The Comfort of Avoidance — War and Peace

The Bible legend tells us that the absence of labour, idleness, was a condition of the first man's blessedness before the Fall. Fallen man has retained a love of idleness, but the curse weighs on the race not only because we have to seek our bread in the sweat of our brows, but because our moral nature is such that we cannot be both idle and at ease. An inner voice tells us we are in the wrong if we are idle. If man could find a state in which he felt that though idle he was fulfilling his duty, he would have found one of the conditions of man's primitive blessedness. And such a state of obligatory and irreproachable idleness is the lot of a whole class, the military. The chief attraction of military service has consisted and will consist in this compulsory and irreproachable idleness. Nicholas Rostóv experienced this blissful condition to the full when, after 1807, he continued to serve in the Pávlograd regiment, in which he already commanded the squadron he had taken over from Denísov.

He has become a bluff, good-natured fellow, whom his Moscow acquaintances would have considered rather bad form, but who is liked and respected by his comrades, subordinates, and superiors, and is well contented with his life. Of late, in 1809, he finds in letters from home more frequent complaints from his mother that their affairs are falling into greater and greater disorder, and that it is time for him to come back to gladden and comfort his old parents. Reading these letters, Nicholas feels a dread of their wanting to take him away from surroundings in which, protected from all the entanglements of life, he has been living so calmly and quietly. He feels that sooner or later he will have to re-enter that whirlpool of life, with its embarrassments and affairs to be straightened out, its accounts with stewards, quarrels, and intrigues, its ties, society, and with Sónya's love and his promise to her. It is all dreadfully difficult and complicated; and he replies to his mother in cold, formal letters in French, beginning My dear Mamma and ending Your obedient son, which say nothing of when he would return. In 1810 he receives letters from his parents in which they tell him of Natásha's engagement to Bolkónski, and that the wedding would be in a year's time because the old prince made difficulties. This letter grieves and mortifies him. He is sorry that Natásha, for whom he cares more than for anyone else in the family, should be lost to the home; and secondly, from his hussar point of view, he regrets not to have been there to show that fellow Bolkónski that connection with him was no such great honour after all, and that if he loved Natásha he might dispense with permission from his dotard father.

He finally applies for leave after saddling the vicious Mars, and is sent off by hussars with hurrahs and two bands. Homecoming brings rapture then flatness. He finds parents aged by worry, Sónya's steady love, Natásha transformed yet oddly calm about Andrew's distant December letters. Once, when he has touched on this topic with his mother, he discovers, to his surprise and somewhat to his satisfaction, that in the depth of her soul she too has doubts about this marriage. You see he writes, she says, showing a letter of Prince Andrew's, with that latent grudge a mother always has in regard to a daughter's future married happiness, he writes that he won't come before December. What can be keeping him? Illness, probably. His health is very delicate. Don't tell Natásha. And don't attach importance to her being so bright: that's because she's living through the last days of her girlhood, but I know what she is like every time we receive a letter from him. However, God grant that everything turns out well. She always ends with these words. He is an excellent man.