War and Peace

ot only did Prince Andrew know he would die, but he felt that he was
dying and was already half dead. He was conscious of an aloofness from
everything earthly and a strange and joyous lightness of existence.
Without haste or agitation he awaited what was coming. That inexorable,
eternal, distant, and unknown the presence of which he had felt
continually all his life—was now near to him and, by the strange
lightness he experienced, almost comprehensible and palpable....

Formerly he had feared the end. He had twice experienced that terribly
tormenting fear of death—the end—but now he no longer understood that
fear.

He had felt it for the first time when the shell spun like a top before
him, and he looked at the fallow field, the bushes, and the sky, and
knew that he was face to face with death. When he came to himself after
being wounded and the flower of eternal, unfettered love had instantly
unfolded itself in his soul as if freed from the bondage of life that
had restrained it, he no longer feared death and ceased to think about
it.

During the hours of solitude, suffering, and partial delirium he
spent after he was wounded, the more deeply he penetrated into the new
principle of eternal love revealed to him, the more he unconsciously
detached himself from earthly life. To love everything and everybody and
always to sacrifice oneself for love meant not to love anyone, not
to live this earthly life. And the more imbued he became with that
principle of love, the more he renounced life and the more completely he
destroyed that dreadful barrier which—in the absence of such love—stands
between life and death. When during those first days he remembered that
he would have to die, he said to himself: “Well, what of it? So much the
better!”

But after the night in Mytíshchi when, half delirious, he had seen her
for whom he longed appear before him and, having pressed her hand to his
lips, had shed gentle, happy tears, love for a particular woman again
crept unobserved into his heart and once more bound him to life. And
joyful and agitating thoughts began to occupy his mind. Recalling the
moment at the ambulance station when he had seen Kurágin, he could not
now regain the feeling he then had, but was tormented by the question
whether Kurágin was alive. And he dared not inquire.

His illness pursued its normal physical course, but what Natásha
referred to when she said: “This suddenly happened,” had occurred two
days before Princess Mary arrived. It was the last spiritual struggle
between life and death, in which death gained the victory. It was
the unexpected realization of the fact that he still valued life as
presented to him in the form of his love for Natásha, and a last, though
ultimately vanquished, attack of terror before the unknown.

It was evening. As usual after dinner he was slightly feverish, and his
thoughts were preternaturally clear. Sónya was sitting by the table. He
began to doze. Suddenly a feeling of happiness seized him.

“Ah, she has come!” thought he.

And so it was: in Sónya’s place sat Natásha who had just come in
noiselessly.

Since she had begun looking after him, he had always experienced this
physical consciousness of her nearness. She was sitting in an armchair
placed sideways, screening the light of the candle from him, and was
knitting a stocking. She had learned to knit stockings since Prince
Andrew had casually mentioned that no one nursed the sick so well as old
nurses who knit stockings, and that there is something soothing in
the knitting of stockings. The needles clicked lightly in her slender,
rapidly moving hands, and he could clearly see the thoughtful profile
of her drooping face. She moved, and the ball rolled off her knees. She
started, glanced round at him, and screening the candle with her hand
stooped carefully with a supple and exact movement, picked up the ball,
and regained her former position.

He looked at her without moving and saw that she wanted to draw a
deep breath after stooping, but refrained from doing so and breathed
cautiously.

At the Tróitsa monastery they had spoken of the past, and he had told
her that if he lived he would always thank God for his wound which had
brought them together again, but after that they never spoke of the
future.

“Can it or can it not be?” he now thought as he looked at her and
listened to the light click of the steel needles. “Can fate have brought
me to her so strangely only for me to die?... Is it possible that the
truth of life has been revealed to me only to show me that I have spent
my life in falsity? I love her more than anything in the world! But what
am I to do if I love her?” he thought, and he involuntarily groaned,
from a habit acquired during his sufferings.

On hearing that sound Natásha put down the stocking, leaned nearer to
him, and suddenly, noticing his shining eyes, stepped lightly up to him
and bent over him.

“You are not asleep?”

“No, I have been looking at you a long time. I felt you come in. No one
else gives me that sense of soft tranquillity that you do... that light.
I want to weep for joy.”

Natásha drew closer to him. Her face shone with rapturous joy.

“Natásha, I love you too much! More than anything in the world.”

“And I!”—She turned away for an instant. “Why too much?” she asked.

“Why too much?... Well, what do you, what do you feel in your soul, your
whole soul—shall I live? What do you think?”

“I am sure of it, sure!” Natásha almost shouted, taking hold of both his
hands with a passionate movement.

He remained silent awhile.

“How good it would be!” and taking her hand he kissed it.

Natásha felt happy and agitated, but at once remembered that this would
not do and that he had to be quiet.

“But you have not slept,” she said, repressing her joy. “Try to sleep...
please!”

He pressed her hand and released it, and she went back to the candle and
sat down again in her former position. Twice she turned and looked at
him, and her eyes met his beaming at her. She set herself a task on her
stocking and resolved not to turn round till it was finished.

Soon he really shut his eyes and fell asleep. He did not sleep long and
suddenly awoke with a start and in a cold perspiration.

As he fell asleep he had still been thinking of the subject that now
always occupied his mind—about life and death, and chiefly about death.
He felt himself nearer to it.

“Love? What is love?” he thought.

“Love hinders death. Love is life. All, everything that I understand, I
understand only because I love. Everything is, everything exists, only
because I love. Everything is united by it alone. Love is God, and to
die means that I, a particle of love, shall return to the general and
eternal source.” These thoughts seemed to him comforting. But they were
only thoughts. Something was lacking in them, they were not clear, they
were too one-sidedly personal and brain-spun. And there was the former
agitation and obscurity. He fell asleep.

He dreamed that he was lying in the room he really was in, but that
he was quite well and unwounded. Many various, indifferent, and
insignificant people appeared before him. He talked to them and
discussed something trivial. They were preparing to go away somewhere.
Prince Andrew dimly realized that all this was trivial and that he had
more important cares, but he continued to speak, surprising them by
empty witticisms. Gradually, unnoticed, all these persons began to
disappear and a single question, that of the closed door, superseded
all else. He rose and went to the door to bolt and lock it. Everything
depended on whether he was, or was not, in time to lock it. He went, and
tried to hurry, but his legs refused to move and he knew he would not be
in time to lock the door though he painfully strained all his powers. He
was seized by an agonizing fear. And that fear was the fear of death. It
stood behind the door. But just when he was clumsily creeping toward
the door, that dreadful something on the other side was already pressing
against it and forcing its way in. Something not human—death—was
breaking in through that door, and had to be kept out. He seized the
door, making a final effort to hold it back—to lock it was no longer
possible—but his efforts were weak and clumsy and the door, pushed from
behind by that terror, opened and closed again.

Once again it pushed from outside. His last superhuman efforts were vain
and both halves of the door noiselessly opened. It entered, and it was
death, and Prince Andrew died.

But at the instant he died, Prince Andrew remembered that he was asleep,
and at the very instant he died, having made an effort, he awoke.

“Yes, it was death! I died—and woke up. Yes, death is an awakening!” And
all at once it grew light in his soul and the veil that had till then
concealed the unknown was lifted from his spiritual vision. He felt as
if powers till then confined within him had been liberated, and that
strange lightness did not again leave him.

When, waking in a cold perspiration, he moved on the divan, Natásha went
up and asked him what was the matter. He did not answer and looked at
her strangely, not understanding.

That was what had happened to him two days before Princess Mary’s
arrival. From that day, as the doctor expressed it, the wasting fever
assumed a malignant character, but what the doctor said did not interest
Natásha, she saw the terrible moral symptoms which to her were more
convincing.

From that day an awakening from life came to Prince Andrew together with
his awakening from sleep. And compared to the duration of life it did
not seem to him slower than an awakening from sleep compared to the
duration of a dream.

There was nothing terrible or violent in this comparatively slow
awakening.

His last days and hours passed in an ordinary and simple way. Both
Princess Mary and Natásha, who did not leave him, felt this. They did
not weep or shudder and during these last days they themselves felt
that they were not attending on him (he was no longer there, he had left
them) but on what reminded them most closely of him—his body. Both felt
this so strongly that the outward and terrible side of death did not
affect them and they did not feel it necessary to foment their grief.
Neither in his presence nor out of it did they weep, nor did they ever
talk to one another about him. They felt that they could not express in
words what they understood.

They both saw that he was sinking slowly and quietly, deeper and deeper,
away from them, and they both knew that this had to be so and that it
was right.

He confessed, and received communion: everyone came to take leave of
him. When they brought his son to him, he pressed his lips to the boy’s
and turned away, not because he felt it hard and sad (Princess Mary and
Natásha understood that) but simply because he thought it was all that
was required of him, but when they told him to bless the boy, he did
what was demanded and looked round as if asking whether there was
anything else he should do.

When the last convulsions of the body, which the spirit was leaving,
occurred, Princess Mary and Natásha were present.

“Is it over?” said Princess Mary when his body had for a few minutes
lain motionless, growing cold before them. Natásha went up, looked at
the dead eyes, and hastened to close them. She closed them but did not
kiss them, but clung to that which reminded her most nearly of him—his
body.

“Where has he gone? Where is he now?...”

When the body, washed and dressed, lay in the coffin on a table,
everyone came to take leave of him and they all wept.

Little Nicholas cried because his heart was rent by painful perplexity.
The countess and Sónya cried from pity for Natásha and because he was
no more. The old count cried because he felt that before long, he, too,
must take the same terrible step.

Natásha and Princess Mary also wept now, but not because of their own
personal grief; they wept with a reverent and softening emotion which
had taken possession of their souls at the consciousness of the
simple and solemn mystery of death that had been accomplished in their
presence.

BOOK THIRTEEN: 1812