Returning after their successful visit to the French camp, Pétya tells Denísov about the adventure. Pétya doesn’t even try to sleep. He is almost in a dream world. When dawn arrives, Denísov orders everyone to prepare for the attack.
Returning after their successful visit to the French camp, Pétya tells Denísov about the adventure. Pétya doesn’t even try to sleep. He is almost in a dream world. When dawn arrives, Denísov orders everyone to prepare for the attack.
Book 14, Chapter 10
Returning after their successful visit to the French camp, Pétya tells Denísov about the adventure. Pétya doesn’t even try to sleep. He is almost in a dream world. When dawn arrives, Denísov orders everyone to prepare for the attack.
Summary:
Returning to his own camp, Pétya finds Denísov waiting for him in the passage. Denísov had been awaiting Pétya’s return in a state of agitation, anxiety, and self-reproach for having let him go. Thank God! he exclaimed. Yes, thank God! he repeated, listening to Pétya’s rapturous account. Denísov had not gone to sleep because he was very worried about Pétya. Denísov tells Pétya to try to get some sleep, but Pétya’s spirits are so high that he does not even try to sleep. He wanders about the camp hardly noticing his surroundings. When he encounters a cossack who is awake, Pétya recounts his adventure to him. Pétya asks the cossack to sharpen his saber, and the man does so. Pétya sits down by a wagon almost in a dream state, nearly unaware of his surroundings, and imagines beautiful music in his mind. He looks at the beautiful sky. Pétya briefly dozes off, but is awaken at dawn. Denísov tells him to get ready for their attack on the French, which will soon take place.
quote from the chapter:
He was in a fairy kingdom where nothing resembled reality. The big dark blotch might really be the watchman’s hut or it might be a cavern leading to the very depths of the earth. Perhaps the red spot was a fire, or it might be the eye of an enormous monster. Perhaps he was really sitting on a wagon, but it might very well be that he was not sitting on a wagon but on a terribly high tower from which, if he fell, he would have to fall for a whole day or a whole month, or go on falling and never reach the bottom. Perhaps it was just the Cossack, Likhachëv, who was sitting under the wagon, but it might be the kindest, bravest, most wonderful, most splendid man in the world, whom no one knew of. It might really have been that the hussar came for water and went back into the hollow, but perhaps he had simply vanished-disappeared altogether and dissolved into nothingness.
Nothing Pétya could have seen now would have surprised him. He was in a fairy kingdom where everything was possible.
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