has them to serve a general purpose incomprehensible to man.

A bee settling on a flower has stung a child. And the child is afraid of bees and declares that bees exist to sting people.

A poet admires the bee sucking from the chalice of a flower and says it exists to suck the fragrance of flowers. A beekeeper, seeing the bee collect pollen from flowers and carry it to the hive, says that it exists to gather honey.

“Why, whatever is the matter, my dearest?”

The looks of the plain Countess Márya always improved when she was in tears.

She never cried from pain or vexation, but always from sorrow or pity, and when she wept her radiant eyes acquired an irresistible charm.

“Natásha, Natásha!” came Countess Márya’s frightened whisper from the door. “Papa wants to sleep.”

“No, Mamma, he doesn’t want to sleep,” said little Natásha with conviction. “He’s laughing.”

Nikoláy lowered his legs, rose, and took his daughter in his arms.

“Oh, how absurd you are!

It is not beauty that endears, it’s love that makes us see beauty.

It is only Malvina and women of that kind who are loved for their beauty. But do I love my wife? I don’t love her, but … I don’t know how to put it.

But do I love my wife? I don’t love her, but … I don’t know how to put it. Without you, or when something comes between us like this, I seem lost and can’t do anything.

Now do I love my finger? I don’t love it, but just try to cut it off!

”

The chief reason for devoting no time either to singing, to dress, or to choosing her words was that she really had no time to spare for these things.

We know that man has the faculty of becoming completely absorbed in a subject however trivial it may be, and that there is no subject so trivial that it will not grow to infinite proportions if one’s entire attention is devoted to it.

The subject which wholly engrossed Natásha’s attention was her family:

… dispute, but long afterwards Pierre to his surprise and delight would find in his wife’s ideas and actions the very thought against which she had argued, but divested of everything superfluous that in the excitement of the dispute he had added when expressing his opinion.

After seven years of marriage Pierre had the joyous and firm consciousness that he was not a bad man, and he felt this because he saw himself reflected in his wife.

He felt the good and bad within himself inextricably mingled and overlapping. But only what was really good in him was reflected in his wife, all that was not quite good was rejected.