out on the steps in default of a balcony. “Come, let us argue the matter,” said Prince Andrey. “You talk of schools,” he went on, crooking one finger, “instruction, and so forth, that is, you want to draw him” (he pointed to a peasant who passed by them taking off his cap), “out of his animal condition and to give him spiritual needs, but it seems to me that the only possible happiness is animal happiness, and you want to deprive him of it. I envy him, while you are trying to make him into me, without giving him my circumstances. Another thing you speak of is lightening his toil. But to my notions, physical labour is as much a necessity for him, as much a condition of his existence, as intellectual work is for me and for you. You can’t help thinking. I go to bed at three o’clock, thoughts come into my mind, and I can’t go to sleep; I turn over, and can’t sleep till morning, because I’m thinking, and I can’t help thinking, just as he can’t help ploughing and mowing. If he didn’t, he would go to the tavern, or become ill. Just as I could not stand his terrible physical labour, but should die of it in a week, so he could not stand my physical inactivity, he would grow fat and die. The third thing—what was it you talked about?”
Prince Andrey crooked his third finger.
“Oh, yes, hospitals, medicine. He has a fit and dies, but you have him bled and cure him. He will drag about an invalid for ten years, a burden to every one. It would be ever so much simpler and more comfortable for him to die. Others are born, and there are always plenty. If you grudge losing a labourer—that’s how I look at him—but you want to cure him from love for him. But he has no need of that. And besides, what a notion that medicine has ever cured any one! Killed them—yes!” he said, scowling and turning away from Pierre.
Prince Andrey gave such a clear and precise utterance to his ideas that it was evident he had thought more than once of this already, and he talked rapidly and eagerly, as a man does who has long been silent. His eyes grew keener, the more pessimistic were the views he expressed.
“Oh, this is awful, awful!” said Pierre. “I don’t understand how one can live with such ideas. I have had moments of thinking like that; it was not long ago at Moscow and on a journey, but then I become so abject that I don’t live at all, everything’s hateful to me … myself, most of all. Then I don’t eat, I don’t wash … how can you go on? …”
“Why not wash, that’s not clean,” said Prince Andrey; “on the contrary, one has to try and make one’s life more agreeable as far as one can. I’m alive, and it’s not my fault that I am, and so I have to try without hurting others to get on as well as I can till death.”
“But what impulse have you to live with such ideas? You would sit still without stirring, taking no part in anything.…”
“Life won’t leave you in peace even so. I should be glad to do nothing, but here you see on one side, the local nobility have done me the honour of electing me a marshal; it was all I could do to get out of it. They could not understand that I haven’t what’s needed, haven’t that good-natured, fussy vulgarity we all know so well, that’s needed for it. Then there’s this house here, which had to be built that I might have a nook of my own where I could be quiet. Now there’s the militia.”
“Why aren’t you serving in the army?”
“After Austerlitz!” said Prince Andrey gloomily. “No, thank you; I swore to myself that I would never serve in the Russian army again. And I will not, if Bonaparte were stationed here at Smolensk, threatening Bleak Hills! even then I wouldn’t serve in the Russian army. Well, so I was saying,” Prince Andrey went on, regaining his composure. “Now, there’s the militia; my father’s commander-in-chief of the third circuit, and the only means for me to escape from active service is to serve under him.”
“So you are in the service, then?”
“Yes.” He was silent for a while.