The comet of love
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Russia, 1812. Pierre has just had his proposal of marriage accepted by his beloved Natasha. Filled with gratitude, joy, and exuberance, he drives home through the cold night and happens to look up into the sky...
"Home!" said Pierre, and despite twenty-two degrees of frost Fahrenheit he threw open the bearskin cloak from his broad chest and inhaled the air with joy.
It was clear and frosty. Above the dirty, ill-lit streets, above the black roofs, stretched the dark starry sky. Only looking up at the sky did Pierre cease to feel how sordid and humiliating were all mundane things compared with the heights to which his soul had just been raised. At the entrance to the Arbat Square an immense expanse of dark starry sky presented itself to his eyes. Almost in the center of it, above the Prechistenka Boulevard, surrounded and sprinkled on all sides by stars but distinguished from them all by its nearness to the earth, its white light, and its long uplifted tail, shone the enormous and brilliant comet of 18l2- the comet which was said to portend all kinds of woes and the end of the world. In Pierre, however, that comet with its long luminous tail aroused no feeling of fear. On the contrary he gazed joyfully, his eyes moist with tears, at this bright comet which, having traveled in its orbit with inconceivable velocity through immeasurable space, seemed suddenly- like an arrow piercing the earth- to remain fixed in a chosen spot, vigorously holding its tail erect, shining and displaying its white light amid countless other scintillating stars. It seemed to Pierre that this comet fully responded to what was passing in his own softened and uplifted soul, now blossoming into a new life.
(Translation by Louise and Aylmer Maude, on Project Gutenberg)
About the author
Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910) was one of Russia's most famous writers. He is best known for his epic, multi-generational novel War and Peace (1869) and for his novel Anna Karenina (1878), both models of nineteenth-century realism with passionate love stories at their core.
Born into the Russian aristocracy, Tolstoy had a spiritual awakening in mid-life that led him to embrace religion, establish schools for the newly liberated serfs, and advocate non-violent methods of political and social reform.
What We Love About This Passage...
The passage captures so well the exhilaration of requited love. We especially like how Tolstoy describes this feeling while juxtaposing it with the vision of the Great Comet of 1811 shooting through the night sky.
Tolstoy got the date of the comet's appearance wrong by one year--but for us, that small astronomical error in no way diminishes the vividness of this extraordinary description of how love soars and shines in the darkness.
To Read Alongside...
Thomas Hardy's novel Two on a Tower also puts two lovers into an astronomical context. Gazing at the canopy of stars above them, they experience a mixture of feelings--wonder at the vastness and beauty they see in the sky, and humility at how insignificant their everyday concerns seem by comparison. Hardy leaves it to the reader to decide what we can conclude from this emotional debate between the cosmological and the merely human.
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