A description of Pierre’s fellow prisoner Platón Karatáev, a peasant soldier who to Pierre seemed the very personification of everything Russian and kindly, the spirit of simplicity and truth itself.
A description of Pierre’s fellow prisoner Platón Karatáev, a peasant soldier who to Pierre seemed the very personification of everything Russian and kindly, the spirit of simplicity and truth itself.
Book 12, Chapter 13
A description of Pierre’s fellow prisoner Platón Karatáev, a peasant soldier who to Pierre seemed the very personification of everything Russian and kindly, the spirit of simplicity and truth itself.
Summary:
This chapter contains a description of Pierre’s fellow prisoner Platón Karatáev. Twenty-three soldiers, three officers, and two officials were confined in the shed in which Pierre had been placed and where he remained for four weeks. Afterwards, Karatáev was the only fellow prisoner Pierre remembered clearly. In Pierre’s mind, Karatáev always remained a most vivid and precious memory and the personification of everything Russian, kindly, and round. He had physical strength and agility and seemed not to know what fatigue and sickness meant. Karatáev must have been about 50, although he looked much younger. He had an expression of innocence and youth, his voice pleasant and musical, his speech apt and direct. He baked, cooked, sewed, planed, and mended boots. He was always busy, and only at night allowed himself conversation. Karatáev slept like a stone at night. He had peasant habits. By being in the military, Karatáev relieved his siblings of this obligation, which they appreciated. He did not complain, and had never been flogged. To all the other prisoners Platón Karatáev seemed a most ordinary soldier. They called him little falcon or Platósha, chaffed him good-naturedly, and sent him on errands. But to Pierre he always remained what he had seemed that first night: an unfathomable, rounded, eternal personification of the spirit of simplicity and truth.
quote from the chapter:
He liked to talk and he talked well, adorning his speech with terms of endearment and with folk sayings which Pierre thought he invented himself, but the chief charm of his talk lay in the fact that the commonest events-sometimes just such as Pierre had witnessed without taking notice of them-assumed in Karatáev’s a character of solemn fitness. He liked to hear the folk tales one of the soldiers used to tell of an evening (they were always the same), but most of all he liked to hear stories of real life. He would smile joyfully when listening to such stories, now and then putting in a word or asking a question to make the moral beauty of what he was told clear to himself. Karatáev 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. He loved his dog, his comrades, the French, and Pierre who was his neighbor, but Pierre felt that in spite of Karatáev’s affectionate tenderness for him (by which he unconsciously gave Pierre’s spiritual life its due) he would not have grieved for a moment at parting from him. And Pierre began to feel in the same way toward Karatáev.
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