“You’re accepting money the tsar has taken from the Russian people to feed and grow his death machine. And you’re giving him something pure, unsullied, unique, priceless in exchange for that money. You can’t allow it. Not on my account. This wouldn’t matter if it were a question of arrogance or pride—if that were the case I wouldn’t be here. I urge you in the name of all that’s worthy in mankind. Consider it carefully. It’s not right. It’s steeped in evil. It’s affirming a reign of murder and violence. There’s no need to go into detail, let’s stick to the basics: commanding an army is neither honorable nor important, but they have the tyrant’s ear and tell him that it is, the flatterers. It’s shameful to organize killings. An army is always an instrument of murder, and in the case of the tsar’s army, it’s also a suicide machine—Russia is killing itself.”

Tolstoy has yet to sit down, but in Claudia’s and Sergei’s dreams he gets out of his chair—according to that dream logic in which you can see someone go up and down stairs to the same landing (it could never happen on stairs made of brick and mortar, but in dreams those stairs can lead to the same landing, a metaphor for life).

In both Claudia’s and Sergei’s dreams, the writer looks askance at the room that Claudia has decorated with such care. He sees it with a novelist’s eye. He thinks of what he wrote in The Death of Ivan Ilyich, “In reality it was just what is usually seen in the houses of people of moderate means who want to appear rich, and therefore succeed only in resembling others like themselves: there are damasks, dark wood, plants, rugs, and dull and polished bronzes—all the things people of a certain class have in order to resemble other people of that class.” Then he regards the room with his essayist’s eye, and he feels even more disdain, but it’s what he sees with his moralist’s eye that makes Count Leo Tolstoy feel profound disgust.