War and peace by Leo Tolstoy (graf) & Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky

Author:Leo Tolstoy (graf) & Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky [Tolstoy, Leo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Alexander I; 1801-1825, Fiction, Literary, Napoleonic Wars; 1800-1815, War & Military, Europe, Classic fiction, Campaigns, Literature: Classics, Russian, Napoleonic Wars; 1800-1815 - Campaigns - Russia, Historical - General, Russia & the Former Soviet Union, Russian Novel And Short Story, Russia - History - Alexander I; 1801-1825, Historical, Classics, Russia, History, Criticism, Russian & Former Soviet Union, General, Literary Criticism, General & Literary Fiction, Literature - Classics, Russian fiction
ISBN: 9780307266934
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2007-10-16T10:00:00+00:00

XIX

Since the day when Pierre, leaving the Rostovs’ and remembering Natasha’s grateful eyes, had looked at the comet that hung in the sky, and had felt that something new had been revealed to him—the question that eternally tormented him about the vanity and folly of all earthly things had stopped presenting itself to him. That terrible question—“Why? What for?”—which used to present itself to him amidst every occupation, was now replaced for him not by another question and not by the answer to the old question, but by her image. Listening to a trivial conversation, or engaged in one himself, or reading, or learning about the baseness and senselessness of people, he was not horrified as he used to be; he did not ask himself why people made a fuss, if everything was so brief and unknown, but he remembered her the way he had seen her the last time, and all his doubts vanished, not because she answered the questions that presented themselves to him, but because her image immediately transferred him to a different, bright realm of inner activity, in which no one could be right or wrong, into a realm of beauty and love for which it was worth living. Whatever vileness of life presented itself to him, he said to himself:

“Well, let so-and-so steal from the state and the tsar, and the state and the tsar confer honors on him; but yesterday she smiled at me and asked me to come, and I love her, and nobody will ever know it,” he thought.

Pierre still went into society, still drank as much and led the same idle and dissipated life, because besides the hours he spent at the Rostovs’, he had the rest of the time to spend, and the habits and acquaintances he had acquired in Moscow drew him irresistibly to the life he was caught up in. But lately, when ever more alarming rumors kept coming from the theater of war, and Natasha’s health began to improve, and she ceased to arouse in him the former feeling of protective pity, an anxiety he found more and more incomprehensible began to come over him. He felt that the situation in which he found himself could not continue for long, that a catastrophe was coming which was bound to change his whole life, and he impatiently sought signs of this approaching catastrophe in everything. One of his brother Masons revealed to Pierre the following prophecy concerning Napoleon and derived from the Apocalypse of St. John.30

In the Apocalypse, chapter 13, verse 18, it was said: “Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.”

And in verse 5 of the same chapter: “And there was given unto him a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies; and power was given unto him to continue forty and two months.”

French letters, given numerical values like the Hebrew, in which the

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