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Analysis of the novel "War and Peace" by Tolstoy L. N.
Analysis / Tolstoy L. N. / War and Peace
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The image of the inner world of a person in one of the works of Russian literature of the XIX century (based on the novel "War and Peace"by Leo Tolstoy) Option 2 The image of the inner world of a person in one of the works of Russian literature of the XIX century (based on the novel "War and Peace"by Leo Tolstoy) Option 1 The image of the people in the novel "War and Peace" by L. N. Tolstoy The system of characters in the novel "War and Peace" by L. N. Tolstoy Analysis of the novel "War and Peace" by L. N. Tolstoy
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THE PROBLEM OF THE GENRE.
Tolstoy found it difficult to determine the genre of his main work.
"This is not a novel, even less a poem, even less a historical chronicle," he wrote in the article " A few words about the book "War and Peace" (1868), adding that in general "in the new period of Russian literature there is not a single prose work of fiction that comes out of mediocrity a little, which would fit perfectly into the form of a novel, poem or story."
The poem was meant, of course, prose, Gogol's, focused on ancient epics and at the same time on a picaresque novel about modernity.
The novel, as it developed in the West, was traditionally understood as a multi event narrative with a developed plot about what happened to one person or several people who are given significantly more attention than others — not about their usual, regular life, but about a more or less long incident with a beginning and an end, most often happy, consisting in the hero's marriage to his beloved, less often unhappy, when the hero died.
Even in the problematic Russian novel that preceded "War and Peace“, there is a” one power" of the hero and the finales are relatively traditional.
In Tolstoy, as in Dostoevsky “ "the sole power of the central person is practically absent”" and the novel plot seems to him artificial:"...I can not and do not know how to put certain boundaries to the persons I have fictitious such as marriage or death, after which the interest of the narrative would be destroyed.
It involuntarily seemed to me that the death of one person only aroused interest in other persons, and marriage seemed to be mostly a tie, and not a denouement of interest.”
"War and Peace", of course, is not a historical chronicle, although Tolstoy pays great attention to history.
It is estimated that " Episodes from history and arguments in which historical questions are developed occupy 186 chapters out of 333 chapters of the book,” while only 70 chapters are related to the line of Andrei Bolkonsky.
There are especially many historical chapters in the third and fourth volumes.
So, in the second part of the fourth volume, four chapters out of nineteen are related to Pierre Bezukhov, the rest are entirely military historical.
Philosophical, journalistic and historical arguments occupy four chapters at the beginning of the first part of the epilogue and the entire second part of it.
However, reasoning is not a sign of a chronicle, a chronicle is primarily a statement of events.
There are signs of a chronicle in “War and Peace”, but not so much historical as family.
Characters are rarely represented in literature by whole families.
Tolstoy also talks about the Bolkonsky, Bezukhov, Rostov, Kuragin, Drubetsky families, mentions the Dolokhov family (although outside the family this hero behaves like an individualist and egoist).
The first three families, faithful to the family spirit, are finally related, which is very important, and the official relationship of Pierre, who married Helene out of weakness, with the soulless Kuragins is liquidated by life itself.
But the family chronicle “War and Peace " can not be reduced in any way.
Meanwhile, Tolstoy compared his book with the Iliad, i.e. with an ancient epic.
The essence of the ancient epic is “the primacy of the general over the individual”.
It tells about the glorious past, about events not just significant, but important for large human communities, peoples.
A separate hero exists in it as an exponent (or antagonist) of the general life.
The obvious signs of an epic beginning in "War and Peace" are a large volume and a problem themed encyclopedia.
But, of course, Tolstoy's worldview was very far from the people of the "age of heroes" and he considered the very concept of “hero” unacceptable for the artist.
His characters are self valuable personalities, by no means embodying any extrapersonal collective norms.
In the XX century.
"War and Peace" is often called an epic novel.
This sometimes raises objections, assertions that "the leading genre forming principle of Tolstoy's "book" should still be recognized as a "personal" thought, basically not epic, but novelistic, "especially" the first volumes of the work, devoted primarily to family life and the personal destinies of the characters, are not dominated by the epic, but by the novel, although unconventional."
Of course, the principles of the ancient epic are not literally used in” War and Peace".
And yet, along with the novel beginning, there is also an original epic opposite to it, only they do not complement each other, but turn out to be interpenetrable, creating a certain new quality, an unprecedented artistic synthesis.
According to Tolstoy, individual self affirmation of a person is detrimental to his personality.
Only in unity with others, with the “common life”, can he develop and improve himself, receive a truly worthy reward for his efforts and searches in this direction. .
V. A. Nedzvetsky rightly noted: "The world of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy's novels is built for the first time in Russian prose on a mutually directed movement and interest in each other of the individual and the people.”
Tolstoy has a synthesis of novel and epic beginnings.
Therefore, there are still reasons to call "War and Peace" a historical novel an epic, bearing in mind that both components in this synthesis are radically updated and transformed.
The world of the archaic epic is closed in itself, absolute, self sufficient, detached from other epochs, “rounded”.
Tolstoy's personification of " all Russian, good and round” (vol. 4, Part 1, Chapter XIII) is Platon Karataev, a good soldier in the ranks and a typical peasant, an absolutely peaceful man in captivity.
His life is harmonious in all situations.
After Pierre Bezukhov, who was expecting death himself, saw the shooting, “this is a terrible murder committed by people who did not want to do it,” his faith in the improvement of the world, in the human soul, in his soul, and in God was destroyed, although he did not realize it.”
But after talking with Plato, falling asleep beside him calmed down, he " felt that the previously destroyed world was now being built up in his soul with a new beauty, on some new and unshakable foundations” (vol. 4, part 1, ch. XII).
The orderliness of the world is characteristic of its epic state.
But in this case, the ordering takes place in one soul, which absorbs the world.
This is completely out of the spirit of ancient epics.
Internally, in the epic picture of the world, the image is a symbol of a water ball that Pierre dreamed of.
It has a stable solid body shape and has no corners.
“The idea of the circle is related to the peasant world of the community with its social isolation, mutual responsibility, specific limitations (which is reflected through the influence of Karataev in limiting Pierre's horizons to the nearest business).
At the same time, the circle is an aesthetic figure, with which the idea of the achieved perfection is associated from time immemorial” (1, p.245), writes one of the best researchers of “War and Peace” S. G. Bocharov.
In Christian culture, the circle symbolizes the sky and at the same time the highly aspiring human spirit.
However, firstly, the ball that Pierre dreams of is not only constant, but also differs in the inescapable variability of the liquid (merging and separating drops again).
The stable and the changeable appear in an indissoluble unity.
Secondly, the ball in "War and Peace" is a symbol not so much of the available, but of the ideal, desired reality.
Tolstoy's searching heroes never calm down on the path that introduces them to eternal, permanent spiritual values.
As S. G. Bocharov notes, in the epilogue, the conservative landowner and limited person Nikolai Rostov, not Pierre, is close to the peasant world of the community and to the land.
Natasha has withdrawn into the family circle, but admires her husband, whose interests are much broader, while Pierre and 15 year old Nikolenka Bolkonsky, the true son of their father, are experiencing acute dissatisfaction, ready to go far beyond the surrounding, stable life circle in their aspirations.
The new activity of Bezukhov "would not have been approved by Karataev, but he would have approved of Pierre's family life; this is how the small world, the home circle, where the acquired good looks are preserved, and the big world, where the circle again opens into a line, a path, the "world of thought" and endless striving are resumed."
Pierre cannot be like Karataev, because the Karataev world is self sufficient and impersonal.
“My name is Plato; Karataev's nickname” " he introduces himself to Pierre, immediately including himself in the community, in this case family.
Love for everyone for him excludes the high price of individuality.
"Karataev had no attachments, friendship, love, as Pierre understood them, but he loved and lived lovingly with everything that life brought him to, and in particular... with those people who were before his eyes.
He loved his mutt, he loved his comrades, the French, he loved Pierre, who was his neighbor; but Pierre felt that Karataev, despite all his affectionate tenderness for him...
I wouldnot be saddened for a minute by parting with him.
And Pierre began to feel the same feeling for Karataev” (vol. 4, part 1, chapter XIII).
Then Pierre, like all the other prisoners, does not even try to support and save Plato, who is ill on the way, leaves him, who will now be shot by the guards, acts as Plato himself would have done.
Karataev's " roundness” is the momentary completeness and self sufficiency of existence.
For Pierre, with his spiritual search, in his natural environment, such a fullness of being is not enough.
In the epilogue, Pierre, arguing with the irrational, self contained Rostov, not only confronts Nikolai, but is also concerned about his fate, as well as the fate of Russia and humanity. ”
It seemed to him at that moment that he was called upon to give a new direction to the whole Russian society and the whole world, "Tolstoy writes, not without condemning “his self satisfied reasoning" (epilogue, part 1, Chapter XVI).
The "new direction" turns out to be inseparable from conservatism.
Criticizing the government, Pierre also wants to help him by creating a secret society.
“The society may not be secret, if the government allows it.
It is not only not hostile to the government, but it is a society of real conservatives.
A society of gentlemen in the full meaning of the word.
We are just so that tomorrow Pugachev does not come to kill both my and your children, "Pierre says to Nikolai," and so that Arakcheev does not send me to a military settlement, we are only taking hand in hand, with the same goal of the common good and common security” (epilogue, part 1, chapter XIV).
Nikolai Rostov's wife has her own internal problems, which is much deeper than her husband.
"The soul of Countess Mary has always aspired to the infinite, eternal and perfect, and therefore could never be at rest” (epilogue, part 1, chapter XV).
This is very Tolstoyan: eternal anxiety in the name of the absolute.
The world of the epic novel as a whole is stable and defined in its outlines, but it is not closed, it is not complete.
War exposes this world to cruel trials, brings suffering and heavy losses (the best die: prince Andrew, who has just begun to live and loves everyone, Petya Rostov, who also loves everyone, although otherwise, Karataev), but trials also strengthen what is really strong, and the evil and unnatural suffers defeat.
“Until the twelfth year broke out,”writes S. G. Bocharov, " it might have seemed that intrigue, the play of interests, the Kuraginsky principle prevailed over the deep necessity of life; but in the situation of the twelfth year, intrigue is doomed to failure, and this is shown in the most diverse facts, between which there is an internal connection — and in the fact that poor Sonya must lose and innocent tricks will not help her, and in the pitiful death of Helene entangled in intrigues, and in the imminent defeat of Napoleon, his grandiose intrigues, his adventures, which he wants to impose on the world and turn into a world law."
The end of the war is the restoration of the normal flow of life.
Everything is being sorted out.
Tolstoy's heroes pass the tests with honor, they come out of them more pure and deep than they were.
Their sadness for the dead is peaceful, bright.
Of course, such an understanding of life is akin to an epic one.
But this is not a heroic epic in the original sense, but an idyllic one.
Tolstoy accepts life as it is, despite his sharply critical attitude to everything that separates people, makes them individualists, despite the fact that there are a lot of dramatic and tragic things in the trials of an idyllic world.
The epilogue promises the heroes new challenges, but the tone of the finale is bright, because life in general is good and indestructible.
For Tolstoy, there is no hierarchy of life events.
Historical and personal life in his understanding are phenomena of the same order.
Therefore “ "every historical fact must be explained in a human way..."
Everything is connected with everything.
The impressions of the Battle of Borodino leave a feeling of this universal connection in Pierre's subconscious.
"The most difficult thing (Pierre continued to think or hear in a dream) is to be able to combine the meaning of everything in your soul.
Connect everything?
Pierre said to himself.
— No, I donot want to connect it.
You canot connect thoughts, but to combine all these thoughts -that's what you need!
Yes, it is necessary to match, it is necessary to match!”
It turns out that someone's voice at this time repeats several times that it is necessary, it's time to harness (vol.3, part 3, Chapter IX), i.e. the key word is suggested to Pierre's subconscious by a similar word that his tutor pronounces when waking his master.
Thus, in the epic novel, the global laws of being and the most subtle movements of individual human psychology are “interfaced”.
THE MEANING OF THE WORD “WORLD".
Although in Tolstoy's time the word “peace” was printed in the title of his book as “peace”, and not “world”, thereby meaning only the absence of war, in fact, in the epic novel, the meanings of this word, going back to one original, are numerous and diverse.
This is the whole world (the universe), and humanity, and the national world, and the peasant community, and other forms of uniting people, and what is beyond this or that community — so, for Nikolai Rostov, after losing 43 thousand to Dolokhov, “the whole world was divided into two uneven departments: one is our Pavlograd regiment, and the other is everything else.”
For him, certainty is always important.
It is in the shelf.
He decided to " serve well and be quite an excellent comrade and officer, that is, a wonderful person, which seemed so difficult in the world, and so possible in the regiment” (vol. 2, part 2, ch. XV).
At the beginning of the war of 1812, Natasha was deeply moved by the words “let us pray to the Lord in peace” in the church, she understands this as the absence of hostility, as the unity of people of all classes.
"World” can mean a way of life, a worldview, a type of perception, a state of consciousness.
Princess Mary, who was forced to live and act independently on the eve of her father's death “ " was embraced by another world of everyday, difficult and free activity, completely opposite to the moral world in which she was imprisoned before and in which prayer was the best consolation” (vol. 3, part 2, ch. VIII).
The wounded Prince Andrew " wanted to return to the former world of pure thought, but he could not, and delirium drew him into his own region” (vol. 3, part 3, ch. XXXII).
Princess Mary felt in the words, tone, and look of her dying brother “a terrible alienation from everything worldly for a living person” (vol. 4, part 1, chapter XV).
In the epilogue, Countess Mary is jealous of her husband's economic pursuits, because she cannot " understand the joys and sorrows brought to him by this separate, alien world for her” (part 1, chapter VII).
And it goes on to say “ " As in every real family, several completely different worlds lived together in the Lysogorsky house, which, each retaining its own peculiarity and making concessions to one another, merged into one harmonious whole.
Every event that happened in the house was equally important joyfully or sadly for all these worlds; but each world had its own reasons, independent of the others, to rejoice or be sad about any event” (ch. XII).
Thus, the range of meanings of the word “peace “in” War and Peace " is from the universe, the cosmos to the inner state of an individual hero.
The macrocosm and the microcosm are indissoluble in Tolstoy.
Not only in the Lysogorsky house of Marya and Nikolai Rostov — throughout the book, many and diverse worlds merge “into one harmonious whole", according to an unprecedented genre.
THE IDEA OF UNITY.
The connection of everything with everything in " War and Peace” is not only stated and demonstrated in various forms.
It is actively established as a moral, in general, life ideal.
"Natasha and Nikolai, Pierre and Kutuzov, Platon Karataev and Princess Mary are sincerely disposed to all people without exception and expect everyone to respond with goodwill” [8, p. 23], writes V. E. Khalizev.
For these characters, such a relationship is not even an ideal, but the norm.
Prince Andrew, who is not devoid of prudery, constantly reflecting, is much more self contained and focused on his own.
At first, he thinks about his personal career and fame.
But he understands fame as the love of many strangers for him.
Later, Bolkonsky tries to participate in state reforms for the benefit of the same people unknown to him, for the whole country, now not for the sake of his career.
One way or another, being together with others is extremely important for him, he thinks about this in a moment of spiritual enlightenment after visiting the Rostovs in Otradnoye, after accidentally overhearing Natasha's enthusiastic words about a beautiful night, addressed to Sonya, who is much colder and more indifferent than she is (here is almost a pun: Sonya sleeps and wants to sleep), and two “meetings” with an old oak tree, first not yielding to spring and the sun, and then transformed under fresh foliage.
Not so long ago, Andrei told Pierre that he was only trying to avoid illness and remorse, i.e., directly concerning only him personally.
This was the result of disappointment in life after he had to experience a wound and captivity instead of the expected glory, and his return home coincided with the death of his wife (he did not love her much, but that's why he knows remorse).
"No, life is not over at the age of thirty — one," Prince Andrew suddenly decided definitively, irrevocably.
— Not only do I know all that is in me, it is necessary that all knew this; and Pierre, and the girl who wanted to fly away, it is necessary to know me not for me my life was taking, not so they lived like this girl, whatever my life to be reflected in theirs, and that they all lived with me!” (t 2, CH. 3, CH. III).
In the foreground in this internal monologue — I, my, but the main, summing up word - "together".
Among the forms of unity of people, Tolstoy especially distinguishes two — family and national.
Most of the Rostovs are, to a certain extent, a single collective image.
Sonya turns out to be ultimately alien to this family not because she is only the niece of Count Ilya Andreevich.
She is loved in the family as the most native person.
But both her love for Nikolai and her sacrifice the rejection of her claims to marry him — are more or less forced, constructed in a limited and far from poetic simplicity mind.
And for Vera, it becomes quite natural to marry a calculating Berg, who is nothing like the Rostovs.
In fact, the Kuragins are an imaginary family, although Prince Vasily cares about his children, arranges a career or marriage for them in accordance with secular ideas of success, and they are in solidarity with each other in their own way: the story of the attempted seduction and abduction of Natasha Rostova by the already married Anatole was not without the participation of Helen. ”
Oh, a vile, heartless breed! "
exclaims Pierre at the sight of a" timid and mean smile” Anatole, whom he asked to leave, offering money for the road (vol. 2, part 5, ch. XX).
The Kuraginsky " breed” is not at all the same as a family, Pierre knows this all too well.
Platon Karataev, who is married to Helene Pierre, first of all asks about his parents — the fact that Pierre does not have a mother especially upsets him — and when he hears that he does not have “children”, he is upset again, resorts to purely folk consolation: “Well, young people, God willing, they will still be.
If only we could live in the council... " (vol . 4, part 1, chapter XII).
There is just no” Council " in sight.
In Tolstoy's artistic world, such complete egoists as Helen with her debauchery or Anatole cannot and should not have children.
And after Andrei Bolkonsky, there is a son, although his young wife died in childbirth and the hope for a second marriage turned into a personal disaster.
The plot of “War and Peace”, opened directly into life, ends with the dreams of the young Nikolenka about the future, whose dignity is measured by the high criteria of the past — the authority of the father who died from a wound: "Yes, I will do something that even he would be satisfied with...” (epilogue, part 1, chapter XVI).
The exposure of the main antihero of “War and Peace”, Napoleon, is also carried out with the help of “family” themes.
Before the Battle of Borodino, he receives a gift from the Empress — an allegorical portrait of his son playing in bilbok (“The ball represented the globe, and the wand in the other hand represented the scepter”), “a boy born of Napoleon and the daughter of the Austrian emperor, who for some reason everyone called the king of Rome.”
For the sake of “history” Napoleon, “with his greatness” ""showed, in contrast to this greatness, the simplest paternal tenderness”" and Tolstoy sees in this only a feigned " kind of thoughtful tenderness” (vol. 3, part 2, ch. XXVI).
” Family " relations for Tolstoy are not necessarily related.
Natasha, dancing to the guitar of a poor landowner, " uncle”, who plays “Along the street of the bridge...", is mentally close to him, as well as to everyone present, regardless of the degree of kinship.
She, the Countess, "brought up by a French emigrant”" in silk and velvet”, “was able to understand everything that was in Anisya, and in Anisya's father, and in her aunt, and in her mother, and in every Russian person” (vol. 2, part 4, chapter VII).
The previous hunting scene, during which Ilya Andreevich Rostov, who missed the wolf, endured the emotional abuse of the hunter Danila — is also proof that the” kindred " atmosphere for the Rostovs sometimes overcomes very high social barriers.
According to the law of " conjugation” this branched scene turns out to be an artistic preview of the image of the Patriotic War.
"Isnot close all Danilin appearance of the image of "the cudgel of the people's war"?
On the hunt, where he was a major figure, depended on its success, the farmer, the hunter, just for a moment became Lord of his master that hunting was useless" [2, p. 31] — said S. G. Bocharov, next on the example of the image of the chief of Moscow graph rastopchina revealing the weakness and futility of the actions of the "historical" character.
At the Rayevsky battery, where Pierre falls during the Battle of Borodino, before the start of hostilities, “there was the same and common to all, as if a family revival” (vol.3, part 2, ch. XXXI).
The soldiers immediately dubbed the stranger “our master”, as the soldiers of the regiment of Andrei Bolkonsky their commander - "our prince".
"There is a similar atmosphere at the Tushin battery during the battle of Shengrabensky, as well as in the partisan detachment when Petya Rostov comes there," V. E. Khalizev points out.
- Let us recall in this connection Natasha Rostova, who helped the wounded during the days of departure from Moscow: she “liked these relations with new people, outside of the usual living conditions.”..
the similarity between the family and similar "swarm" communities is also important: both are non hierarchical and free ...
The readiness of Russian people, primarily peasants and soldiers, for non forced free unity is most similar to the "Rostov " nepotism" [8, p. 52].
Tolstoy's unity does not at all mean the dissolution of individuality in the mass.
The forms of unity of people approved by the writer are the opposite of a disordered and impersonal, inhuman crowd.
The crowd is shown in scenes of soldiers ' panic, when the defeat of the allied army in the battle of Austerlitz became obvious, Alexander I's arrival in Moscow after the outbreak of the Patriotic War (the episode with biscuits that the tsar throws from the balcony to his subjects, literally seized with wild delight), the abandonment of Moscow by Russian troops, when Rastop chin gives it to the inhabitants to be torn to pieces by Vereshchagin, allegedly the culprit of what happened, etc.
The crowd is chaos, most often destructive, and the unity of people is deeply beneficial.
"During the battle of Shengrabensky (Tushin's battery) and the Battle of Borodino (Rayevsky's battery), as well as in the partisan detachments of Denisov and Dolokhov, everyone knew their "business, place and purpose".
The true order of a just, defensive war, according to Tolstoy, inevitably arises every time anew from human actions unintentional and unplanned: the will of the people in 1812 was realized independently of any military state requirements and sanctions" [8, p. 76].
Similarly, immediately after the death of the old prince Bolkonsky, Princess Mary did not need to make any orders: “God knows who and when took care of it, but everything happened as if by itself” (vol.3, part 2, ch. VIII).
The popular character of the War of 1812 clear to the soldiers.
From one of them, on the way out of Mozhaisk towards Borodin, Pierre hears a tongue tied speech: "They want to pile on all the people, one word is Moscow.
They want to make one end."
The author comments: "Despite the vagueness of the soldier's words, Pierre understood everything that he wanted to say... " (vol . 3, part 2, ch . XX).
After the battle, shaken, this purely non military man, belonging to the secular elite, seriously thinks about the absolutely impossible.
"To be a soldier, just a soldier!
Pierre thought, falling asleep.
- To enter into this common life with the whole being, to be imbued with what makes them so " (vol. 3, part 3, chapter IX).
Count Bezukhov, of course, will not become a soldier, but he will be captured along with the soldiers and will experience all the horrors and hardships that have fallen to their lot.
However, the idea to perform an absolutely individual romantic feat led to this — to stab Napoleon with a dagger, whose supporter Pierre declared himself at the beginning of the novel, when the newly born French emperor was an idol and a model for Andrei Bolkonsky.
In the clothes of a coachman and wearing glasses, Count Bezukhov wanders around Moscow occupied by the French in search of a conqueror, but instead of carrying out his impossible plan, he saves a little girl from a burning house and attacks the looters who robbed the Armenian woman with his fists.
Arrested, he gives the rescued girl for his daughter, “without knowing how this purposeless lie escaped from him” (vol. 3, part 3, ch. XXXIV).
The childless Pierre feels like a father, a member of some kind of superfamily.
The people are the army, the partisans, and the Smolensk merchant Ferapontov, who is ready to set fire to his own house so that the French do not get it, and the peasants who did not want to bring hay to the French for good money, but burned it, and the Muscovites who leave their homes, their hometown simply because they do not think themselves under the rule of the French, this is Pierre, and the Rostovs, who abandon their property and give up carts for the wounded at Natasha's request, and Kutuzov with his “popular feeling”.
Although, as it is estimated, only eight percent of the book is devoted to episodes with the participation of ordinary people, “only eight percent of the book is devoted to the topic of the people” (Tolstoy admitted that he described mainly the environment that he knew well), “these percentages will increase sharply if we take into account that, from Tolstoy's point of view, Vasily Denisov, Field Marshal Kutuzov, and finally — most importantly — himself, the author, express the people's soul and spirit no less than Platon Karataev or Tikhon Shcherbaty.”
At the same time, the author does not idealize the common people.
The revolt of the Bogucharovsky peasants against Princess Mary before the arrival of the French troops is also shown (however, these are such men who were especially restless before, and Rostov with the young Ilyin and the savvy Lavrushka managed to pacify them very easily).
After the French left Moscow, Cossacks, peasants from neighboring villages and returning residents, " finding it looted, also began to plunder.
They continued what the French were doing” (vol. 4, part 4, ch. XIV).
The militia regiments formed by Pierre and Mamonov (a characteristic association of a fictional character and a historical person) plundered Russian villages (vol. 4, part 1, chapter IV).
Spy Tikhon Shcherbaty is not only “the most useful and brave man in the party”, i.e. in Denisov's partisan detachment, but also capable of killing a captured Frenchman because he was "completely wrong” and" rude”.
When he said this, “his whole face stretched out into this
