He had the unfortunate capacity that many men have, especially Russians, for seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, yet seeing the evil and falsehood in life too clearly to be capable of taking any serious part in it. Every aspect of human activity he saw as bound up with evil and deception. Whatever he tried to be, whatever he decided to do, he found himself repelled by evil and falsehood, with every avenue of activity blocked off. And meanwhile he had to live on and find things to do. It was too horrible to be ground down by life’s insoluble problems, so he latched on to any old distraction that came along, just to get them out of his mind. He tried all kinds of society, drank a lot, bought pictures, built things and, most of all, he read.
He read and reread everything he could get his hands on. When he got home at night he would pick up a book and start on it before his valets had finished undressing him, and then read himself to sleep. From sleep he proceeded to drawing-room and club gossip; from gossip to wine, women and song; and from these back to more gossip, reading and wine. Wine was becoming more and more a mental and physical necessity. He defied the doctors who warned him that with his corpulence wine was a danger to his health, and kept on drinking heavily. The only time he felt good was when he had mechanically emptied several glasses of wine into his big mouth. Only then did he feel a pleasing sensation of warmth flowing through his whole body, along with a sentimental attachment to his fellow men, and enough wit to come out with an off-the-cuff response to any idea, as long as he didn’t have to go too deeply into it. It was only after drinking a bottle or two of wine that he could vaguely accept that the horribly tangled skein of life, which had held such terrors for him, turned out to be less terrifying than he had imagined. As, with a ringing in his head, he chatted away, listened to people as they talked or read after dinner and supper, he couldn’t get away from the sight of that tangled skein in one aspect or another. Only under the influence of wine could he say to himself, ‘There’s nothing to it. I’ll soon get that disentangled. Look, I’ve got the solution here. But now’s not the time. I’ll sort it out later!’ Except that ‘later’ never came.
Next morning at breakfast all the old questions resurfaced, as horribly insoluble as ever, so Pierre would dive into a book with all speed and rejoice when a visitor called.
Sometimes Pierre remembered what he had been told about soldiers in a shelter under fire with nothing to do, trying their best to keep busy and thus make the danger easier to bear. And Pierre pictured all men as soldiers like these, escaping from life through ambition, cards, law-making, women, little playthings, horses, politics, sport, wine, even government service. ‘Everything matters, nothing matters, it’s all the same. If I can only escape, one way or another!’ thought Pierre. ‘And not see
CHAPTER 2
At the beginning of the winter old Prince Bolkonsky and his daughter moved to Moscow. He had become an object of special veneration in Moscow because of his past achievements, his powerful intellect and unusual character, and this, together with the current decline in the popularity of Tsar Alexander’s regime, which coincided with a surge in anti-French sentiment and Russian patriotism, now made him the natural centre of opposition to the government.
The prince had aged a good deal that year. He had begun to show clear signs of senility: nodding off without any warning, forgetting very recent events while clearly remembering incidents from long ago, and the childlike vanity with which he assumed leadership of the Moscow opposition. Nevertheless, when the old man came down for tea, especially of an evening, wearing his powdered wig and a thick little coat, and responded to someone’s challenge by launching forth into a series of sharp comments on the old days, or even sharper and more vitriolic criticism of the present day, he still evoked the same old feelings of respect and admiration in all his guests. For any visitors, that old-fashioned house, with its enormous mirrors, pre-Revolution furniture and powdered footmen, and the stern and shrewd old man, himself a relic from the past, along with his gentle daughter and the pretty Frenchwoman, both of whom doted on him, presented a magnificent and most appealing spectacle. But those same visitors never stopped to think that in addition to the couple of hours when they saw their hosts there were another twenty-two in the daily cycle during which the hidden private life of the household continued.
