Looking up at the numberless stars, he thinks, “And all this is mine, and all this is in me, and all this is me! . . . Count Rostov dances the Daniel Cooper at a ball, and “all who were in the ballroom looked with smiles of joy at the merry old man.” His son Nikolai has “that merry brotherly tenderness with which all fine young men treat everyone when they are happy.” The Rostov girls are “always smiling at something (probably their own happiness)” one of them, Natasha, loves to order the servants around, but they “liked carrying out Natasha’s orders as they did no one else’s.” The fat, naïve, bumbling hero of the novel, Pierre Bezukhov, is so infectious that footmen “joyfully rushed to help him off with his cloak and take his stick and hat.” We cannot resist these people, and they cannot resist themselves: Nikolai goes to war “because he could not resist the wish to go galloping across a level field,” and when the French start running toward him he is amazed that anyone would want to kill him: “To kill me? Me, whom everybody loves so?” Likewise, when Pierre is captured by the French he has a revelation of infinity that is also a revelation of his own infinity. As his characters infect each other with the high temperature of their existence, so they infect us. It is to succumb to the contagion of vitality. That is how it feels to be caught up in the bright sweep of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”: alive, and very much so. “Alive, and very much so,” Tolstoy’s diary entry for November 19, 1889, begins. Photograph from Novosti / Camera Press / Retna Ltd. Tolstoy can seem at once an intrusive narrator, telling us what to think, and an absent one, letting the world speak for itself.
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