Book 2 Part 3 Chapter 26 (Chapter 129 Overall)

Chapter Summaries: Dole: Prince Andrei writes to his sister about engagement. Princess Mariya consults with her father. The old prince's attentions to Mlle. Bourienne. Princess Mariya's consolations. Her pilgrim outfit.
Briggs: He threatens to marry Mlle Bourienne. Marya would like to run away.
Maude: Prince Bolkonski threatens to marry Mademoiselle Bourienne

Translation:

XXVI.

In the middle of the summer, Princess Marya received an unexpected letter from Prince Andrey from Switzerland, in which he informed her of strange and unexpected news. Prince Andrey announced about his engagement with Rostov. All of his letter breathed love and enthusiasm to his bride and tender friendship and trust to his sister. He wrote that he never loved so, as he loves now, and that only now got and found life; he requested his sister to forgive him for how in his arrival to Bald Mountains he said nothing to her about this decision, although he spoke about this with their father. He did not tell her this because of how Princess Marya would begin to ask their father to give his consent, and not having reached her goals, would annoy her father, and onto herself would carry all the heaviness of his displeasure. However, he wrote that the business was still so finally decided as of now.

"So father has appointed me a term of a year, and here is already six months, half passed from the appointed term, and I am staying more where it is somewhere hard in his decision. Should the doctor not detain me here, in the waters, I would myself be in Russia, but now my return should be still put aside for three months. You know me and my relationship with father. I need nothing from him, I was and will always be independent, but to disgust his will and deserve his wrath, when maybe not for so long is left in him with us, would destroy half of my happiness. I am writing him now a letter about the same and beg you, choose a kind moment, deliver him the letter and notify me about how he looks on all this is and whether there are hopes in that he will agree to cut the term to three months."

After long hesitation, doubt and prayers, Princess Marya delivered the letter to her father. On the next day the old prince said to her calmly:

— Write your brother, so that to wait until I die... It will not be long — I will soon untie...

The princess wanted to contradict something, but her father did not allow her, and began all the more and more to raise his voice.

— Marry, marry, darling... Good kinship!... Smart people, ah? Rich, ah? Yes. A good stepmother to Nikolushki she will be! You write to him that I will let him marry tomorrow. A stepmother Nikolushki will have in her, but I will marry Bourienne!... Ha, ha, ha, and he will not be without a stepmother! Only one thing, in my house more women are not needed; let him marry and live by himself. May you cross to him? — he turned to Princess Marya: — With the Lord, by frost, by frost... by frost!...

After this outbreak, the prince did not speak once more about this case. Yet the restrained annoyance for the cowardice of his son were put in the relations of the father with his daughter. The same pretexts of ridicule increased to a still new one — the conversation about a stepmother and courtesies to m-llе Bourienne.

— From what again do I not marry her? — he spoke to his daughter. — A nice princess she will be! — and in latter times, to her perplexity and surprise, Princess Marya began to notice how her father really started more and more to move closer to the Frenchwoman. Princess Marya wrote Prince Andrey about how their father accepted his letter; but consoled her brother, giving hopes to reconcile their father with this thought.

Nikolushka and his upbringing, André and religion were the consolations and joys of Princess Marya; but besides this, as each person needs their personal hopes, in Princess Marya was the most deep secret hidden dream and hope in her, delivering to her the main thing of comfort in her life. This consolatory dream and hope were her godly people —holy fools and wanderers who visited her secretly from the prince. The more Princess Marya lived, the more she tested life and watched it, the more amazed she was at the myopia of people, seeking here on earth pleasures and happiness; workers, suffering, fighting and doing evil to each other for achieving the impossible, ghostly and vicious happiness. "Prince Andrey loved his wife, she died, little from this he wants to bundle up his happiness with another woman. Father does not want this because of how he wishes for Andrey a more noble and rich matrimony. And they all are struggling and suffer, and torture, and spoil their soul, their eternal soul, for achieving good, which term is instant. This little that we ourselves know, — Christ, the son of God came down onto earth and said to us that this life is an instant life, an experiment, but we all hold for it and think in it we will find happiness. How has no one got this? — thought Princess Marya. — No one besides these despicable godly people, which with bags behind shoulders come to me from the rear porch, fearing to hit the eye of the prince, and not so that to not get injured from him, but so he will not introduce sin in them. To leave family, homeland, to not care at all about worldly goods so that to not cleave to why, to walk in thin rags, under a strange name from place to place, to not do harm to people, and pray for them, praying for those which drive us out, and for those that patronize: there are no higher truths in life!"

Alone was a wanderer, Fedosyushka, 50 years old, a small, quiet, pockmarked woman, walking now for more than 30 years barefoot and in chains. She especially loved Princess Marya. Once, when in a dark room, in the light of one of the icon lamps, Fedosyushka told about her life, — and Princess Marya suddenly with such force had come to the idea about how Fedosyushka alone had found the true way of life that she decided herself to go wander. When Fedosyushka went to sleep, Princess Marya for long thought about this and finally decided that how weird this was — her need was to go wander. She betrayed her intention only to the confessor monk alone, Father Akinfio, and the confessor approved her intention. Under the pretext of a gift to the wanders, Princess Marya saved herself a complete garb of the wanderers: shirt, bast shoes, caftan and black handkerchief. Often coming up to the cherished chest of drawers, Princess Marya stopped in indecision about whether to not advance now while for the casts in her entrusted intentions.

Often listening to the stories of the wanderers, she was excited by their simple, for them mechanical but for her completely deep in sense, speeches, so that she was a few times ready to throw all and run from home. In her imagination she already saw herself with Fedosyushka in rough rags, walking with a stick and knapsack by the dusty road, directing her wandering without envy, without human love, without desires, from pleasures to pleasers, and in the end of the ends, there, where there are no sorrows or sighs, but eternal joy and bliss.

"We will come to one place, pray; not have time to get used to it, to fall in love with it — and will go farther. And we will go to those while our legs buckle, and lie down and die somewhere, and will come finally to that eternal, quiet dock where there are no sorrows or sighs!..." thought Princess Marya.

Yet then, seeing her father and especially the small Coco, she weakened in her intentions, slowly cried and felt that she was a sinner: loving her father and nephew more than God.

Time: middle of summer
Mentioned: year, six months, four months (three months in Briggs, Dunnigan and Garnett.), to-morrow, thirty years

Locations: Lysyya Gory
Mentioned: Switzerland, Russia, Frenchwoman

Pevear and Volokhonsky Notes:

Marya gets a letter from Andrei, which is not printed in entirety, condensed into one section, with the rest only summed up. She learns of his engagement and that the doctors are keeping him in Switzerland, but he still feels
his love for Natasha. Marya gives her father the letter, which upsets him. He threatens to marry Bourienne and says he doesn't want any women around the house.

"The longer Princess Marya lived, the more of life she experienced and observed, the more astonished she was at the shortsightedness of people who sought pleasure and happiness here on earth...And they all struggle
and suffer, and torment and ruin their souls, their eternal souls, to achieve blessings that last a moment." She sees only her people of God living the right life. She decides to become a wanderer, but then waffles, deciding
"she loved her father and her nephew more than God."

Characters (characters who do not appear, but are mentioned are placed in italics. First appearances are in Bold. First mentions are underlined. Final appearance denoted by *):

Princess Mariya

Prince Andrei

Natasha

Nikolai Bolkonsky ("father" and "the old prince")

Nikolushka (Bolkonsky. also "Koko")

Mademoiselle Bourienne (also "Bouriennka". "little Bourienne" in Garnett, Edmonds, and Briggs. Maude, Bell, and Mandelker do not use a different name. Wiener just adds "woman".)

 

Liza ("his wife")

Fedosyushka (Bell gives "Fedociouchka" as an alternate reading.)

(Bell has a "spiritual director Father Hyacinthe". "Father Akinfi" in Wiener.)

Abridged Versions:

End of Part Three in Mandelker, Dunnigan, Edmonds, and Briggs. End of Part Third in Dole. End of Book Six in Maude. End of Part Six in Garnett. End of Part the Sixth in Wiener. End of chapter 9 in Bell.

Gibian: Chapter 17: end of book 6.
Fuller: Entire Chapter is cut.

Komroff: Chapter is pretty well preserved. End of Book Six.

Kropotkin: Chapter cuts off early, at "giving him to hope that their father might be dissuaded from this notion." End of Part Sixth.
Simmons: Chapter 17: the chapter breaks off after Prince Bolkonsky begins showing affection to Bourienne, removing Marya's thoughts of pilgrimage. End of Book Six

Additional Notes:

Roberts: Page xli: “Napoleon secretary Louis de Bourrienne...Napoleon had sacked him twice for embezzlement….

King Assarhadon: Page 126: And on the next day, he called his son, Assurbanipal, and surrendered the throne to him; he himself retired to the desert, and meditated upon what he had learned. But then

he wandered as a pilgrim through cities and villages, preaching to them that all life is one, and that men only do themselves hurt when they think to harm another.”

Wiks/Foote: Page xxiv: “‘The Two Old Men’...Tolstoy...For him pilgrimages were in the same class as other ecclesiastical distortions of the true Christian message, including all the Church’s so-called ‘sacraments’. What we need is not change of place, but change of heart. Yet Tolstoy knew that hte idea of pilgrimages to holy places had a strong hold on the Russian peasant mentality: the country swarmed with mendicants wandering from one holy site to another. So he softens the anti-pilgrim moral somewhat.”