“‘Go away. I don’t want to see you.’
“‘Mariana,’ said Olénin, coming nearer to her.
“‘You will never get any thing from me!”
“‘Mariana, don’t say so!’
“‘Go away, you hateful man!’ cried the young girl, stamping angrily, and starting towards him with a threatening gesture. Such anger, scorn, hatred, were expressed in her face that Olénin instantly saw that he had nothing more to hope for.”
He therefore goes away. The scene of his farewell with the old uncle Yeroshka has that exquisite pathos where smiles are mingled with tears. As a friendly gift at this solemn moment of separation, the old Kazak gives the young Russian some advice which will save his life in battles. He casts ridicule on the customs of the orthodox soldiers. “When you have to go into battle, or everywhere,—I am an old wolf, you see, who has seen every thing,—when they fire at you, don’t go into a crowd where there are many men. You see, when your fellows are a bit afraid, they all crowd together; and though it’s more sociable in a crowd, it is more dangerous, because a crowd gives a good mark.... I say sometimes, when I look at your soldiers, “I wonder at ’em. How stupid! They go straight on, all in a mass; and, what is worse, they wear red. How can they help getting killed?” And he breaks into tears as he kisses this young, “ever-wandering fool;” but he manages to extort from him a gun, to keep as a remembrance of him.
“Olénin looked round. Dyadya Yeroshka and Marianka were talking, evidently about their own affairs; and neither the old Kazak nor the young girl were looking at him.” (With these simple but pathetic words, the story ends.)
III.
An analysis mingled with characteristic quotations might be able to give some slight idea of the romance “Kazaki,” might give the reader a hint of its interest, its color, and its flavor of originality. An analysis of “War and Peace” can have no other aim, no other pretension, than to point out Tolstoï’s design in this colossal work, and separate the moralist’s tendencies from the story itself, which every one will want to read, and read again, in detail.
In “War and Peace,” amid a multitude of thoroughly interesting figures, there are three heroes who in some measure occupy the foreground, and who stand out clearly against a background of great variety, carefully studied, and peopled with living beings. These three characters are Andréi Bolkonsky, Nikolaï Rostof, and Pierre Bezúkhof. The last mentioned is not at first glance the one who is most attractive in outward appearances; but it is the one whose moral nature is most curious, the one in whom the author has expressed his own inmost views, the one who, in his eyes, best illustrates the striking faults and the fundamental virtues of a Russian nature. Bezúkhof’s qualities are exactly those of the men of the Slav race: he is good, gentle, loyal, compassionate; his faults are indolence, apathy, fickleness in his tastes, incapability of following a given course, inaptitude in realizing his own volitions.