War and Peace

by Leo Tolstoy

Prince Vassily did not think out his plans. Still less did he think of doing people harm in order to profit from it. He was simply a man of the world, who succeeded in the world and made a habit of that success.

Pierre, on unexpectedly becoming a rich man and Count Bezukhov, felt himself, after his recent solitary and carefree life, so surrounded, so taken up, that it was only in bed that he managed to remain alone with himself. He had to sign papers, communicate with government offices of whose significance he had no clear notion, ask his chief steward about something, go to his estate near Moscow, and receive a host of persons who formerly did not even care to know of his existence, but who now would be hurt and chagrined if he did not wish to see them. All these various persons—business connections, relations, acquaintances—were equally well and benignly disposed towards the young heir; they were all obviously and indubitably convinced of Pierre’s high merits. He so constantly heard the words: “With your extraordinary kindness,” or “With your excellent heart,” or “You yourself, Count, are so pure …,” or “If he were as intelligent as you are,” and so on, that he was sincerely beginning to believe in his extraordinary kindness and his extraordinary intelligence, the more so because, deep in his heart, it had always seemed to him that he really was very kind and very intelligent.

Rostov was a truthful young man, not for anything would he have deliberately told an untruth. He began telling the story with the intention of telling it exactly as it had been, but imperceptibly, involuntarily, and inevitably for himself, he went over into untruth.

To tell the truth is very difficult, and young men are rarely capable of it.

Every general and soldier sensed his own nullity, aware of being a grain of sand in this sea of people, and at the same time sensed his strength, aware of being part of this enormous whole.

Prince Andrei answers himself, “I don’t know what will happen then, I don’t want to know and I can’t know; but if I want this, want glory, want to be known to people, want to be loved by them, it’s not my fault that I want it, that it’s the only thing I want, the only thing I live for. Yes, the only thing! I’ll never tell it to anyone, but my God! what am I to do if I love nothing except glory, except people’s love? Death, wounds, loss of family, nothing frightens me. And however near and dear many people are to me—my father, my sister, my wife—the dearest people to me—but, however terrible and unnatural it seems, I’d give them all now for a moment of glory, of triumph over people, for love from people I don’t know and will never know, for the love of these people here,” he thought, listening to the talk in Kutuzov’s yard.

“And still the only thing I love and cherish is triumph over all of them, I cherish that mysterious power and glory hovering over me here in this mist!”

“No, to kill a man is bad, it’s wrong …” “Why is it wrong?” Prince Andrei repeated. “It’s not given to people to judge what’s right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more so than in what they consider right and wrong.”

There was not all that disorder of the free world, in which he found no place for himself and made wrong choices; there was no Sonya, with whom he had or did not have to talk things over. There was no possibility of going or not going here or there; there were not those twenty-four hours in a day which could be spent in so many different ways; there was no numberless multitude of people, of whom no one was close, no one was distant; there were none of those unclear and undefined money relations with his father; there was no recollection of that terrible loss to Dolokhov! Here in the regiment everything was clear and simple.

“We’re not diplomatic officials, we’re soldiers and nothing more,” he went on. “We’re told to die—and we die. If we’re punished, it means we’re guilty; it’s not for us to judge. If it pleases the sovereign emperor to recognize Bonaparte as emperor and conclude an alliance with him—it means it has to be so. And if we start judging and reasoning about everything, then there’ll be nothing sacred left. Next we’ll be saying there’s no God, no anything,” shouted Nikolai, banging the table, quite inappropriately in his interlocutors’ opinion, but quite in keeping with his own train of thought. “Our business is to do our duty, to cut and slash, not to think, that’s all,” he concluded.

Prince Andrei considered such a vast number of people as contemptible and insignificant beings, he wanted so much to find in someone else the living ideal of that perfection for which he strove, that he easily believed that in Speransky he had found that ideal of the fully reasonable and virtuous man. If Speransky had been from the same society as Prince Andrei, of the same upbringing and moral habits, Bolkonsky would soon have found his weak, human, unheroic sides, but as it was, this logical way of thinking, which was strange for him, inspired him with all the more respect because he did not quite understand him. Besides that, Speransky, either because he appreciated Prince Andrei’s ability, or because he found it necessary to acquire him for himself, flaunted his impartial, calm reason before Prince Andrei and flattered Prince Andrei with that subtle flattery, combined with self-assurance, which consists in silently acknowledging one’s interlocutor and oneself as the only people capable of understanding all the stupidity of all the rest, and the intelligence and profundity of one’s own thoughts.

All the brothers, the members of the lodges, were people whom Pierre knew in life, and it was difficult for him to see in them only brothers in Freemasonry, and not Prince B., not Ivan Vassilievich D., whom he knew in life mainly as weak and insignificant people. Under the Masonic aprons and signs, he saw on them the uniforms and decorations they strove for in life. Often, collecting alms and counting up twenty or thirty roubles, written down as receipts and for the most part left owing, from ten members, half of whom were as rich as he was, Pierre remembered the Masonic vow in which each brother promised to give all his possessions to his neighbor, and doubts arose in his soul which he tried not to dwell on. He divided all the brothers he knew into four categories. In the first category he included brothers who took no active part either in the affairs of the lodges or in the affairs of the people, but were taken up exclusively with the mysteries of the order’s science, with questions of the triple name of God or of the three basic elements of things—sulfur, mercury, and salt, or with the meaning of the square and all the figures on Solomon’s temple.10 Pierre respected this category of brother Masons, to which mainly the old brothers and Iosif Alexeevich himself belonged, in Pierre’s opinion, but he did not share their interests. His heart was not inclined to the mystical side of Masonry. In the second category Pierre included himself and similar brothers, seeking, vacill...

Pierre was struck for the first time at this meeting by the infinite diversity of human minds, which makes it so that no truth presents itself to two people in the same way. Even those members who seemed to be on his side understood him in their own fashion, with limitations and alterations which Pierre could not agree to, since his main need consisted precisely in conveying his thought to others exactly as he understood it himself.

To be received in the countess Bezukhov’s salon was considered a diploma in intelligence; young men read books before Hélène’s soirées so as to have something to talk about in her salon, and embassy secretaries, and even ambassadors, confided diplomatic secrets to her, so that Hélène was a power in a certain sense. Pierre, who knew that she was very stupid, sometimes, with a strange feeling of perplexity and fear, attended her soirées and dinners, where politics, poetry, and philosophy were discussed. At these soirées, he experienced a feeling similar to what a conjurer experiences, expecting each time that his trick will be exposed. But either because stupidity was precisely necessary for keeping such a salon, or because those who were tricked found pleasure in the trick itself, the trick was not exposed, and the reputation of Elena Vassilievna Bezukhov as une femme charmante et spirituelle was so firmly established that she could utter the greatest banalities and stupidities, and still they all admired her every word and sought for a deep meaning in them, which she herself never suspected.

Vera also smiled with a consciousness of her superiority over her virtuous, good husband, who all the same understood life wrongly, as, in Vera’s view, all men did. Berg, judging by his wife, considered all women weak and stupid. Vera, judging by her husband alone and extending the observation to everyone, supposed that all men ascribed reason only to themselves, and at the same time understood nothing, were proud and egoistic.

Prince Andrei, with a radiant, rapturous face, renewed towards life, stopped before Pierre and, not noticing his sad face, smiled at him with the egoism of happiness.

religion alone can explain to us that which man cannot understand without its help: wherefore, why kind and lofty beings, who know how to find happiness in life, who not only harm no one but are necessary for the happiness of others, are called to God, while the evil, the useless, the harmful, or such as are a burden to themselves and to others, are left to live.

Deeply feel that religion utterly FAILS to explain this

He had that common sense of mediocrity which told him what he ought to do.

he prayed with that passionate and guilty feeling with which people pray at moments of strong agitation arising from insignificant causes. “What would it cost You?” he said to God.

“Yes, maybe I do love a poor girl,” Nikolai said to himself, “and what, should I sacrifice my feeling and honor for money? I’m surprised that mama could say it to me. Because Sonya’s poor,” he thought, “does it mean I can’t love her, can’t respond to her faithful, devoted love? And I’d surely be happier with her than with some doll of a Julie. I can’t command my feelings,” he said to himself. “If I love Sonya, my feeling is stronger and higher than everything for me.” Nikolai did not go to Moscow, the countess did not renew the conversation about marriage with him, and saw with sadness, and sometimes with anger, the signs of a greater and greater intimacy between her son and the dowerless Sonya.

Litle shit

No one in the house ordered so many people around or gave them so much work as Natasha.

Little bitch

Drinking wine became more and more of a physical and at the same time moral need for him. Though the doctors told him that, with his corpulence, wine was dangerous for him, he drank a great deal. He felt perfectly well only when, without noticing how, having poured several glasses of wine into his large mouth, he experienced a pleasant warmth in his body, an affection towards all his neighbors, and a mental readiness to respond superficially to every thought, without going deeply into its essence.

relatable

At that time Julie, who, owing to the deaths of her brothers, had become one of the richest prospective brides in Moscow, was in the full whirl of society pleasures. She was surrounded by young men who, she thought, had suddenly come to appreciate her merits.

Anatole was always content with his position, with himself, and with others. He was instinctively convinced with his whole being that it was impossible for him to live otherwise than the way he lived, and that he had never in his life done anything bad. He was not capable of reflecting either on how his actions might affect others, or on what might come of one or another of his actions. He was convinced that, just as the duck was created so that it must always live in water, so he was created by God so that he must live on an income of thirty thousand and occupy a high position in society. He believed it so firmly that others, looking at him, were also convinced of it and refused him neither a high position in society, nor the money which he, obviously without paying it back, borrowed from anyone and everyone.

this archetype is tragically familiar.

And with that special partiality which dullwitted people have when they work out some conclusion for themselves, Anatole repeated the argument that he had repeated to Dolokhov a hundred times.

It was necessary that millions of men, in whose hands the actual power lay, the soldiers who shot, transported provisions and cannon—it was necessary that they agree to fulfill this will of isolated and weak men and be brought to that by a countless number of complex, diverse causes.

going up to him, began speaking at once, like a man who values every minute of his time and who does not condescend to prepare his speeches, but is certain that he will always speak well and say what needs to be said.

Napoleon was in that state of irritation in which a man has to talk and talk and talk, only so as to prove his rightness to himself.

Clearly it was Napoleon’s long-standing conviction that the possibility of mistakes did not exist for him, and to his mind everything he did was good, not because it agreed with any notion of what was good and bad, but because he did it.

self-confident to the point of despising everything.

A Frenchman is self-assured because he considers himself personally, in mind as well as body, irresistibly enchanting for men as well as women. An Englishman is self-assured on the grounds that he is a citizen of the best-organized state in the world, and therefore, as an Englishman, he always knows what he must do, and knows that everything he does as an Englishman is unquestionably good. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and others. A Russian is self-assured precisely because he does not know anything and does not want to know anything, because he does not believe it possible to know anything fully. A German is self-assured worst of all, and most firmly of all, and most disgustingly of all, because he imagines that he knows the truth, science, which he has invented himself, but which for him is the absolute truth.

A good commander not only does not need genius or any special qualities, but, on the contrary, he needs the absence of the best and highest human qualities—love, poetry, tenderness, a searching philosophical doubt. He should be limited, firmly convinced that what he is doing is very important (otherwise he would not have patience enough), and only then will he be a brave commander. God forbid he should be a human being and come to love or pity someone, or start thinking about what is just and what isn’t.

Take up Thine arms and shield, and arise to help us, so that those who contrive evil against us may be put to shame and disgrace, let them be before the face of Thy faithful army like dust before the face of the wind, and let Thy mighty angel discomfit them and drive them hence; let the net they know not of come upon them, let the trap concealed from them ensnare them; so that they fall under the feet of Thy servants, and our warriors may trample upon them.

“Lord our God, in whom we believe and place our trust, disgrace us not in our hope of Thy mercy and make a sign for the good, so that those who hate us and our Orthodox faith may be put to shame and perish; and let all nations know that Thy name is the Lord and we are Thy people.

And all the countless persons who participated in this war acted in just the same way, as a result of their personal qualities, habits, conditions, and aims. They feared, boasted, rejoiced, resented, reasoned, supposing that they knew what they were doing and that they were doing it for themselves, and yet they were all involuntary instruments of history, and performed work hidden from them but comprehensible to us. Such is the inevitable fate of all men of action, and the higher they stand in the human hierarchy, the less free they are.

good player who loses at chess is genuinely convinced that he has lost because of a mistake, and he looks for this mistake in the beginning of his game, but forgets that there were also mistakes at every step in the course of the game, that none of his moves was perfect. The mistake he pays attention to is conspicuous only because his opponent took advantage of it. How much more complex is the game of war, which takes place in certain conditions of time and where no single will is guiding lifeless mechanisms, but everything is the result of numberless collisions of various wills?

The aim of war is killing, the instruments of war are espionage, treason and the encouragement of it, the ruin of the inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to supply the army; deception and lying are called military stratagems; the morals of the military estate are absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, depravity, and drunkenness.

And it was not Napoleon who ordained the course of the battle, because nothing of his disposition was carried out and during the battle he did not know what was happening in front of him. Which meant also that the way these people were killing each other occurred not by the will of Napoleon, but went on independently of him, by the will of the hundreds of thousands of people who took part in the common action. To Napoleon it only seemed that the whole thing happened by his will. And therefore the question whether Napoleon had or did not have a cold is of no greater interest to history than the question of the last convoy soldier having a cold.

Pierre had no notion that this place surrounded by small trenches, where a few cannon stood firing, was the most important place in the battle. On the contrary, it seemed to Pierre that this place (precisely because he was there) was one of the most insignificant places of the battle. Having come up onto the barrow, Pierre sat down at the end of a trench that surrounded the battery and with an unconsciously joyful smile looked at what was happening around him. Now and then Pierre, with the same smile, got up and, trying not to bother the soldiers who were loading and rolling the guns, and who constantly ran past him with sacks and charges, strolled around the battery.

To study the laws of history, we must change completely the object of observation, leave kings, ministers, and generals alone, and study the uniform, infinitesimal elements that govern the masses.

To her mind, the meaning of any religion consisted only in observing certain decencies while satisfying human desires.

As long as the world has existed and people have been killing each other, no one man has ever committed a crime upon his own kind without calming himself with this same thought. This thought was le bien publique, the supposed good of other people.

Two equally strong feelings drew Pierre irresistibly to his intention. The first was the feeling of the need for sacrifice and suffering in the awareness of the general calamity, that feeling on account of which he had gone to Mozhaisk on the twenty-fifth and ended up in the very heat of battle, and had now run away from his home and, instead of the habitual luxury and comforts of life, slept on a hard couch without undressing, and ate the same food as Gerasim; the other was that vague, exclusively Russian feeling of disdain for everything conventional, artificial, human, for everything that most people consider the highest good in the world.

Intetion to off Napoleon

In historical events what is most obvious is the prohibition against eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Only unconscious activity bears fruit, and a man who plays a role in a historical event never understands its significance. If he attempts to understand it, he is struck with fruitlessness.

To sacrifice herself for others was Sonya’s habit. Her position in the house was such that it was only on the path of sacrifice that she could show her worth, and she was accustomed to sacrificing herself and loved it. But formerly, in all her acts of self-sacrifice, she had been joyfully aware that in sacrificing herself she thereby raised her value in her own and other people’s eyes, and became more worthy of Nicolas, whom she loved more than anything in her life; but now her sacrifice was to consist in renouncing that which for her made up the whole reward for her sacrifice, the whole meaning of her life. And for the first time in her life she felt bitter towards the people who had been her benefactors only so as to torment her the more; she felt envy of Natasha, who had never experienced anything like that, who had never needed to sacrifice herself, but made others sacrifice themselves for her, and was loved even so.

She knew that Natasha loved only Prince Andrei and had never ceased loving him. She knew that now, being brought together in such terrible conditions, they would love each other again, and that then, because of the family relations between them, Nikolai would be unable to marry Princess Marya.

Wait, it's cool for sonya and Nicolas to marry as COUSINS but Natasha and Andrei getting back together would make a relationship between Nicolas and Marya improper?

The totality of causes of phenomena is inaccessible to the human mind. But the need to seek causes has been put into the soul of man. And the human mind, without grasping in their countlessness and complexity the conditions of phenomena, of which each separately may appear as a cause, takes hold of the first, most comprehensible approximation and says: here is the cause.

In historical events (where the subject of observation is the actions of people), the most primordial approximation appears as the will of the gods, then as the will of those people who stand in the most conspicuous historical place—the historical heroes. But we need only inquire into the essence of any historical event, that is, into the activity of the entire mass of people who took part in the event, to become convinced that the will of the historical hero not only does not guide the actions of the masses, but is itself constantly guided.

The plight of the whole army was like the plight of a wounded animal that feels itself perishing and does not know what it is doing. To study the skillful maneuvers and aims of Napoleon and his army from the moment of his entry into Moscow until the destruction of that army, is the same as studying the meaning of the dying leaps and convulsions of a mortally wounded animal. Very often a wounded animal, hearing a rustle, rushes towards the hunter’s shot, runs forward, then back, and hastens its own end. That was what Napoleon was doing under the pressure of his whole army. The rustle of the battle of Tarutino frightened the beast, and it rushed ahead towards the shot, ran as far as the hunter, turned back, then ahead, then back again, and finally, like any beast, ran back over its old, familiar tracks—that is, over the most disadvantageous and dangerous path for it.

Napoleon, whom we imagine as guiding this whole movement (as a savage imagines that the figure carved on the prow of a ship is the force that guides it), Napoleon, during all this time of his activity, was like a child who, holding the straps tied inside a carriage, fancies that he is driving it.