—Tolstoy’s mumbled words to his daughter Alexandra a few days before his death
Tolstoy’s views about the limits of worldly success in War and Peace, far from offering him a pass on self-improvement, only reinforced his belief in the possibilities of human striving toward truth and goodness. I was newly struck by this dimension of his vision when, as a student at Moscow State University in 1990, my literature professor Aida Abuashvili-Lominadze invited me to spend a week with her and her husband at Peredelkino, the official summer retreat of the Union of Soviet Writers, just beyond greater Moscow. As I wandered among the grassy fields of this large property where writer Boris Pasternak once owned a summer home, the May air was thick with the scent of freshly blooming wildflowers. Three times daily we’d congregate in the cafeteria, where the clinking and clanging of silverware could be heard alongside the animated arguing, a common phenomenon in the heyday of Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika.
One evening, the conversation turned to Russian literature, and Tolstoy’s name was of course soon invoked. A recent article in a high-profile Moscow literary journal had argued that maybe it was time to remove Russia’s most famous novelist from the required school reading lists. His time, the argument went, had come and gone. He was from a world far kinder and gentler, after all, than the one late-twentieth-century Russians inhabited, and thus had little relevance to the problems of Soviet Russia.
“He never lived through anything like Stalin’s terror or fascist Germany,” said one writer in his twenties at the dinner, eager to demonstrate his postmodernist credentials by agreeing with the author of the article.
No sooner had those words come flying out of his mouth than the clanging of silverware, the slurping of soup and compote, and the general chatter at our table of six ceased. I looked around in confusion. All eyes were on Sergei, Aida’s husband, a smallish, well-built man in his sixties whose kind, intelligent face, with its bristling eyebrows and deep creases, contorted now into a look of both sadness and anger. Putting down his glass, he placed his thick, hairy forearms on the table.
“Young man,” he said, slowly and quietly, peering directly into the eyes of the young writer. “When I was your age, I was serving a ten-year sentence in Stalin’s Siberian work camps. I dug ditches. I was beaten. I pissed in my bunk at night because it was too frigid to go outside. I watched friends get murdered in cold blood. And you want to tell me about Stalin’s terror!”
“I’m only saying, uh, that Tolstoy never, you know, went through . . .” the young writer stammered, his self-confidence rapidly fading, his face turning as red as the six untouched bowls of steaming borsht sitting on the table.
“Maybe I didn’t serve long enough,” Sergei continued, “because I, for one, still believe that [Tolstoy’s] Hadji-Murat is the most devastatingly accurate story of man’s inhumanity towards man ever written. And in War and Peace, the bestiality of battlefields drenched in blood . . . Or when Rostopchin [Moscow’s governor in 1812] feeds a man to the crowd to be beaten to death . . . I saw these sorts of things with my own eyes.” Pausing, he glanced around at us, then back at his young interlocutor, sternly concluding: “No, I can assure you, Tolstoy understood.”
I later learned Sergei’s story. His father, a high-ranking general in the Georgian army who had been suspected of treason, was ordered by Stalin to come to Moscow on urgent business. He knew perfectly well what that meant. This “enemy of the people,” of which there were millions at the time, would be sent to the camps. And so he hanged himself. Unfortunately, under Stalin’s rule, when one member of your family was an enemy of the people, so was the rest of the family. Years later, a seventeen-year-old Sergei, who didn’t quite grasp this fact, unwisely penned and distributed among his classmates a poem with mocking references to the Soviet dictator. The school authorities found out about it, sent the poem to the regional authorities, and within weeks, Sergei was being escorted by security guards to Siberia. Still a teenager, he was about to begin a ten-year sentence of hard labor.
To this day, I remember that painful dinner conversation at Peredelkino, because it was my very first exposure to the concrete human realities of Stalin’s Russia. I’d read books about twentieth-century Soviet history, of course, but there at that dinner, for perhaps the first time, I actually began to understand—and appreciate something else besides: Why Tolstoy still matters, and not just to Russians, either. To all of us.
Sure, the greatest Russian realist may not have lived through Stalin’s terror or the Holocaust, or for that matter, the more recent threats of nuclear war or faith-based terrorism. He knew plenty, though, about the rank injustice, evil, and sheer brutishness that have ever dominated the world. He’d witnessed a public execution in Paris, for Christ’s sake; had lived through the European revolutions of 1848, as well as the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, followed by the ultrarepressive regime of Alexander III. By the end of the century, Tolstoy was reading daily newspaper reports about workers’ riots, bloody bombings by revolutionary terrorists, religious persecution, and pogroms. And what counts is this: having lived through all of that, he never lost his faith in the possibility of goodness, of human promise.
In his seventies, Tolstoy asked to be buried on the spot where, as a boy, he and his brother Nikolai had discovered a little green stick, a stick on which, they believed, was inscribed the secret to universal happiness. “And just as I believed then, that there is a little green stick, on which is written the secret that will destroy all evil in people, and give them great blessings,” Tolstoy wrote in his Recollections (1902), “so now I believe that such a truth exists and that it will be revealed to people and will give them what it promises.” Imagine that: someone who’d seen and done all Tolstoy had, still believing in “a secret that would destroy all evil in people.” Was the man mad—or just some incorrigible Pollyanna?
Tolstoy’s gravesite today, on the spot where he first discovered the little green stick that would “destroy all evil in people.”
Some in Tolstoy’s own time thought he was, well, a little bit of both. In one of the most famous of his later works of nonfiction, The Kingdom of God Is Within You, he responded directly to this criticism. “Blessedness,” Tolstoy writes in that book, first published in Germany, in 1894, after being banned in Russia, “consists in progress towards perfection; to stand still in any condition whatever means the cessation of this blessedness.” To tell somebody that striving toward such a high ideal is hopelessly naïve, Tolstoy writes,
is just like telling a man who is struggling on a swift river and is directing his course against the current, that it is impossible to cross the river against the current, and that to cross it he must point in the direction of the point he wants to reach.
In reality, in order to reach the place to which he wants to go, he must row with all his strength toward a point much higher up.
True, the world may be filled with all sorts of obstacles to achieving our highest hopes, Tolstoy is saying. Yet if we cease striving toward those noble ideals, then not only will we fail ever to achieve them, but we will get carried so far downstream by the current of complacency that we will no longer even recognize the destination we wanted to reach in the first place. We’ll end up, in other words, living without any ideals at all—in a state of either perennial despair or the kind of moral relativism that Tolstoy saw as one of the central spiritual illnesses of his times.
A quaint thought, even when he voiced it, but who in the “enlightened,” modern world of the decades to follow could possibly have taken it seriously? A twenty-four-year-old barrister by the name of Mohandas Gandhi, for one. “[O]verwhelmed” by The Kingdom of God Is Within You when he first read it at the age of twenty-four, Gandhi was transformed by “the independent thinking, profound morality, and the truthfulness” of Tolstoy’s vision. Gandhi dedicated his life to bringing the world a little closer to perfection himself, thanks in part to the inspiration of his Russian predecessor.
The word for “perfection” in Russian (sovershenstvo) is nearly identical to the word for “completion” (sovershenie). Of course, life is no more likely to be “complete” than it is to be perfect. A mere glance at today’s newspaper will provide you with more than ample reason to doubt whether “perfection” even belongs in the human vocabulary at all. Tolstoy is here to remind us that it most assuredly does. Perfection, you see, is the goal we never quite reach, the thin, glowing horizon we may glimpse only in the distance. The closer we come to it, the farther away it would seem to get. Still, something compels us to move toward it, and by doing so, we bring a measure of sanity to the world, becoming better human beings ourselves in the process. There is a famous Jewish saying: “You are not required to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” Tolstoy believed something rather similar. The world is badly flawed, he says, yet with every moment brimming with potential, it is up to us to try to perfect it.
No character in War and Peace embodies this insanely hopeful approach to living more than Pierre Bezukhov. Not that Pierre doesn’t have plenty of reasons to be cynical about the world. After inheriting a great fortune, he marries the most beautiful woman in Russia: the empty-headed, fortune-hunting Hélène Kuragin, whose father, Vassily, a relative of Pierre’s deceased father, skillfully orchestrates the union, while pocketing around forty thousand rubles’ worth of the inheritance for himself. No sooner is the marriage consummated than it begins to unravel, thanks in part to that snake Dolokhov, whom Pierre challenges to a duel over suspicions that Dolokhov is having an affair with his wife. Hélène chastises Pierre for his groundless fears, while cruelly assuring him that there are few wives with idiotic husbands like him who wouldn’t have taken lovers. At which point Pierre, in a paroxysm of rage, yanks from the table before him an enormous slab of marble and hurls it to the floor, leaving his wife appropriately shaken.
Following such an inauspicious introduction to the joys of adulthood and married life, you’d think Pierre might quietly hunker down in some funk-hole of self-pity, right? And indeed he does—this is Russian literature, after all. Far more interesting, though, is how quickly this soul-crushing depression is followed by an almost childlike readiness not just to forgive, but to believe again. First, though, the depression.
A few weeks after the argument with Hélène, Pierre gives her power of attorney over a large piece of his personal fortune, and then heads off to Petersburg, far away from the morass his life has become. Sitting in the Torzhok posting station as he awaits a horse transport, his mind turns and turns like a stripped screw, unable to catch on to anything solid or sensible. In this moment Pierre comes about as close as he ever will to thinking like one of those tortured nihilists for which nineteenth-century Russian literature is famous: Why, he asks himself, is he in this situation? What the hell should he do with his life? Why is anything the way it is? Of the peddler woman selling her wares at the Torzhok station, he thinks: “ ‘And what does she need the money for? As if this money can add one hair’s breadth to her peace of mind? Can anything in the world make her or me less subject to evil and death?’ ” (348).
When Pierre suspects the postmaster of trying to fleece him of even more rubles by delaying the arrival of horses, he concludes that the guy obviously needs the money, and Pierre can afford it, so, well, fleece away. After all, Pierre himself almost murdered Dolokhov, so who is he, really, to judge others? And while he’s on the subject of senseless murders, what about those Frenchmen who chopped off King Louis XVI’s head, or the fact that those who did so were themselves later executed for some reason. “ ‘What is bad? What is good? What should one love, what hate? Why live, and what am I? What is life, what is death? What power rules over everything?’ ” (348). Things are not, shall we say, altogether well in Pierre’s inner world.
Until, that is, a total stranger sits down on the bench next to him. This stranger, as it turns out, is the famous Freemason Osip Bazdeyev, whose glittering old eyes and calm paternal voice begin to soothe Pierre, even as he, at least at first, looks askance at the man’s ideas. The more they talk, the more Pierre opens up about his despair, the depravity of his life, his wish to believe in God, and his inability to do so. Sensing Pierre’s vulnerability, the old man explains to him that his current suffering comes from the fact that he is looking at things all wrong: the possibilities he imagines for his life are far too limited; there is another path toward truth and happiness, a path the fraternal organization of Freemasonry can help reveal to him. We watch as Pierre’s mood shifts from despair to skepticism to a growing openness to Bazdeyev’s message, and finally, to complete acceptance of it—all in a matter of just a few hours. No sooner has Bazdeyev shared with his soon-to-be young protégé this glorious vision of the possibility of perfection on earth than Pierre is seized with
a rapture of renewal, picturing to himself his blissful, irreproachable, and virtuous future, which seemed so easy to him. . . . In his soul there remained no trace of his former doubts. He firmly believed in the possibility of the brotherhood of people, united with the purpose of supporting each other on the path of virtue, and that was what he imagined Masonry to be. (353–54)
As the reader rather suspects, this is not exactly what Freemasonry is, and the transformation Pierre believes it will bring about in him is to prove more elusive than he thinks. What’s more, Bazdeyev comes across as a bit of a spirituality peddler, not to mention a whack job. Still, he’s not a complete sham; there is something genuinely kind and attractive about him, not least when compared with those high-society vultures Pierre’s been moving among lately. Moreover, he gives Pierre something he badly needs in this moment: hope.
Inspired by the Freemason goal of reforming the human race, Pierre conceives a plan. Traveling to his estates in the province of Kiev, he summons the stewards (peasant managers) to let them know that he intends to set all of his peasants free. And while the details of their liberation are being worked out, he orders that peasants will not be overburdened by work, that women and children will not work at all, and that hospitals, almshouses, and schools should be built in every village. The stewards listen carefully, each interpreting the master’s words in his own way. Some of them are fearful that Pierre is dissatisfied with their work and perhaps displeased at the fact they have been concealing money from him, which, Tolstoy hints, they’ve been doing for quite some time. Others are amused by Pierre’s lisp and the intriguing new words he uses. Another group simply finds it pleasant to hear the master speak. Yet others, sharper of wit, politely nod their sweaty heads, all the while secretly calculating how best to manipulate Pierre to further their own aims.
When Pierre returns after a few months to see how the reforms are coming along, it is spring, and the southern sun warms the blossoming Russian countryside. His heart bursts with joy as his Viennese carriage progresses through his estates, each one, it seems to him, more picturesque than the last. “ ‘How easy it is, how little effort it takes, to do so much good,’ ” he proudly thinks after being greeted at every stop with crowds of grateful peasants (380). But this royal tour is, of course, a sham carefully orchestrated by the stewards to impress and deceive their master.
What the stewards’ glowing reports of a reduction in peasant labor don’t explain, for one thing, is that the peasants, freed of their obligation to Pierre, are now being forced to work overtime for the stewards. Nor does Pierre understand that in one village, where a chapel is being built on his orders, or so he thinks, the only people who welcome him happen to be the wealthy peasants who had already started building that chapel long ago; nine-tenths of the peasants in that village are, in fact, destitute. Nor does he grasp that the priest who proudly exhibits the peasant children whom he has been instructing in reading, writing, and religion isn’t quite as godly as his station in life and the thick cross hanging from his vestments might suggest; in exchange for the spiritual enlightenment he provides, he exacts exorbitant sums of money from the pupils’ parents.
So, what are we to make of all this? Do we shake our heads at Pierre’s naïveté? Get angry with him for being so blind? Admire his sincere intentions? Yes, yes, and yes, says Tolstoy. Indeed, there is something at once maddening and touching about this hopelessly good man who insists on doing “what he considered right” (381), even though he hasn’t a clue, really, about how to carry out those well-meaning intentions . . . at least right now, that is. Pierre is only twenty-two, after all; we haven’t quite reached the halfway point in the novel, and, well, a lot can happen in eight hundred pages. As Tolstoy reminds us over and over again, today’s mistake may well become the “informed failure” that propels us toward some future triumph, just as what may seem like a conquest at one time may very well turn out to be a disaster later—or simply fizzle away into oblivion. We just don’t know. Life has a funny (and often not so funny) way of reminding us of just how little control we human beings actually have over our destinies.
How, given such a fickle universe, are we supposed to live? Ah! . . . That is the million-ruble question all of Tolstoy’s characters face—or avoid.
Were personal survival one’s only concern, then any number of options would seem perfectly adequate, including, say, that of a postmaster who takes advantage of a rich traveler, or a Petersburg beauty and her father who lure a recent heir into a financially lucrative marriage. Heck, even Dolokhov’s pursuit of sadistic pleasure by cruelly messing with others’ lives might constitute a fine choice—in a world, that is, in which questions of right and wrong aren’t of concern. But human beings live on this earth, presumably, for a purpose; unlike animals, we have the ability to wrestle with big questions, make moral decisions, and perhaps become a little bit better tomorrow than we find ourselves today. Making full use of that capacity, Tolstoy says, is the key to leading a fulfilling life. Pierre does it in spades, which is why, despite the bad rap he sometimes gets from other characters, and not a few readers, he is such an attractive character in this novel.
One Russian acquaintance with whom I discussed this section of the book some years ago, for instance, was far less fond of Pierre than I am. In his fifties at the time, this shaggy-headed, plump scientist with a bristling beard and a fun-loving personality enjoyed giving folksy career advice to young people like me, who, not unlike Pierre, were struggling with a tendency toward idealism, uninformed by any professional focus. “Well, Pierre is obviously trying to sit in too many places with one butt,” observed my mentor in his own colorful rendition of a famous Russian proverb. “If you want to make a hole in the snow,” he added, unable to resist a mixed metaphor, “you’ve got to piss in one spot.”
I knew that, while ostensibly he was still talking about Pierre, he was referring to me, as well. And his message was perfectly clear: if you want to accomplish something, you’ve got to be focused, and strategic—the very things that Pierre, chasing utopian dreams and continually switching from one thing to another, is most definitely not. But something I never quite understood from that conversation is why anyone would be so intent on making a hole in the snow in the first place. Urinating in multiple places, after all, you’re bound to make a much more interesting pattern. Consummately bad planner that he is, Pierre ricochets pinball-like from one experience to the next, but he also happens to lead a rather fascinating life—a life that will lead him to the sort of abiding happiness that eludes many of the novel’s more pragmatic characters. That’s because Pierre is a genuine seeker, and as such, he can teach us something about living with deeper purpose in a world that, if it doesn’t turn us into unthinking egoists, is just as likely to turn us into overthinking nihilists.
Pierre’s inspired vision and infectious personality are strong enough, in fact, to lift Prince Andrei out of a slump of his own when Pierre visits his friend after a two-year hiatus. Arriving at Bogucharovo, one of the family estates recently acquired by Prince Andrei, the first thing Pierre notices is how everything bears the stamp of Bolkonskyesque efficiency and cleanliness. Yet there is something dead about the place, just as there is something less than vital about Prince Andrei himself.
Like Pierre, Andrei has been through a great deal since their last meeting. Two years before this he abandoned his pregnant wife Liza to join the army. Then, after the battle of Schöngrabern, in which almost nothing went according to plan, Andrei grew bitterly disappointed. Austerlitz, he hoped, would be a different story, and that it proved to be, but not in the way he’d expected: after being knocked on his back during that battle by a soldier’s bayonet, he looks up at the lofty sky, only to realize that his longtime quest for personal glory has been an illusion.
Presumed dead after Austerlitz, Andrei is all but forgotten by his family and friends; then, on a stormy March night, he returns home to the amazement of everybody, including his wife Liza, who happens to be going into labor that very evening. What might have been a joyous homecoming, however, turns tragic, when Liza suddenly dies during childbirth. “ ‘Ah, what have you done to me?’ ” says her lovely, pitiful, dead face to him as he enters the room where her body lies (327). Those words, and that face, will continue to haunt him for years to come.
And so it is with deep pangs of guilt and disillusionment that Andrei returns to the country, wishing to be left alone, to live out his days as quietly as he can.
Such is the state in which Pierre finds Prince Andrei when he visits. He is struck by the deadness of Andrei’s expression—a gaze “expressive of a long concentration on some one thing” (382). What that one thing may be Tolstoy never tells us, but Andrei does indeed appear to be as focused and single-minded as he was during his former pursuit of glory, only far more depressed and guilt-ridden. Feeling awkward in Andrei’s presence, Pierre restrains himself somewhat, in order not to appear naïve before his rather superior friend. Nevertheless, he tries to share with his old friend his current happiness:
“I can’t tell you how much I’ve lived through in this time. I wouldn’t recognize myself.”
“Yes, we’ve changed very much, very much, since then,” said Prince Andrei.
“Well, and you?” asked Pierre. “What are your plans?”
“Plans?” Prince Andrei repeated ironically. “My plans?” he repeated, as if astonished at the meaning of such a word. (382)
The more Prince Andrei talks, the more feverish he becomes, trying desperately to prove to Pierre that he’s had it with life, and that anything he undertakes now is merely to survive and eke out a modicum of pleasure from the rest of his days. But Pierre, still flying high from Freemasonry, cannot stand hearing this. As the eloquent and embittered Andrei demolishes Pierre’s noble arguments one right after the other, the latter fears for his friend’s soul, and possibly his own. Pierre’s plans to lighten the burden of the peasants’ physical labor and build schools for them? Bad ideas, insists Andrei, for physical labor is as necessary to the peasants as mental labor is to the aristocrats; Pierre will merely be depriving the peasants of the animal happiness natural to them. As for the building of hospitals, that, says Andrei, is equally superfluous, for it would be simpler and easier for the peasants to just die. More will be born in any event; and, besides, medicine kills as many people as it cures (which, given the unsanitary state of rural hospitals in those days, would not have been far from the truth).
Shocked by his friend’s callousness and yet feeling completely outgunned in the debate, Pierre suddenly sees a small opening through which to score a point: What about the fact that Prince Andrei is still serving alongside his father in the local militia, and that just a few weeks ago he dissuaded his father from hanging a civil servant for stealing boots from the militiamen? Surely that could be taken as proof that Prince Andrei is, in fact, concerned with building a more just society? Nope, insists Andrei; he joined the militia so as to have influence on his father and prevent him from doing something he might regret later on, which, given the nearly unlimited power the tsar has recently bestowed on the old prince, is a real possibility. All of which goes to show, Andrei insists, that his actions were motivated by self-interest. “ ‘I pity my father—that is, again, myself’ ” (386).
“ ‘Do you believe in a future life?’ ” Pierre then asks, changing tack, as he launches into his most impassioned monologue yet, ebulliently describing an invisible ladder that extends from earth to heaven and connects all living beings to a huge, harmonious whole.
“ ‘Yes, that’s Herder’s teaching,’ ” responds Prince Andrei coolly, referring to a German philosopher popular in Russia at the time:
“[B]ut that, dear heart, does not convince me; life and death are what convince me. What convinces me is to see a being dear to you, who is bound up with you, before whom you were guilty and hoped to vindicate yourself” (Prince Andrei’s voice quavered and he turned away), “and suddenly this being suffers, agonizes, and ceases to be . . . Why?” (388–89)
On and on they argue. This hours-long debate starts in the little cottage on the lake where Andrei is currently living, and continues in a carriage ride to Bald Hills, and finally, on a ferry raft that transports them across a flooded river. To the astonishment of the lackeys, coachmen, and ferrymen, these two friends are still at it long after the horses have been hitched up on the other side of the river, the sun has already half disappeared, the evening frost has formed, and the stars have sprinkled the sky.
Even as Prince Andrei destroys Pierre’s every argument, denying the existence of an absolute morality or of divine order, refusing to acknowledge the possibility of life after death, and insisting that he himself has no more plans, the fact is, he is still planning; he still wants to believe. For no matter how much the “facts” of his own situation might convince him otherwise, he finds confirmation of Pierre’s glorious, future-oriented vision in each gentle wave that bumps up against the moored ferry raft on which they have been talking for hours in the stillness of this spring evening: “It seemed to Prince Andrei that this splash of waves made a refrain to Pierre’s words, saying: ‘It’s true, believe it’ ” (389). And indeed, stepping off the ferry, Andrei looks up at the sky Pierre pointed to earlier, and
for the first time since Austerlitz saw that high, eternal sky he had seen as he lay on the battlefield, and something long asleep, something that was best in him, suddenly awakened joyful and young in his soul. This feeling disappeared as soon as Prince Andrei re-entered the habitual conditions of life, but he knew that this feeling, which he did not know how to develop, lived in him. The meeting with Pierre marked an epoch for Prince Andrei, from which began what, while outwardly the same, was in his inner world a new life. (389)
Indeed, the seed Pierre has planted in time bears fruit, for in the next two years Prince Andrei will successfully bring about on his estate those very reforms against which he argued so passionately.
What I have always loved about these scenes on the ferry raft is how they encapsulate the optimism-grounded-in-reality that is at the heart of War and Peace. By no means does Tolstoy pull any punches with Pierre; as that little fiasco with his peasants demonstrates, he’s still got a lot to learn about how the world works. But then, the far more worldly Prince Andrei has an equally important lesson to learn from Pierre: true wisdom is as much about believing as it is about . . . “knowing.” By throwing himself into life completely and following that idealistic star of his, Pierre makes some foolish decisions along the way, sure, but he also manages to connect to the higher sort of truth that so often eludes his chronically skeptical friend. And it is ultimately through the power of his inspired state, rather than any particularly shrewd argument, that Pierre helps Prince Andrei do something he hasn’t been able to for quite some time: rediscover what is best in him and in the world.
We may be forgiven for suspecting that Andrei’s transformation won’t last any longer than that profound illumination he experienced at Austerlitz. Just as Pierre, for his part, will eventually descend back into one of his familiar depressive states. But so what? Life is movement and change, with none of us ever knowing for certain what the future holds. The excitement of reading Tolstoy’s novel, for me at least, lies in its masterly depiction of not only what life is, but also what it can be. Never could Pierre have foreseen that a chance encounter with a stranger at a train station would lead him out of his funk to one of the most important stages of his journey. Nor could Prince Andrei have guessed when he coldly greeted Pierre at his doorstep at Bogucharovo that many hours later he’d be looking back up at that high, eternal sky to sense possibilities for his life he hadn’t felt in some two years.
I’ve read War and Peace maybe fifteen times, and I still root for these characters, knowing ahead of time full well what will happen to them. I want to believe that Pierre is right about the possibility of universal brotherhood on earth, even as I shudder to think he might not be. I find myself hoping Prince Andrei will carry that glorious vision of the lofty infinite sky with him into the everyday of his remaining years on earth, even though I know he won’t . . .
Here they are, still asking the biggest, thorniest questions while others are predisposed to supply easy answers. To quote Dostoevsky’s description of Levin in Anna Karenina, these two young searchers, Pierre and Andrei, are examples of “those Russian people who must have the truth.”
And yet, no sooner than they think they’ve tracked down that mysterious it, reached a coveted goal, or achieved an ideal of perfection, life hits them over the head, suggesting otherwise: “Nope, not quite there yet.” So they keep marching on, through every thicket of disillusionment or despair, persisting in their quest for perfection in a universe that inevitably has other plans.