Everyone who has read _War and Peace_ remembers, of course, the hard experiences of Pierre, and his friendship with the soldier Karatáeff. One feels that Tolstóy is full of admiration for the quiet philosophy of this man of the people,--a typical representative of the ordinary, common-sense Russian peasant. Some literary critics concluded that Tolstóy was preaching in Karatáeff a sort of Oriental fatalism. In the present writer’s opinion there is nothing of the sort. Karatáeff, who is a consistent pantheist, simply knows that there are natural calamities, which it is impossible to resist; and he knows that the miseries which befall him--his personal sufferings, and eventually the shooting of a number of prisoners among whom to-morrow he may or may not be included--are the unavoidable consequences of a much greater event: the armed conflict between nations, which, once it has begun, must unroll itself with all its revolting but absolutely ungovernable consequences. Karatáeff acts as one of those cows on the slope of an Alpine mountain, mentioned by the philosopher Guyau, which, when it feels that it begins to slip down a steep mountain slope, makes at first desperate efforts to hold its ground, but when it sees that no effort can arrest its fatal gliding, lets itself quietly be dragged down into the abyss. Karatáeff accepts the inevitable; but he is not a fatalist. If he had felt that his efforts could prevent war, he would have exerted them. In fact, towards the end of the work, when Pierre tells his wife Natásha that he is going to join the Decembrists (it is told in veiled words, on account of censorship, but a Russian reader understands nevertheless), and she asks him: “Would Platón Karatáeff approve of it?” Pierre, after a moment’s reflection, answers decidedly, “Yes, he would.” I don’t know what a Frenchman, an Englishman, or a German feels when he reads _War and Peace_--I have heard educated Englishmen telling me that they found it dull--but I know that for educated Russians the reading of nearly every scene in _War and Peace_ is a source of indescribable æsthetic pleasure. Having, like so many Russians, read the work many times, I could not, if I were asked, name the scenes which delight me most: the romances among the children, the mass-effects in the war scenes, the regimental life, the inimitable scenes from the life of the Court, aristocracy, the tiny details concerning Napoléon or Kutúzoff, or the life of the Róstoffs--the dinner, the hunt, the departure from Moscow, and so on.