Platon Karatayev must have been on the wrong side of fifty if the stories of his old campaigns were anything to go by. He didn’t know his own age and had no means of working it out. But he had strong, white teeth that gleamed in two full semi-circles whenever he laughed, which was often, and they were all good and sound; there wasn’t grey hair in his beard or on his head, and his whole figure gave an impression of suppleness combined with remarkable toughness and stamina.
His face, for all its web of rounded wrinkles, shone with the innocence of youth, and his voice had a pleasant lilt. But the great thing about his way of talking was its spontaneity and shrewdness. Clearly, he never thought over what he had said or worked out what he was going to say, and this gave his sharp utterances a ring of truth and a special stamp of irresistible persuasiveness.
In the first days of his imprisonment his physical strength and agility were such that he didn’t seem to know the meaning of illness or fatigue. Every night as he lay down to sleep he said, ‘Lord, make me lie down like a stone and rise like new bread,’ and every morning when he got up he would stretch his shoulders always in the same way and say, ‘Sleep deep, wake with a shake.’ And that’s how it worked out: he only had to lie down to fall asleep like a stone, and when he woke, one shake saw him instantly ready to tackle anything without a second’s delay, like a child wanting to play with his toys straightaway. There was nothing he couldn’t do, if not brilliantly, then at least tolerably well. He could bake, cook, sew, work wood and cobble boots. He was always busy with something, and it was invariably late evening before he allowed himself a little conversation, which he loved, and some singing. He sang not like a singer who knows he has an audience, but more like a bird: obviously, he just needed to sing, in the way that sometimes you just have to stretch your limbs or go for a walk, and the sound of his singing was always light, sweet, plangent, almost feminine, and his face as he sang was very serious.
Now that he was in prison, letting his beard grow, he seemed to have cast off all the unnatural military behaviour that had been forced upon him, and reverted instinctively to his old peasant ways.
‘A soldier back home leaves his shirt hanging out,’ he used to say. He was reluctant to talk about his life as a soldier, though he never complained, and he kept on repeating that in all his years of service he’d never once been hit. Whenever he got going on a story he inevitably drew on a series of distant memories, obviously very dear to him, taking him back to a former life that he referred to as ‘Christian’ (
Often he would come out with something that flatly contradicted what he had said before, yet both sayings were true. He loved talking, and he spoke well, embellishing his speech with warm diminutives and proverbial sayings that Pierre thought he had invented himself. But the best thing about his way of speaking was that the simplest of incidents, some of them witnessed but not really noticed by Pierre, in Karatayev’s version assumed a new depth of meaning and dignified stature. He liked listening to the folk tales that one soldier used to tell in the evenings, always the same ones, but he preferred stories from real life. He beamed with delight listening to stories of this kind, contributing words of his own and asking questions aimed at bringing out clearly the full meaning and stature of the deeds recounted. Karatayev enjoyed no attachments, no friendships, no love in any sense of these words that meant anything to Pierre, yet he loved and showed affection to every creature he came across in life, especially people, no particular people, just those who happened to be there before his eyes. He loved his dog, his comrades, the French, and he loved Pierre, his neighbour. But Pierre felt that for all the warmth and affection Karatayev showed him (an instinctive tribute to Pierre’s spirituality), he wouldn’t suffer a moment’s sorrow if they were to part. And Pierre began to feel the same way towards Karatayev.
To all the other men Platon Karatayev was just an ordinary soldier; they called him their mate or Platosha, made fun of him all the time, and sent him on errands. But as far as Pierre was concerned, that first-night impression of Karatayev as simplicity and truth roundly epitomized for all time in some mysterious way stayed with him for ever.
