War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [470]
“No, he hasn’t died, it can’t be!” Princess Marya said to herself, went up to him, and, overcoming the horror that seized her, pressed her lips to his cheek. But she drew back from him at once. Instantly the whole force of the tenderness for him which she felt in herself vanished and was replaced by a feeling of horror at what lay before her. “No, he’s no more! He’s no more, and in the place where he was there is something alien and hostile, some dreadful, terrifying, and repulsive mystery…” And, covering her face with her hands, Princess Marya fell into the arms of the doctor, who supported her.
In the presence of Tikhon and the doctor, the women washed what had been he, bound his head with a handkerchief so that the open mouth would not stiffen, and with another handkerchief bound together the legs, which were beginning to spread. Then they dressed the small, shriveled body in the uniform with decorations and laid it out on the table. God knows who took care of it or when, but everything got done as if by itself. Towards nighttime candles were burning around the coffin, on the coffin lay a pall, the floor was strewn with juniper boughs, under the dead man’s withered head a printed prayer had been placed, and in the corner sat a beadle reading the psalter.
As horses shy, crowd, and snort over a dead horse, so people crowded around the coffin in the drawing room—strangers and familiars, the marshal, and the headman, and peasant women—and all with a fixed and frightened gaze crossed themselves and bowed, and kissed the cold and stiffened hand of the old prince.13
IX
Bogucharovo, before Prince Andrei settled there, had always been an absentee estate, and the Bogucharovo peasants had quite a different character from those of Bald Hills. They differed from them in speech, dress, and disposition. They were called steppe folk. The old prince had praised them for their endurance at work when they came to help out with the harvest at Bald Hills or to dig ponds and ditches, but had disliked them for their wildness.
Prince Andrei’s last stay in Bogucharovo, with his innovations—clinics, schools, and the reducing of the quitrent—had not softened their disposition, but, on the contrary, had increased in them the traits of character which the old prince called wildness. Among them there was always some vague talk going around, now about enlisting them all as Cossacks, now about a new faith to which they were to be converted, now about some charters from the tsars, now about an oath to Pavel Petrovich in 1797 (of which it was said that they had already been granted their freedom then, but that the landowners had taken it away), now about Pyotr Feodorovich, who was to begin to reign in seven years,14 and under whom everything would be free and so simple that there would be nothing at all. The rumors of war and Bonaparte and his invasion combined for them with equally vague notions of the Antichrist, the end of the world, and pure freedom.
The neighborhood of Bogucharovo was all large villages belonging to the crown or to absentee landowners. Very few landowners actually lived there; there were also very few domestic and literate serfs, and in the lives of the peasants in this area there appeared, more noticeably and strongly than in others, those mysterious currents of popular Russian life the causes and meaning of which are inexplicable for contemporaries. One of those phenomena, which had manifested itself among the peasants of that locality twenty years before, was a movement to migrate to some “warm rivers.” Hundreds of peasants, Bogucharovo peasants among them, suddenly began selling their cattle and leaving with their families for somewhere in the southeast. As birds fly somewhere beyond the seas, these people, with their