for personal reasons, which he called people’s merits, in order to love them, but love overflowed his heart, and, loving people without reason, he discovered the unquestionable reasons for which it was worth loving them.”
- Leo Tolstoy, from “War and Peace,” about Pierre’s way of being in the world when falling in love with Natasha
Tolstoy
"Prince Andrei, going back into the shed, lay down on the rug, but could not sleep.
He closed his eyes. One image succeeded another. He lingered long and joyfully over one of them. He vividly recalled one evening in Petersburg. Natasha was telling him with an animated, excited face how she had gone to pick mushrooms the previous summer and lost her way in a big forest. She incoherently described to him the dense forest and her feelings, and a talk with a beekeeper she met, and, interrupting herself every moment, said: ‘No, I can’t, I’m not telling it right; no, you don’t understand,’ even though Prince Andrei reassured her, saying that he did understand, and indeed he understood everything she wanted to say. Natasha was displeased with her own words; she sensed that she was not conveying the passionately poetic feeling which she had experienced that day and which she wanted to bring out. ‘He was so lovely, that old man, and it was so dark in the forest…and he had such a kind…No, I don’t know how to tell it,’ she said, flushed and excited. Prince Andrei now smiled the same joyful smile that he had smiled then, looking in her eyes. ‘I understood her,’ thought Prince Andrei.”
- Tolstoy, from “War and Peace”
"In the church there were always few people;
Natasha and Mrs. Belov would stand in their usual place before the icon of the Mother of God, built into the back of the left-hand choir, and a new feeling of humility would come over Natasha before the great, the unknowable, when at this unaccustomed hour of morning, looking at the blackened face of the Mother of God lit by candles and the light of the morning coming from the window, she listened to the words of the service, which she tried to follow and understand. When she understood them, her personal feeling, with its nuances, joined with her prayer; when she did not, the sweeter it was for her to think that the wish to understand everything was pride, that it was impossible to understand everything, that she only had to believe and give herself to God, who in those moments—she felt—was guiding her soul.”
- Leo Tolstoy, from “War and Peace”
Nikolushka and his upbringing, Andre, and religion
were Princess Marya’s comforts and joys; but, besides that, since every human being needs his personal hope, Princess Marya had in the deepest recesses of her soul a hidden dream and hope, which provided the main comfort of her life. This comforting dream and hope were given her by the people of God—the fools for Christ and wanderers who visited her in secret from the old prince. The longer Princess Marya lived, the more of life she experienced and observed, the more astonished she was at the shortsightedness of people who sought pleasure and happiness here on earth; who worked, suffered, struggled, and did evil to each other to achieve this impossible, illusory, and fallacious happiness. “Prince Andrei loved his wife, she dies, it’s not enough for him, he wants to bind up his happiness with another woman. Father doesn’t want it, because he wants a more aristocratic and wealthy marriage for Andrei. And they all struggle and suffer, and torment and ruin their souls, their eternal souls, to achieve blessings that last a moment. Not only do we know it ourselves—Christ, the Son of God, came down to earth and told us that this life is a momentary life, a trial, yet we keep holding on to it and hope to find happiness in it. How is it no one understands that?” thought Princess Marya. “No one except these contemptible people of God, who come to me at the back door with bags over their shoulders, afraid of being noticed by the prince, not because they would suffer from him, but so as not to lead him into sin. To leave family, birthplace, all cares for worldly goods, so as to walk, without clinging to anything, in coarse rags, under an assumed name, from place to place, without harming people, and praying for them, praying for those who persecute and for those who protect: there is no truth and life higher than this truth and life!”
There was one woman wanderer, Fedosyushka, a fifty-year-old, small, quiet, pockmarked woman, who had been walking barefoot and in chains for thirty years already. Princess Marya had a special love for her. Once, when in the dark room, by the light of the icon lamp, Fedosyushka was telling about her life, the thought that Fedosyushka alone had found the right way of life suddenly came to Princess Marya with such force that she herself decided to go wandering. When Fedosyushka went to bed, Princess Marya thought about it for a long time, and finally decided that, however strange it was, she had to become a wanderer. She confided her intention only to her father confessor, the monk Akinfy, and the monk approved of it. Under the pretext of a gift for the wanderers, Princess Marya provided herself with a full wanderer’s outfit: a shirt, bast shoes, a kaftan, and a black kerchief. Often, going to the secret chest, Princess Marya would pause, unable to decide whether the time had come to fulfill her intention.
Often, listening to the stories of the women wanderers, she would become excited by their simple talk, mechanical for them, but full of deep meaning for her, so that several times she had been ready to drop everything and flee the house. In her imagination, she already saw herself and Fedosyushka in coarse rags, walking with a stick and a bag down a dusty road, guiding her wandering without envy, without love of human things, without desires, from one holy place to another, and in the end to the place where there is no sorrow or sighing, but eternal joy and bliss.
“I’ll come to one place and pray; before I have time to get used to it and love it, I’ll go on. And I’ll keep going until my legs give out, and I lie down and die somewhere, and come finally to that eternal, quiet haven, where there is no sorrow or sighing!…” thought Princess Marya.
But then, seeing her father and especially little Coco, her intention would weaken, she would weep in quiet and feel she was a sinful woman: she loved her father and her nephew more than God.
- Tolstoy, from “War and Peace”
"Levin felt guilty but could do nothing.
He felt that if they both spoke without dissimulation and straight from the heart, they would only look into one another's eyes and Constantine would say nothing but, 'You will die! You will die!' and Nicholas would only say in reply: 'I know I shall die and I am afraid, afraid, afraid!' That was all they would say if only they spoke straight from the heart. But that would make life impossible; therefore Constantine tried to do what all his life he had tried and never known how to do (although he had often observed that many people were able to do it well), something without which life was impossible: he tried to say something different from what he thought; and he felt all the time that it sounded false and that his brother detected him and grew irritable."
- Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Part III / Chapter XXXII