War and Peace

by Leo Tolstoy

However convenient it may have been for the French to blame the ferocious Rostopchin, and for the Russians to blame that villain Napoleon, or at a later date to hand the heroic torch to their patriot peasantry, we cannot hide the fact that there could never be one single reason behind the fire, because Moscow was as certain to burn as any village, factory or house abandoned by its owners and taken over by strangers to live in and cook their porridge. Yes, it is true that Moscow was burnt by its inhabitants, but it was burnt by those who went away rather than those who stayed behind.

He had to stay on in Moscow, hide his identity, meet Napoleon and kill him.

It was the feeling that makes a volunteer-recruit spend his last farthing on drink, or a drunken man smash mirrors and windows for no good reason, even though he knows it will cost him what little he has; the feeling that impels a man to do things that the common mentality would write off as insane, in order to take the measure of his own independence and strength by maintaining the existence of a higher code transcending everyday experience by which human life is to be judged.

Everybody knew only too well that the lovely countess’s indisposition arose from the difficulties of marrying two husbands at the same time, and the Italian doctor’s cure amounted to getting rid of the difficulties.

And leaving the young man annihilated, Anna Pavlovna turned to Bilibin,

He had often noticed in his career as a diplomat that an off-the-cuff remark like that was considered very witty, so he had blurted out the first words that came into his head, just in case. ‘It might come out all right,’ he had thought, ‘and if it doesn’t they’ll know what to do with it.’

Countess Hélène Bezukhov had died quite suddenly of the dreadful illness which they had so much enjoyed chatting about.

Hélène, tormented by the old count’s suspicions and her husband’s failure to respond to her letter (that wretched profligate Pierre), had suddenly taken an overdose and died in agony before any help could be given.

‘But if it were ever to be written in the decrees of Divine Providence,’ he said, with his gentle, handsome eyes shining with emotion and raised towards heaven, ‘that my dynasty should cease to reign on the throne of my ancestors, then after exhausting every means in my power I shall grow my beard down to here’ (the Emperor placed his hand half-way down his chest) ‘and go and eat potatoes with the humblest of my peasants rather than underwrite the shame of my country and my dear people, whose sacrifice I fully appreciate.’

Yet in real life personal concerns of immediate relevance are so much more important than the general public interest that they prevent the public interest from ever being sensed, or even noticed.

But when he thought of Princess Marya and being engaged to her, which was what the matchmakers were after, he couldn’t form the vaguest outline of his future married life. If he so much as tried, it all seemed so false and incongruous. And it filled him with nothing but dread.

But with Princess Marya he couldn’t picture any future life, because he had no understanding of her; he just loved her.

The countess missed no opportunity for turning on Sonya with a cutting or humiliating remark.

Now, knowing that the rapprochement between Natasha and Prince Andrey meant that Nikolay wouldn’t be able to marry Princess Marya, she welcomed a resurgence of the self-sacrificing spirit she was used to, and liked to live by. She sat down with a gratifying sense of doing something truly magnanimous, and although her velvet-black eyes were blinded with tears so that she had to keep breaking off, she managed to write the poignant letter that was to have such a strong impact on Nikolay when he received it.

Pierre felt like a meaningless speck trapped in the wheels of some well-oiled machinery working away in a manner that he didn’t understand.

Who was it, then, when all was said and done, who was punishing him, killing him, taking his life, Pierre’s life, with all his memories, yearnings, hopes and ideas? Who was doing this? And Pierre felt he knew the answer: no one was. It was the way of things. A pattern of circumstances.

It was beyond belief: they were the only ones who knew what life meant to them, so they couldn’t understand, or believe, that it could be taken away.

In the late afternoon a patrol sergeant came into the church with two soldiers and informed Pierre he had been pardoned and would now be going to a special barracks set aside for prisoners of war.

‘No justice in a courtroom,’ put in the little man.

‘What I says is this: we’re at large but God’s in charge,’

he could feel his ruined world rising up again in his soul with a new kind of beauty, and its new foundations were unshakable.

Often he would come out with something that flatly contradicted what he had said before, yet both sayings were true.

He couldn’t see any value or meaning in an action or word with no context.

Latterly Princess Marya had managed to persuade herself – though clearly not in so many words – that she was in love and loved in return.

But Princess Marya took one look at Natasha’s face and immediately recognized a comrade in adversity, and therefore a friend. She flew across, took her in her arms and burst into tears on her shoulder.

‘Funny how fate has brought us together again,’ he said, breaking the silence and pointing to Natasha. ‘She’s looking after me.’ Princess Marya heard what he said, but she couldn’t understand him. How could Prince Andrey, with all his warmth and sensitivity, talk like that in the presence of the girl he loved, and who loved him? If he had any thought of living he wouldn’t have spoken in such a cold and offensive tone. If he didn’t know he was dying, how could he have been so callous, talking like that while she was there?

The fowls of the air sow not, neither do they reap, yet your heavenly Father feedeth them,’

‘What they can’t understand is that all these feelings they make so much of – all these thoughts and feelings of ours that seem so important – they’re of no consequence!

We can’t understand each other!’ And he said no more.

Andrey’s little son was seven years old. He could barely read, ...

Loving everything and everybody, always sacrificing oneself for the sake of love, meant loving no one person, and not living this earthly life. And the more he absorbed this principle of love, the easier he found it to renounce life, and the more effectively he destroyed the dreadful barrier that the absence of love sets up between life and death.

one glance below the surface of any historical event, one glance at the actions of the mass of humanity involved in it, is enough to show that the will of the historical hero, far from controlling the actions of the masses, is itself subject to continual outside control.

Napoleon, with his certainty that the right thing to say was not the right thing to say but the first thing that came into his head, wrote to Kutuzov the first words that came into his head, and these happened not to make any sense.

and, what mattered most of all, a vague awareness rising in every soldier’s heart that there had been a shift in the relative strength of the armies, and the advantage now lay with us. A substantial change of this nature really had come about, and advance was now inevitable.

The entire battle was limited to what had been achieved by Orlov-Denisov’s Cossacks; the rest of the troops simply lost a few hundred men for no good reason. This battle resulted in Kutuzov receiving a diamond decoration, Bennigsen being rewarded also with diamonds plus a hundred thousand roubles, and many other people getting many nice things, according to rank.

It would have been a stiff challenge for any expert strategist, assuming Napoleon’s object to be the destruction of his own army, to devise a series of actions which, without relying on any steps taken by the Russian forces, could have guaranteed the complete destruction of the whole French army with such certainty as the course taken by Napoleon.

We have paid for the right to look the facts simply and squarely in the face, and we are not going to give up that right.

With regard to commerce, the proclamation to ‘hard-working artisans and peasants’ fell on deaf ears. There were no hard-working artisans left in Moscow, and the peasants seized any messengers who ventured too far out of the town with this proclamation and killed them.

Moscow was full of paper money, genuine and counterfeit, and the notes were valueless.

The Napoleon that comes down to us as the motive force behind this movement (just as primitive people saw the figurehead on the prow of a ship as the motive force driving the ship), the Napoleon who was active at this time was like a child in a carriage who pulls on the straps inside and thinks he is doing the driving.

No thoughts now about Russia, the war, politics or Napoleon. None of this seemed to matter any more; it was not his responsibility, and his was not to sit in judgement.

all our instinctive strivings towards positive happiness were implanted only for us to be let down and tormented by them.

Pierre now saw the absence of suffering and the satisfaction of our basic needs, followed up by freedom to choose an occupation, or lifestyle, as the highest and most dependable form of human happiness.

The very qualities that had proved inhibiting, if not actually destructive, in the society he had lived in before – his physical strength, disdain for luxury, absent-mindedness, open-heartedness – gave him virtually heroic status here among these men.

Pierre recognized the mysterious, inhuman force that drove people against their will to murder their fellow men, the force he had seen working to full effect during the execution.

It is natural for a man who doesn’t understand how a machine works to imagine, when he sees it in action, that a chip that has fallen in by accident and is now jumping about and stopping things working properly is the most important part of the whole mechanism. Anyone who doesn’t understand the construction of the machine cannot conceive that this chip is just jamming up the works and reining them, unlike one little cog-wheel, spinning away quietly, which is one of the most essential parts of the machine.

Like Dokhturov, he was one of those inconspicuous cog-wheels that never judder or rattle; they just go on working as the most essential parts of the machine.

Like all old people Kutuzov was a poor sleeper.

The army could never have come to its senses. Ever since the battle of Borodino and the sacking of Moscow it had carried within itself what you might call the chemical elements of decomposition.

A man on a thousand-mile walk has to forget his ultimate goal and say to himself every morning, ‘Today I’m going to cover twenty-five miles and then rest up and sleep.’