War and Peace

wenty-three soldiers, three officers, and two officials were confined
in the shed in which Pierre had been placed and where he remained for
four weeks.

When Pierre remembered them afterwards they all seemed misty figures to
him except Platón Karatáev, who always remained in his mind a most
vivid and precious memory and the personification of everything Russian,
kindly, and round. When Pierre saw his neighbor next morning at dawn
the first impression of him, as of something round, was fully confirmed:
Platón’s whole figure—in a French overcoat girdled with a cord, a
soldier’s cap, and bast shoes—was round. His head was quite round, his
back, chest, shoulders, and even his arms, which he held as if ever
ready to embrace something, were rounded, his pleasant smile and his
large, gentle brown eyes were also round.

Platón Karatáev must have been fifty, judging by his stories of
campaigns he had been in, told as by an old soldier. He did not himself
know his age and was quite unable to determine it. But his brilliantly
white, strong teeth which showed in two unbroken semicircles when he
laughed—as he often did—were all sound and good, there was not a gray
hair in his beard or on his head, and his whole body gave an impression
of suppleness and especially of firmness and endurance.

His face, despite its fine, rounded wrinkles, had an expression of
innocence and youth, his voice was pleasant and musical. But the chief
peculiarity of his speech was its directness and appositeness. It was
evident that he never considered what he had said or was going to say,
and consequently the rapidity and justice of his intonation had an
irresistible persuasiveness.

His physical strength and agility during the first days of his
imprisonment were such that he seemed not to know what fatigue and
sickness meant. Every night before lying down, he said: “Lord, lay me
down as a stone and raise me up as a loaf!” and every morning on getting
up, he said: “I lay down and curled up, I get up and shake myself.” And
indeed he only had to lie down, to fall asleep like a stone, and he
only had to shake himself, to be ready without a moment’s delay for some
work, just as children are ready to play directly they awake. He could
do everything, not very well but not badly. He baked, cooked, sewed,
planed, and mended boots. He was always busy, and only at night allowed
himself conversation—of which he was fond—and songs. He did not sing
like a trained singer who knows he is listened to, but like the birds,
evidently giving vent to the sounds in the same way that one stretches
oneself or walks about to get rid of stiffness, and the sounds were
always high-pitched, mournful, delicate, and almost feminine, and his
face at such times was very serious.

Having been taken prisoner and allowed his beard to grow, he seemed to
have thrown off all that had been forced upon him—everything military
and alien to himself—and had returned to his former peasant habits.

“A soldier on leave—a shirt outside breeches,” he would say.

He did not like talking about his life as a soldier, though he did not
complain, and often mentioned that he had not been flogged once during
the whole of his army service. When he related anything it was generally
some old and evidently precious memory of his “Christian” life, as he
called his peasant existence. The proverbs, of which his talk was full,
were for the most part not the coarse and indecent saws soldiers
employ, but those folk sayings which taken without a context seem so
insignificant, but when used appositely suddenly acquire a significance
of profound wisdom.

He would often say the exact opposite of what he had said on a previous
occasion, yet both would be right. He liked to talk and he talked well,
adorning his speech with terms of endearment and with folk sayings which
Pierre thought he invented himself, but the chief charm of his talk lay
in the fact that the commonest events—sometimes just such as Pierre
had witnessed without taking notice of them—assumed in Karatáev’s a
character of solemn fitness. He liked to hear the folk tales one of the
soldiers used to tell of an evening (they were always the same), but
most of all he liked to hear stories of real life. He would smile
joyfully when listening to such stories, now and then putting in a word
or asking a question to make the moral beauty of what he was told clear
to himself. Karatáev had no attachments, friendships, or love, as Pierre
understood them, but loved and lived affectionately with everything life
brought him in contact with, particularly with man—not any particular
man, but those with whom he happened to be. He loved his dog, his
comrades, the French, and Pierre who was his neighbor, but Pierre felt
that in spite of Karatáev’s affectionate tenderness for him (by which
he unconsciously gave Pierre’s spiritual life its due) he would not have
grieved for a moment at parting from him. And Pierre began to feel in
the same way toward Karatáev.

To all the other prisoners Platón Karatáev seemed a most ordinary
soldier. They called him “little falcon” or “Platósha,” chaffed him
good-naturedly, and sent him on errands. But to Pierre he always
remained what he had seemed that first night: an unfathomable, rounded,
eternal personification of the spirit of simplicity and truth.

Platón Karatáev knew nothing by heart except his prayers. When he began
to speak he seemed not to know how he would conclude.

Sometimes Pierre, struck by the meaning of his words, would ask him to
repeat them, but Platón could never recall what he had said a moment
before, just as he never could repeat to Pierre the words of his
favorite song: native and birch tree and my heart is sick occurred in
it, but when spoken and not sung, no meaning could be got out of it. He
did not, and could not, understand the meaning of words apart from
their context. Every word and action of his was the manifestation of
an activity unknown to him, which was his life. But his life, as he
regarded it, had no meaning as a separate thing. It had meaning only as
part of a whole of which he was always conscious. His words and actions
flowed from him as evenly, inevitably, and spontaneously as fragrance
exhales from a flower. He could not understand the value or significance
of any word or deed taken separately.