“When he reached home Prince Andrei began thinking of his life in Petersburg during those last four months, as if it were something new. He recalled his exertions and solicitations, and the history of his project of army reform, which had been accepted for consideration and which they were trying to pass over in silence simply because another, a very poor one, had already been prepared and submitted to the Emperor. He thought of the meetings of a committee of which Berg was a member. He remembered how carefully and at what length everything relating to form and procedure was discussed at those meetings, and how sedulously and promptly all that related to the gist of the business was evaded. He recalled his labours on the Legal Code, and how painstakingly he had translated the articles of the Roman and French codes into Russian, and he felt ashamed of himself. Then he vividly pictured to himself Bogucharovo, his occupations in the country, his journey to Ryazan, he remembered the peasants, and Dron the village elder, and mentally applying to them the Personal Rights he had divided into paragraphs, he felt astonished that he could have spent so much time on such useless work.”
Frustration with bureaucracy, the futility of human labour, self-doubt.
Basically, read the Book of Ecclesiastes. "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."
Tosltoy didn't writer that. A translator did
>>9325337
Is he advocating NEET life?
>>9325337
>the futility of human labour
You mean, "the futility of bureaucratic labor." He considers physical labor to be honorable and worthwhile
>>9325337
Bolkonskoy's the serious Russian patrician in the book, and yet a notch below his father. Though the 'vanity of vanity's' interpretation is essentially correct, Tolstoy here is revealing the means by which the Prince begins to move toward his father's less word-bound, starker and more honorable position. If youre a blossoming Stoic, Prince Andrei is your favorite character.