War And Peace полностью

He squeezed her hand and let it go, and she moved back near to the candle, where she sat down again as before. Twice she glanced across at him; he looked back with shining eyes. She fixed on a certain amount of stocking to knit, and told herself not to look round until it was done.

And sure enough, it was not long before his eyes closed and he dozed off. But his sleep did not last. He woke up suddenly in a cold sweat, deeply alarmed.

As he had been going to sleep he had been thinking about what now obsessed him all the time – living and dying. Most of all, dying. He felt closer than ever to death.

‘Love? What is love?’ he thought.

‘Love gets in the way of death. Love is life. Every single thing I understand, I understand only because I love. Everything is – everything exists – only because I love. Everything is bound up with love, and love alone. Love is God, and dying means me, a tiny particle of love, going back to its universal and eternal source.’ These thoughts seemed comforting enough, but they were only thoughts. There was something missing. They seemed lop-sided, too personal, too rational; they should have been blindingly obvious. Besides, there was still something worrying him, something he couldn’t get to grips with. He fell asleep.

In a dream he sees himself lying there in the same room he is actually lying in, but he hasn’t been wounded, he is fit and well. Lots of people, all different kinds, people who don’t matter and aren’t worried about him, appear before him. He is talking to them, arguing about nothing at all. They seem to be getting ready to go on a journey. Prince Andrey is vaguely aware that none of this matters, there are other things of much greater importance for him to bother about, but he keeps on talking, impressing them with his casual, witty comments. They begin to slip away imperceptibly one by one, and all that is left is the question of closing the door. He rises to his feet and goes over to the door to get it locked and bolted. Everything now depends on whether or not he will get there in time to shut it. He is walking forward, hurrying, but his legs won’t move, and he knows he is not going to get the door locked, though he strains agonizingly to do so. And he is filled with a ghastly feeling of terror. This terror is the fear of death: beyond the door there is It. But while he is flailing helplessly towards the door, that horrible something is already pushing from the other side, forcing the door open. Something inhuman – death – is pushing on the door, and he must hold it back. With one last effort he grabs at the door – it can’t now be shut – to try and hold it back, but his efforts are feeble and clumsy. Under pressure from the ghastly thing outside, the door opens and shuts again.

More pushing from the other side. His last, inhuman struggles are fruitless. Both leaves of the door open without a sound. It comes in. It is death. And Prince Andrey has died.

But at the very moment of death Prince Andrey realized he was dreaming; at the moment of death itself he summoned all his strength and forced himself back to consciousness.

‘Yes, that was death. I have died and woken up again. But that’s what death is – a reawakening!’ His soul was suddenly ablaze with light, and the veil that had hidden the unknown from him was half lifted for his spirit to see beyond. He had sensed the releasing of pent-up forces within him, and he felt the curious lightness of being that had not left him since.

When he woke up in a cold sweat and stirred on the couch Natasha went over and asked him what was wrong. He didn’t answer, he couldn’t understand what she was saying, and he gazed at her with a strange look in his eyes.

This was the change that had come over him two days before Princess Marya’s arrival. From that day on, according to the doctor, the wasting fever took a turn for the worse, but Natasha ignored him; she could see the terrible signs emanating from Andrey’s spirit, and their message was beyond doubt.

For Prince Andrey that day marked more than a reawakening from sleep; it was a reawakening from life. And in relation to his own life-span it seemed to take no longer than waking up does in relation to the span of a dream. It was a relatively slow reawakening, but there was nothing violent or terrible about it.

His last days and hours were spent in a simple, down-to-earth way. Princess Marya and Natasha, who never left his side, both felt that. They did not weep; they did not shudder. And towards the end they both felt they were not looking after him (he was no more, he had gone away), they were cherishing the most immediate memory of him – his body. Both of them felt emotions so strong they were unaffected by the horrible outward aspect of death, and they felt no need to work at their grief. They never wept, with him or without him, and when they were together they didn’t even talk about him. They felt that no words could express what they now understood.