Library of the World

Princess Maria postponed her departure, Sonya, the count tried to replace Natasha, but could not. They saw that she alone could keep her mother from despairing. For three weeks Natasha lived with her mother, slept in a chair in her room, sang, fed her, and kept talking to her," she said, "because one gentle, caressing voice calmed her down. Her mother's soul wound could not heal. Petya's death ripped off half her life. One month after learning of Petya's death, who had caught her as a fresh and...

Apart from the general feeling of alienation from all people, Natasha experienced a special feeling of alienation from her family. Her father, mother, Sonya, were so close to her, so familiar, so everyday that all their words, feelings seemed to her to be an insult to the world in which she had been living lately, and she was not only indifferent, but hostile to them. She heard Dunyashi's words about Peter Ilyich, about misfortune, but did not understand them. "What kind of misfortune do they have...

It seemed to her that she was about to understand what she was looking at with a terrible, unbearable question. At the end of December, in a black woolen dress, with a slanting, slanting and pale beam, Natasha sat with her legs in the corner of the sofa, crumpling and dissolving the ends of the belt, and looked at the corner of the door. She looked where he had gone, at the other side of life. And the side of life that she had never thought of before, which had previously seemed so far away, so incredible to her, was now closer and more familiar to her, more understandable than that side of life, where everything was either emptiness and destruction, or suffering and insult...

When a man sees a dying animal, the horror is overwhelming him: what he is - his essence - is obviously destroyed in his eyes - ceases to exist. But when the dying person is a person and the loved one is felt, then, except for the horror before the destruction of life, there is a tear and spiritual wound, which, as well as the physical wound, sometimes kills, sometimes heals, but always hurts and is afraid of external irritating touch. After the death of Prince Andrei Natasha and Princess Maria felt it equally. They, morally bent down and frowned on the terrible, hanging over them clouds of death, did not dare to look into the face of life...

Quickly the horses were disassembled in half darkness, the girlfriends were pulled up and the teams were sorted out. Denisov stood at the guardhouse, giving his last orders. The infantry of the game, spanking hundreds of legs, went forward on the way and quickly disappeared between the trees in the dawn fog. Esaul ordered something from the Cossacks. Petya kept his horse in check, looking forward to the order to sit down. Washed with cold water, his face, especially his eyes burned with fire, chills ran down his back, and something was shaking quickly and evenly throughout his body...