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By Root 3897 0

had lived through during the execution had washed forever from his imagination and memory the anxious thoughts and feelings that had once seemed important to him. No thoughts of Russia, or of the war, or of politics, or of Napoleon came to him. It was obvious to him that all this did not concern him, that he was not called upon and therefore could not judge about all that. “Russia and hot weather don’t go together,” he repeated Karataev’s words, and those words strangely calmed him. His intention of killing Napoleon and his calculation of the kabbalistic number and the beast of the Apocalypse now seemed incomprehensible and even ridiculous to him. His anger with his wife and his anxiety about his name being disgraced now seemed to him not only insignificant, but amusing. What did he care about this woman leading the life she liked somewhere? What did it matter to anyone, especially to him, whether or not they found out that their prisoner’s name was Count Bezukhov?

He now often recalled his conversation with Prince Andrei and fully agreed with him, only he understood Prince Andrei’s thought slightly differently. Prince Andrei had thought and said that happiness can only be negative, but had said it with a shade of bitterness and irony. It was as if, in saying it, he was voicing another thought—that all striving for positive happiness had been put into us solely in order to torment us without giving satisfaction. But Pierre acknowledged the correctness of it without any second thoughts. The absence of suffering, the satisfaction of one’s needs, and the resulting freedom to choose one’s occupation, that is, one’s way of life, now seemed to Pierre the highest and most unquestionable human happiness. Here, only now, did Pierre fully appreciate for the first time the enjoyment of food when he wanted to eat, of drink when he wanted to drink, of sleep when he wanted to sleep, of warmth when he was cold, of talking to someone when he wanted to talk and to hear a human voice. The satisfaction of his needs—for good food, cleanliness, freedom—now that he was deprived of them all, seemed perfect happiness to Pierre, and the choice of an occupation, that is, of a life, now, when that choice was so limited, seemed to him such an easy matter that he forgot that a superfluity of life’s comforts destroys all the happiness of the satisfaction of one’s needs, and that a greater freedom to choose one’s occupation, the freedom which in this life was granted him by education, wealth, social position—precisely that freedom made the choice of an occupation insolubly difficult and destroyed the very need and possibility of an occupation.

All Pierre’s dreams were now turned to the time when he would be free. And yet afterwards and for the whole of his life Pierre thought and spoke with rapture of that month of captivity, of those irrevocable, strong, and joyful sensations, and above all of that full peace of mind, that perfect inner freedom, which he experienced only in that time.

When, on the first day, having gotten up early in the morning, he went out of the shed at dawn and saw the at first dark cupolas and crosses of the Novodevichye Convent, saw the frosty dew on the dusty grass, saw the heights of the Sparrow Hills, and the wooded bank meandering along the river and disappearing into the purple distance, when he sensed the touch of the fresh air and heard the noise of jackdaws flying across the field from Moscow, and when the light then suddenly sprayed from the east and the rim of the sun floated majestically from behind a cloud, and the cupolas, and the crosses, and the dew, and the distance, and the river, everything began to play in the joyful light—Pierre felt a new, never yet experienced feeling of the joy and strength of life.

And that feeling not only did not abandon him through all the time of his captivity, but, on the contrary, kept growing in him as the hardships of his situation increased.

That feeling of readiness for anything, of moral fitness, was maintained still more in Pierre by the high opinion of him which, soon after