war and peace

"...he did not wait, as before,

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

Prince Andrei at Borodino

“Prince Andrei opened his eyes and for a long time could not understand what was happening around him. He remembered the meadow, the wormwood, the field, the black, spinning ball, and his passionate fit of love for life. Two steps away from him, talking loudly and attracting general attention to himself, stood a tall, handsome, black-haired sergeant, leaning on a branch, his head bandaged. He had bullet wounds in his head and leg. Around him, listen eagerly to his talk, gathered a crowd of wounded and stretcher bearers.

‘We just pounded him out of there, he dropped everything, we caught the king himself!’ the soldier shouted, looking around him, his black, inflamed eyes glittering. ‘if only the reservers had come just then, brothers, he wouldn’t even have left his name behind, it’s the truth I’m telling you…’

Prince Andrei, like everyone else around the narrator, looked at him with shining eyes and experienced a comforting feeling. ‘But does it make any difference now?’ he thought. ‘And what will be there, and what has there been here?' Why was I so sorry to part with life? There was something in this life that I didn’t and still don’t understand…’”

- Leo Tolstoy, from “War and Peace”

"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”

"Having read to this point, he crumpled the letter and threw it down.

It was not what he read in the letter that made him angry; what made him angry was that the life there, now foreign to him, could excite him. He closed his eyes, rubbed his forehead with his hand, as if driving away all concern for what he had read, and began listening to what was happening in the nursery. Suddenly he seemed to hear some strange noise behind the door. Fear came over him; he was afraid something had happened to the baby while he was reading the letter. He tiptoed to the door of the nursery and opened it. The moment he went in, he saw that the nanny was hiding something from him with a frightened look, and that Princess Marya was no longer by the crib.

’My friend,’ he heard behind him what sounded like the desperate whisper of Princess Marya. As often happens after long sleeplessness and long anxiety, a groundless fear came over him: it occurred to him that the baby had died. Everything he saw and heard seemed to him to confirm his fear. ‘It's all over,’ he thought, and cold sweat broke out on his forehead. Bewildered, he went over to the crib, certain that he would find it empty, that the nanny was hiding the dead baby.

He opened the curtain, and for a time his frightened, unfocused eyes could not find the baby. At last he saw him: the red-cheeked boy lay sprawled across the crib, his head lower than the pillow, smacking and moving his lips in his sleep, and breathing regularly. Prince Andrei, on seeing the boy, was as glad as if he had already lost him. He bent down and, as his sister had taught him, tested with his lips whether the baby had a fever. The tender forehead was moist; he touched his head with his hand—even the hair was wet: the baby had sweated so much. Not only had he not died, but it was obvious now that the crisis was past and that he was getting well. Prince Andrei wanted to snatch up, to squeeze, to clutch to his heart this helpless little being; he did not dare to do it. He stood over him, gazed at his head, his arms, his legs outlined under the blanket. He heard a rustling beside him, and some shadow appeared under the canopy of the crib. He did not turn and, gazing at the baby's face, kept listening to his regular breathing. The dark shadow was Princess Marya, who had come over to the crib with inaudible steps, raised the canopy, and lowered it behind her. Prince Andrei recognized her without turning to look, and reached his hand towards her. She pressed his hand.

‘He's been sweating,’ said Prince Andrei.

‘I was coming to tell you that.’ The baby stirred slightly in his sleep, smiled, and rubbed his forehead against the pillow. Prince Andrei looked at his sister. Princess Marya's luminous eyes, in the dim halflight of the canopy, glistened more than usual from the happy tears that welled up in them. Princess Marya leaned towards her brother and kissed him, catching slightly in the canopy of the crib. They shook their fingers at each other and stood a little longer in the dim light of the canopy, as if reluctant to part with that world in which the three of them were separated from everything on earth.”

- Leo Tolstoy, from “War and Peace'“

" 'Annette, for God's sake, don't refuse me,' the countess said,

suddenly, blushing, which was quite strange with her thin, dignified, and no longer young face, and taking the money from under the handkerchief.
Anna Mikhailovna instantly realized what it was about and bent forward so as to embrace the countess adroitly at the right moment.
‘This is for Boris from me, to have his uniform made…’
Anna Mikhailovna was already embracing her and weeping. The countess was also weeping. They wept because they were friends; and because they were kind; and because they, who had been friends since childhood, were concerned with such a mean subject—money; and because their youth was gone….But for both of them they were pleasant tears…”

- Tolstoy, from “War and Peace”