War And Peace

NOTES

1 Cited in Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers, edited by Henry Hardy and Aileen Kelly (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1994), pp. 32—3.

2 From ‘Silence’ (1857) in N. A. Nekrasov, Sochineniia (3 vols., Moscow, 1959), Vol. I, p. 201.

VOLUME I

PART I

CHAPTER 1

‘Well, Prince, Genoa and Lucca are now nothing more than estates taken over by the Buonaparte family.¹ No, I give you fair warning. If you won’t say this means war, if you will allow yourself to condone all the ghastly atrocities perpetrated by that Antichrist – yes, that’s what I think he is – I shall disown you. You’re no friend of mine – not the “faithful slave” you claim to be . . . But how are you? How are you keeping? I can see I’m intimidating you. Do sit down and talk to me.’

These words were spoken (in French) one evening in July 1805 by the well-known Anna Pavlovna Scherer, maid of honour and confidante of the Empress Maria Fyodorovna, as she welcomed the first person to arrive at her soirée, Prince Vasily Kuragin, a man of high rank and influence. Anna Pavlovna had had a cough for the last few days and she called it la grippe – grippe being a new word not yet in common currency. A footman of hers in scarlet livery had gone around that morning delivering notes written in French, each saying precisely the same thing:

If you have nothing better to do, Count (or Prince), and if the prospect of spending an evening with a poor sick lady is not too unnerving, I shall be delighted to see you at my residence between seven and ten. ANNETTE SCHERER

‘My goodness, what a violent attack!’ replied the prince, who had only just come in and was not in the least put out by this welcome. Dressed in his embroidered court uniform with knee-breeches, shoes and stars across his chest, he looked at her with a flat face of undisturbed serenity. His French was the elegant tongue of our grandparents, who used it for thought as well as speech, and it carried the soft tones of condescension that come naturally to an eminent personage grown old in high society and at court. He came up to Anna Pavlovna and kissed her hand, presenting to her a perfumed and glistening bald pate, and then seated himself calmly on the sofa.

‘First things first,’ he said. ‘How are you, my dear friend? Put my mind at rest.’ His voice remained steady, and his tone, for all its courtesy and sympathy, implied indifference and even gentle mockery.

‘How can one feel well when one is . . . suffering in a moral sense? Can any sensitive person find peace of mind nowadays?’ said Anna Pavlovna. ‘I do hope you’re staying all evening.’

‘Well, there is that reception at the English Ambassador’s. It’s Wednesday. I must show my face,’ said the prince. ‘My daughter is coming to take me there.’

‘I thought tonight’s festivities had been cancelled. I must say all these celebrations and fireworks are becoming rather tedious.’

‘If they had known you wanted the celebration cancelled, it would have been,’ said the prince with the predictability of a wound-up clock. Sheer habit made him say things he didn’t even mean.

‘Stop teasing me. Come on, tell me what’s been decided about Novosiltsev’s dispatch?² You know everything.’

‘What is there to tell?’ replied the prince in a cold, bored tone. ‘What’s been decided? They’ve decided that Bonaparte has burnt his boats, and I rather think we’re getting ready to burn ours.’

Prince Vasily always spoke languidly, like an actor declaiming a part from an old play. Anna Pavlovna Scherer was just the opposite – all verve and excitement, despite her forty years. To be an enthusiast had become her special role in society, and she would sometimes wax enthusiastic when she didn’t feel like it, so as not to frustrate the expectations of those who knew her. The discreet smile that never left her face, though it clashed with her faded looks, gave her the appearance of a spoilt child with a charming defect that she was well aware of, though she neither wished nor felt able to correct it, nor even thought it necessary to do so.