War And Peace полностью

Pierre had left his own house simply to escape from the challenging and complex tangle of everyday demands that he could not unravel in his current state of mind. He had gone to Osip Bazdeyev’s house ostensibly to sort out the dead man’s books and papers, but actually in search of peace and quiet amidst all the turmoil of his life. In his heart and memory he associated Bazdeyev with a different realm of quietude and ideas that seemed solemn and eternal, the exact opposite of the tangled web of anxiety that he could feel himself being drawn into. He sought a quiet refuge, and he certainly found one in Bazdeyev’s study. Sitting there in the deathlike stillness of the study with his head in his hands and his elbows on the dead man’s dusty desk, one by one he brought back to mind all the impressions of the last few days, considering them calmly and with full understanding, especially the battle of Borodino and that overwhelming sense of his own insignificance and hollowness compared with the righteousness, simplicity and strength of character of those few people who had left a mark on his soul and whom he thought of as ‘them’. When Gerasim had interrupted his reverie Pierre’s first thought was that he might go out and join the people in their defence of Moscow. (He knew such a proposal was in the air.) This was why he had asked Gerasim to get him a peasant’s coat and a pistol, and why he told him he was going to hide his identity and stay on in Bazdeyev’s house. Then throughout his first day of solitude and idleness (Pierre made several attempts to concentrate on the masonic manuscripts, but to no avail) his mind had been drawn back repeatedly to a vague recollection of an idea that had been nagging at him for some time: the cabbalistic significance that linked his name with Napoleon’s. But as yet the idea that he, l’russe Besuhof, was fated to put an end to the power of the Beast, was nothing more than one of those dreams that pop up in the mind spontaneously and are immediately gone without trace. When Pierre had bought the peasant’s coat, with the sole object of joining the people in the defence of Moscow, and then met the Rostovs, and Natasha had said, ‘Are you are staying on? I think it’s wonderful!’ it occurred to him that it really might be wonderful, even if they took Moscow, for him to stay on and fulfil his destiny.

The next day he had followed the people out to the Three Hills gate with one idea in mind: to spare no effort in keeping up with them in everything they did. But when he came back, certain that Moscow was not going to be defended, he suddenly felt that what had seemed like an outside possibility before had now become an unavoidable necessity. He had to stay on in Moscow, hide his identity, meet Napoleon and kill him. He had to put an end to the misery of Europe, all of which in Pierre’s estimation could be laid at Napoleon’s door, or die in the attempt.

Pierre knew every detail of the German student’s attempt on Napoleon’s life in Vienna in 1809,³ and he also knew that the student had been shot. But the danger to which he was exposing himself in fulfilling his purpose acted only as a further stimulus.

Two emotions of equal intensity drove him inexorably on. The first was the impulse towards sacrifice and suffering stemming from his sense of the common calamity, the feeling that had induced him to go down to Mozhaysk on the 25th and find his way into the very thick of the battle, and had now made him give up his life of ease and luxury, run away from home, sleep in his clothes on a hard sofa and eat the same food as Gerasim. The other was that vague, exclusively Russian, feeling of contempt for everything conventional, artificial, rooted solely in human experience, a contempt for everything that most people would consider the best things in the world. Pierre had felt this strangely attractive emotion for the first time in the Slobodskoy palace, when it suddenly occurred to him that wealth, power, life itself, all the things that men put so much effort into building up and maintaining, if they have any value at all, are never worth more than the pleasure to be had by renouncing them.

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.