the things on the table. He flushed and went up to Nicholas.
“Uncle, forgive me, I did that . . . unintentionally,” he said, pointing to the broken sealing wax and pens.
Nicholas started angrily.
“All right, all right,” he said, throwing the bits under the table.
And evidently suppressing his vexation with difficulty, he turned away from the boy.
“You ought not to have been here at all,” he said.

1. Amkcheev has been mentioned previously on p. 2j8. See also Book Six, Chapter 2.— A.M.
2. A Russian Bible Society, mentioned in a previous footnote (p. 1253), was founded by A. N. Golitsyn in December, 1812, and had political influence. It produced the first translations of the Bible in the Russian vernacular, but when Photius secured the dismissal of Golitsyn from his posts as Minister of Education and President of the Bible Society, that Society withered, and was- finally suppressed by Nicholas I in 1826.
   In 1831 an Evangelical and quite nonpolitical Russian Bible Society was sanctioned, which continued to operate till the Revolution of 1917 placed a government in power that is averse to anything of a religious nature.—A.M.
3. Johann Gossner (1773-1858) was a Catholic priest and mystic around whom a pietist group formed in Munich. After being compelled to leave that town he obtained the post of Director of the Bible Society in Petersburg (1820-4) and there wrote his book Geist des Lebens und der Lehrer Jesu, which began the break-up of the Bible Society. The book was condemned to be burned and Gossner was expelled from Russia.—A.M.
4. Ekaterina Filippovna Tatarinova (nee Buxhöwden)—1783-1856—founded in Petersburg, in 1817, a mystical sect, the “Spiritual Union” in which, besides faith healing and divination, they adopted the practice, borrowed from the Skoptsi, of inducing ecstasy and a spirit of prophecy by violent whirling dances. Tatarinova was a remarkable person who had some influence with Alexander I, and she managed to maintain her “Union” even after the accession of Nicholas I. It did not break up untill 1837, when Tatarinova was dispatched, under observation, to an out-of-the-way nunnery.—A.M.
5. Baroness Juliane Krudener (1766-1824) was born in Riga. She abandoned fashionable society in i8oy and devoted herself to mysticism? convinced that she was destined to bring the world to a new birth. She was active in Baden in 1815 and made the acquaintance of Alexander I on whom she had some influence. In 1817 she appeared in Russia, but no longer retained her influence with him.—A.M.
6. The aims Pierre mentions as those of Prince Theodore’s circle are very much those with which many of the Decembrists began their conspiracy. Tolstoy had planned a novel dealing with the Decembrist movement before he began War and Peace, but studying the roots from which that movement sprang took him back to the year 1805, and he saw that it would be better to deal with that earlier period. War and Peace extends to the time when the Decembrist conspiracy was taking shape, and Tolstoy hints at it in this chapter. The careful description of the Russian Masonic movement in an earlier part of the novel was an outcome of his study of the Freemasons as an organization intimately connected with the Decembrists. After finishing War and Peace and Anna Karenina Tolstoy returned to that subject, and even wrote some fragmentary chapters, but he eventually abandoned the work, under circumstances mentioned on p. 464 of Volume I of the Oxford Press Life of Tolstoy.—A.M.
7. Arakcheev introduced these as a means of making the army partly self- supporting. Besides being under military discipline, the soldiers had to live in settlements and cultivate the land around them. This kind of slavery, separated from their families, working under military discipline and exposed to harsh punishment, was one of the most detested features of his administration.—A.M.
8. The antigovernmental trend of this passage is worth noting, for it indicates a fundamental connection between Tolstoy’s earlier and later views. He presented the antigovernmental conclusions he put forward after 1880 as unavoidable deductions from his interpretation of Christ’s teaching. They were, however, much in line with feelings he had expressed long before he arrived at that interpretation.—A.M.
9. Pugachëv was the Cossack leader of a great peasant rising in Catherine the Great’s time. After achieving considerable success and capturing several towns, he was taken and executed in 1775.—A.M.
10. The Tugendbund (League of Virtue) was a German association founded in 1808 with the acknowledged purpose of cultivating patriotism, reorganizing the army, and encouraging education, and with the secret aim of throwing off the French yoke. Dissolved on Napoleon’s demand in 1809, it continued to exist secretly and exerted great influence in 1812. It was suspected of having revolutionary tendencies and was in very bad odor with the Russian government at the time of the Holy Alliance.—A.M.
11. Denisov makes play with the similarity of the German word Bund, a union, and the Russian word bunt, a riot.—A.M.
12. The two married couples and their mutual relations. Natásha’s jealousy. Young Nicholas Bol kónski’s aspirations
    THE CONVERSATION at supper was not about politics or societies, but turned on the subject Nicholas liked best—recollections of 1812. Denisov started these and Pierre was particularly agreeable and amusing about them. The family separated on the most friendly terms.
    After supper Nicholas, having undressed in his study and given instructions to the steward who had been waiting for him, went to the bedroom in his dressing gown, where he found his wife still at her table, writing.
    “What are you writing, Mary?” Nicholas asked.
    Countess Mary blushed. She was afraid that what she was writing would not be understood or approved by her husband.
    She had wanted to conceal what she was writing from him, but at the same time was glad he had surprised her at it and that she would now have to tell him.
    “A diary, Nicholas,” she replied, handing him a blue exercise book filled with her firm, bold writing.
    “A diary?” Nicholas repeated with a shade of irony, and he took up the book.
    It was in French.
    December 4. Today when Andrusha (her eldest boy) woke up he did not wish to dress and Mademoiselle Louise sent for me. He was naughty and obstinate. I tried threats, but he only grew angrier. Then I took the matter in hand: I left him alone and began with nurse’s help to get the other children up, telling him that I did not love him. For a long time he was silent, as if astonished, then he jumped out of bed, ran to me in his shirt, and sobbed so that I could not calm him for a long time. It was plain that what troubled him most was that he had grieved me. Afterwards in the evening when I gave him his ticket, he again began crying piteously and kissing me. One can do anything with him by tenderness.1
    “What is a ‘ticket’?” Nicholas inquired.
    “I have begun giving the elder ones marks every evening, showing how they have behaved.”
    Nicholas looked into the radiant eyes that were gazing at him, and continued to turn over the pages and read. In the diary was set down everything in the children’s lives that seemed noteworthy to their mother as showing their characters or suggesting general reflections on educational methods. They were for the most part quite insignificant trifles, but did not seem so to the mother or to the father either, now that he read this diary about his children for the first time.
    Under the date “5” was entered:
    Mitya was naughty at table. Papa said he was to have no pudding. He had none, but looked so unhappily and greedily at the others while they were eating! I think that punishment by depriving children of sweets only develops their greediness. Must tell Nicholas this.
    Nicholas put down the book and looked at his wife. The radiant eyes gazed at him questioningly: would he approve or disapprove of her diary? There could be no doubt not only of his approval but also of his admiration for his wife.
    Perhaps it need not be done so pedantically, thought Nicholas, or even done at all, but this untiring, continual spiritual effort of which the sole aim was the children’s moral welfare delighted him. Had Nicholas been able to analyze his feelings he would have found that his steady, tender, and proud love of his wife rested on his feeling of wonder at her spirituality and at the lofty moral world, almost beyond his reach, in which she had her being.
    He was proud of her intelligence and goodness, recognized his own insignificance beside her in the spiritual world, and rejoiced all the more that she with such a soul not only belonged to him but was part of himself.
    “I quite, quite approve, my dearest!” said he with a significant look, and after a short pause he added: “And I behaved badly today. You weren’t in the study. We began disputing—Pierre and I—and I lost my temper. But he is impossible: such a child! I don’t know what would become of him if Natasha didn’t keep him in hand. . . . Have you any idea why he went to Petersburg? They have formed . . .”
    “Yes, I know,” said Countess Mary. “Natasha told me.”
    “Well, then, you know,” Nicholas went on, growing hot at the mere recollection of their discussion, “he wanted to convince me that it is every honest man’s duty to go against the government, and that the oath of allegiance and duty . . . I am sorry you weren’t there. They all fell on me—Denisov and Natasha . . . Natasha is absurd. How she rules over him! And yet there need only be a discussion and she has no words of her own but