The Weight of Unfinished Business — War and Peace

After his interview with Pierre in Moscow, Prince Andrew goes to Petersburg, on business as he tells his family, but really to meet Anatole Kurágin. Pierre has warned his brother-in-law; Anatole obtains an appointment from the Minister of War and leaves for the army in Moldavia. Andrew, thinking a challenge without fresh cause might compromise Natásha, wants a pretext from a personal meeting. In Petersburg he meets Kutúzov, always well disposed, who suggests he accompany him to Turkey as commander in chief. Andrew receives a staff appointment and goes. He fails to find Kurágin there too: soon after Andrew arrives, Anatole returns to Russia.

In a new country, life is easier to bear. After the broken faith, which he feels more acutely the more he conceals it, the surroundings in which he was happy become trying, and the freedom he once prized still more so. He can no longer think the thoughts that came as he lay looking at the sky at Austerlitz and later enlarged with Pierre; he dreads even to recall the bright horizons. The lofty canopy has become a low solid vault, clear but without mystery. Army service is the simplest activity. As a general on duty he surprises Kutúzov by zeal and accuracy. He knows that when he meets Kurágin he will not resist calling him out, any more than a ravenous man can help snatching food, and the unspent rancor poisons the artificial tranquillity of restless, rather vainglorious work.

In 1812, when news of war reaches Bucharest, where Kutúzov has been living two months with a Wallachian woman, Andrew asks transfer to the Western Army. Kutúzov, weary of an activity that seems to reproach his own idleness, readily lets him go with a mission to Barclay de Tolly. On the way Andrew stops at Bald Hills, unchanged as an enchanted castle: same gates, furniture, smell, timid faces only somewhat older. Mary is still the plain maiden passing her best years in fear; Bourienne more self-confident; Dessalles in a Russian coat still pedantic; the old prince missing a tooth, more irritable. Only little Nicholas has grown, lifting his upper lip like his mother. Inwardly the house has split into hostile camps: the old prince, Bourienne, and the architect against Mary, Dessalles, the child, and the old nurses. At dinner they are ill at ease. That evening the old prince blames Mary for superstition and for disliking the only person attached to him. Andrew, asked, says for the first time in his life that he cannot blame his sister; the one to blame is that Frenchwoman. The old man stares, shows the gap in his teeth, then cries that Andrew must be off, not a trace remaining.

Mary persuades him to stay another day. He does not see his father. Next morning he takes his son on his knee to tell Bluebeard, falls into a reverie, and is horrified to find in himself neither remorse for the quarrel nor the old tenderness for the boy. He puts him down and goes. Mary entreats him to forgive, looking at the air above his head as at a familiar portrait: sorrow is sent by God; men are His instruments. If he were a woman he would; a man cannot. Her plea to forgive Kurágin only convinces him he ought long ago to have punished him. He drives out thinking he is off to the army to meet a man he despises, to give him a chance to kill and laugh at him. Life's conditions are the same as before, but they have tumbled to pieces; only senseless things present themselves, one after another.