War And Peace: Book 13 - CHAPTER XII

作者: Leo Tolstoy

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Author: Leo Tolstoy

FOUR WEEKS had passed since Pierre had been taken prisoner. Although the

French had offered to transfer him from the common prisoners' shed to the

officers', he had remained in the same shed as at first.

In Moscow, wasted by fire and pillage, Pierre passed through hardships almost

up to the extreme limit of privation that a man can endure. But, owing to his

vigorous health and constitution, of which he had hardly been aware till then;

and still more, owing to the fact that these privations came upon him so

gradually that it was impossible to say when they began, he was able to support

his position, not only with ease, but with positive gladness. And it was just at

this time that he attained that peace and content with himself, for which he had

always striven in vain before. For long years of his life he had been seeking in

various directions for that peace, that harmony with himself, which had struck

him so much in the soldiers at Borodino. He had sought for it in philanthropy,

in freemasonry, in the dissipations of society, in wine, in heroic feats of

self-sacrifice, in his romantic love for Natasha; he had sought it by the path

of thought; and all his researches and all his efforts had failed him. And now

without any thought of his own, he had gained that peace and that harmony with

himself simply through the horror of death, through hardships, through what he

had seen in Karataev. Those fearful moments that he had lived through during the

execution had, as it were, washed for ever from his imagination and his memory

the disturbing ideas and feelings that had once seemed to him so important. No

thought came to him of Russia, of the war, of politics, or of Napoleon. It

seemed obvious to him that all that did not concern him, that he was not called

upon and so was not able to judge of all that. “Russia and summer never do well

together,” he repeated Karataev's words, and those words soothed him strangely.

His project of killing Napoleon, and his calculations of the cabalistic numbers,

and of the beast of the Apocalypse struck him now as incomprehensible and

positively ludicrous. His anger with his wife, and his dread of his name being

disgraced by her, seemed to him trivial and amusing. What business of his was

it, if that woman chose to lead somewhere away from him the life that suited her

tastes? What did it matter to any one—least of all to him—whether they found out

or not that their prisoner's name was Count Bezuhov?

He often thought now of his conversation with Prince Andrey, and agreed fully

with his friend, though he put a somewhat different construction on his meaning.

Prince Andrey had said and thought that happiness is only negative, but he had

said this with a shade of bitterness and irony. It was as though in saying this

he had expressed another thought—that all the strivings towards positive

happiness, that are innate in us, were only given us for our torment. But Pierre

recognised the truth of the main idea with no such undercurrent of feeling. The

absence of suffering, the satisfaction of needs, and following upon that,

freedom in the choice of occupation, that is, of one's manner of life, seemed to

Pierre the highest and most certain happiness of man. Only here and now for the

first time in his life Pierre fully appreciated the enjoyment of eating when he

was hungry, of drinking when he was thirsty, of sleep when he was sleepy, of

warmth when he was cold, of talking to a fellow creature when he wanted to talk

and to hear men's voices. The satisfaction of his needs—good food, cleanliness,

freedom—seemed to Pierre now that he was deprived of them to be perfect

happiness; and the choice of his occupation, that is, of his manner of life now

that that choice was so limited, seemed to him such an easy matter that he

forgot that a superfluity of the conveniences of life destroys all happiness in

satisfying the physical needs, while a great freedom in the choice of

occupation, that freedom which education, wealth, and position in society had

given him, makes the choice of occupations exceedingly difficult, and destroys

the very desire and possibility of occupation.

All Pierre's dreams now turned to the time when he would be free. And yet, in

all his later life, Pierre thought and spoke with enthusiasm of that month of

imprisonment, of those intense and joyful sensations that could never be

recalled, and above all of that full, spiritual peace, of that perfect, inward

freedom, of which he had only experience at that period.

On the first day, when, getting up early in the morning, he came out of the

shed into the dawn, and saw the cupolas and the crosses of the New Monastery of

the Virgin, all still in darkness, saw the hoar frost on the long grass, saw the

slopes of the Sparrow Hills and the wood-clad banks of the encircling river

vanishing into the purple distance, when he felt the contact of the fresh air

and heard the sounds of the rooks crying out of Moscow across the fields, and

when flashes of light suddenly gleamed out of the east and the sun's rim floated

triumphantly up from behind a cloud, and cupolas and crosses and hoar frost and

the horizon and the river were all sparkling in the glad light, Pierre felt a

new feeling of joy and vigour in life such as he had never experienced

before.

And that feeling had not left him during the whole period of his

imprisonment, but on the contrary had gone on growing in him as the hardships of

his position increased.

That feeling—of being ready for anything, of moral alertness—was strengthened

in Pierre by the high opinion in which he began to be held by his companions

very soon after he entered the shed. His knowledge of languages, the respect

shown him by the French, the good-nature with which he gave away anything he was

asked for (he received the allowance of three roubles a week, given to officers

among the prisoners), the strength he showed in driving nails into the wall, the

gentleness of his behaviour to his companions, and his capacity—which seemed to

him mysterious—of sitting stockstill doing nothing and plunged in thought, all

made him seem to the soldiers a rather mysterious creature of a higher order.

The very peculiarities that in the society he had previously lived in had been a

source of embarrassment, if not of annoyance—his strength, his disdain for the

comforts of life, his absent-mindedness, his good-nature—here among these men

gave him the prestige almost of a hero. And Pierre felt that their view of him

brought its duties.

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