Collage 390

Regarding Prince Andrei and his sky:

"After his fiancée's betrayal, which struck him the more strongly the more he tried to conceal its effect on him from everyone, the conditions of life in which he had been happy became a burden for him, and still more of a burden were the freedom and independence that had once been so dear to him. He not only did not think those former thoughts that had once first come to him as he gazed at the sky on the field of Austerlitz, which he had liked to enlarge upon with Pierre, and which had filled his solitude in Bogucharovo and then in Switzerland and Rome; but he was even afraid to remember those thoughts that had opened boundless and bright horizons. He was concerned only with the most immediate, practical interests, unconnected with his former ones, which he grasped at the more eagerly the more closed to him the former ones were. As if that boundless, ever-receding vault of the sky that used to stand over him had suddenly turned into a low, oppressive vault, in which everything was clear and nothing was eternal or mysterious."

Lynn Waskelis

from page 35-36, Volume II of original text
collage, ink
made 2/18/11
page 627-628 Pevear/Volokhonsky translation