war and peace (2)

Pierre was an illegitimate son of a very rich aristocrat who was recalled home from France to appear at his father's death bed in Petersburg and inherited tremendous wealth upon his death.

Shy and socially awkward, he was coaxed into marrying the beautiful but shallow daughter of a conniving old aristocrat who pretended to be his elderly benefactor. He went into a duel with a young officer who was rumored to have an affair with his socially active wife and decided to lead a separate life from his wife afterwards.

Always in search of life's true meaning, he joined the Freemasonry Society and became a devoted member, contributing his wealth to help achieve the lofty goals of brotherly love and welfare for the poor, with little or counter effect as people took advantage of his naivete and lack of pragmatism.

As Napoleon's army approached, he decided to stay in Moscow to have a chance to assassinate him when he came to town. A fire accident turned him into a prisoner by the occupying French, where he witnessed innocent people being executed and he himself barely escaped that same fate; he saved a French officer who deemed him a lifetime friend and had a heart-to-heart conversation with; he refused to be in company with other high ranking prisoners but stayed with lowly soldier prisoners where he witnessed a peasant soldier conducting a simple but happy life under the meagerest circumstances:

Karataev had no attachments, friendships, or love, as Pierre understood them, but loved and lived affectionately with everything life brought him in contact with, particularly with man—not any particular man, but those with whom he happened to be... To Pierre he always remained what he had seemed that first night: an unfathomable, rounded, eternal personification of the spirit of simplicity and truth.

The enlightenment he had long searched for finally arrived:

He had sought it in philanthropy, in Freemasonry, in the dissipations of town life, in wine, in heroic feats of self-sacrifice; he had sought it by reasoning—and all these quests and experiments had failed him. And now without thinking about it he had found that peace and inner harmony only through the horror of death, through privation, and through what he recognized in Karataev.

He was rescued by the Russian army from the retreating French and regarded as a legendary hero when he returned home.

He met Natasha, a girl he had long loved but dared not admit. They talked about their mutual friend Andrei and his death, and Pierre's extraordinary ordeal. They eventually got married and had four children.

Pierre of old vs Pierre of new:

Formerly he had appeared to be a kindhearted but unhappy man, and so people had been inclined to avoid him. Now a smile at the joy of life always played around his lips, and sympathy for others shone in his eyes with a questioning look as to whether they were as contented as he was, and people felt pleased by his presence.

Previously he had talked a great deal, grew excited when he talked, and seldom listened; now he was seldom carried away in conversation and knew how to listen so that people readily told him their most intimate secrets.

Previously he had equipped himself with a mental telescope and looked into remote space, where petty worldliness hiding itself in misty distance had seemed to him great and infinite merely because it was not clearly seen.

Now, however, he had learned to see the great, eternal, and infinite in everything, and therefore—to see it and enjoy its contemplation—he naturally threw away the telescope through which he had till now gazed over men’s heads, and gladly regarded the ever-changing, eternally great, unfathomable, and infinite life around him.