Lucerne (Tolstoy)
Short summary
Lucerne, Switzerland, July 1857. Prince Nekhliudof arrived at the luxurious Schweitzerhof hotel and was immediately struck by the contrast between the lake's natural beauty and the artificial English-built quay.
At dinner with wealthy English guests, he felt depressed by their cold formality. Walking outside, he heard beautiful music from a Tyrolese minstrel performing for hotel guests. The small man sang gracefully with his guitar, entertaining about a hundred elegantly dressed people.
After performing several songs, the minstrel asked for money.
Again not one of those brilliantly dressed scores of people standing to listen to him threw him a penny. The crowd laughed heartlessly.
Outraged by this injustice, Nekhliudof invited the minstrel for champagne. The waiters treated them rudely, forcing them into a shabby room. Nekhliudof angrily confronted the staff about their discrimination. Later, alone, he reflected on civilization's hypocrisy, the false notion of equality, and humanity's inability to recognize true beauty and goodness. He concluded that human attempts to judge good and evil were futile against life's infinite contradictions.
Detailed summary
Division into chapters is editorial.
Arrival in Lucerne and first impressions
On July 20, 1857, Prince Nekhliudof arrived in Lucerne and took lodgings at the finest hotel in the city, the Schweitzerhof.
According to Murray's guidebook, Lucerne was one of Switzerland's most romantic places, situated on the shore of Lake Vierwaldstätter, where three important highways crossed and from which Mount Righi offered magnificent views. The city attracted throngs of travelers of all nationalities, especially the English, who had transformed the old covered wooden bridge with its chapels and painted roof into a modern granite quay lined with five-story buildings.
The magnificent five-storied building...seems discordant amid this strangely grandiose and at the same time indescribably harmonious and smiling nature.
When Prince Nekhliudof opened his window facing the lake, the beauty of the water, mountains, and sky literally dazzled and overwhelmed him. He experienced an inner restlessness and felt compelled to express the feelings that suddenly filled his soul. The lake spread out blue as heated sulfur, smooth and motionless like a concave mirror between the variegated green shores. In the foreground stretched fresh green shores with reeds, meadows, gardens, and villas, while farther away dark-green wooded heights crowned with feudal castle ruins rose against a background of pale-lilac mountains with fantastic peaks of crags and snow.
The scene possessed no single completed line, unmixed color, or moment of repose - everywhere was motion, irregularity, fantasy, and endless variety of shades and lines, yet above all a calm unity and striving for beauty. However, the straight white line of the quay with its lindens and green benches stretched before his window in stupid confusion, brutally contradicting the natural harmony.
Dinner at the Schweitzerhof hotel
At half-past seven, Prince Nekhliudof was called to dinner in the magnificently decorated dining room where two long tables accommodated at least a hundred guests. The majority were English, giving the gathering its characteristic strict decorum, reserve founded not in pride but in absence of social necessity, and uniform satisfaction in comfortable gratification of wants. The faces, many handsome, bore expressions of individual prosperity and absolute absence of interest in their surroundings unless directly related to themselves.
Occasionally family members exchanged subdued remarks about the excellence of dishes or wine, or the beauty of Mount Righi's view. Individual tourists sat in silence, not seeming to see each other. When conversation occurred among the fivescore human beings, it consisted uniformly of weather or the Righi ascent. Knives and forks scarcely rattled on plates due to perfect propriety observance, and waiters asked in whispers what wine guests preferred.
All these dead-and-alive faces have an irresistible ascendency over me, and I myself become also as one dead. I have no desires, I have no thoughts: I do not even observe.
Such dinners invariably depressed Prince Nekhliudof, making him feel as if he were somehow to blame, like when as a boy he was set upon a chair for naughtiness while hearing his brothers' merry shouts from another room. He attempted conversation with neighbors but received only phrases repeated hundreds of times with no variation of countenance. These people seemed to deprive themselves of one of life's greatest enjoyments - human intercourse - unlike his experiences at a Parisian pension where twenty people of different nationalities found keen zest in general conversation, witticisms, and dancing.
Feeling blue as invariably happened after such dinners, Prince Nekhliudof left without waiting for dessert and took a constitutional through the city. His melancholy was confirmed rather than relieved by narrow, muddy streets without lanterns, shuttered shops, and encounters with drunken workmen and hurrying women. Returning to the hotel in perfect darkness without casting a glance about him, he experienced that peculiar spiritual chill, loneliness, and heaviness that beset those newly arrived in any place.
The wandering minstrels performance
Walking along the quay toward the Schweitzerhof, Prince Nekhliudof's ear was suddenly struck by peculiar but thoroughly agreeable and sweet music.
These strains had an immediately enlivening effect upon me. It was as though a bright, cheerful light had poured into my soul. I felt contented, gay.
His slumbering attention awakened to all surrounding objects, and the beauty of the night and lake suddenly came over him with quickening force. He saw the dark sky with gray clouds flecking its deep blue, now lighted by the rising moon, the glassy dark-green lake reflecting lighted windows, and far away the snowy mountains. In front of him, amid the semidarkness, stood a throng of people in a semicircle around a small man in dark clothes. Behind them rose the black tops of Lombardy poplars and the two stern spires of the ancient cathedral.
Drawing nearer, he distinguished the full chords of a guitar and several voices taking turns, not singing any definite theme but giving suggestions of one in a sweet, graceful melody resembling a mazurka. The little man was a traveling Tyrolese who stood before the hotel windows with one leg advanced, head thrown back, thrumming his guitar and singing in different voices.
The singer was dressed in an old black coat with short black hair and a civilian's hat no longer new. His clever and youthfully gay motions, together with his diminutive stature, formed a pleasing yet pathetic spectacle. On the hotel steps, windows, and balconies stood handsomely dressed ladies and gentlemen with polished collars, porters and lackeys in gold-embroidered liveries. In the street gathered groups of well-dressed waiters, cooks in white caps, and young girls with arms about each other's waists.
All stood in respectful silence around the singer, listening attentively. The cook was forcibly impressed by the music, enthusiastically nodding to the lackey at every high falsetto note, while the lackey replied with shoulder shrugs showing it was hard for him to be made enthusiastic. When asked, the lackey explained that the minstrel was from Aargau, went around begging, and had come twice that summer - no one else like him visited.
After finishing his first song, the little man briskly twanged his guitar and said something in German patois that brought hearty laughter from the crowd - he said his throat was dried up and he would like some wine. Taking off his cap and swinging his guitar toward the hotel, he addressed the ladies and gentlemen on balconies and windows, saying in half-Italian, half-German accent that if they believed he gained something, they were mistaken - he was only a poor devil. When no one gave him anything, he announced he would sing the air of Righi.
This final song was even better than the preceding, drawing sounds of approbation from the wondering throng. When he finished and again held out his cap with outstretched hand, repeating his stock phrase about being a poor devil, the elegant public remained picturesquely grouped in lighted windows and balconies, conversing in discreet tones about their singer below. Not one of those brilliantly dressed scores of people threw him a penny. The crowd laughed heartlessly as the little singer seemed to shrink into himself, thanked them, and wished them good night.
Confronting the hotel staffs prejudice
Prince Nekhliudof was overmastered by feelings of pain, bitterness, and above all shame for the little man, the crowd, and himself.
I was overmastered by a feeling of pain, of bitterness, and above all, of shame for the little man, for the crowd, for myself, as though it were I who had asked for money.
At the hotel entrance, he met an English family - a portly, handsome gentleman with black side-whiskers carrying a costly cane, accompanied by a lady in raw silk dress with expensive laces and a pretty young lady in a Swiss hat with feather. Their perfect indifference to others' lives and absolute confidence in their privileges contrasted sharply with the wandering minstrel retreating before the laughing crowd. Prince Nekhliudof felt indescribable anger against these people, deliberately bumping the Englishman twice before hastening after the little man.
Catching up with the minstrel, Prince Nekhliudof proposed they go drink a bottle of wine together. Despite the singer's initial hesitation about going to the unfashionable Schweitzerhof, declaring it too fine for him, Prince Nekhliudof insisted. The head waiter listened solemnly, measured the minstrel's modest figure from head to foot, and sternly ordered them taken to the room at the left - a barroom for simple people with bare wooden tables and benches.
The waiter who served them looked with supercilious smile, thrust hands in pockets, and exchanged remarks with the hunchbacked dishwasher, trying to show he felt immeasurably higher than the minstrel in dignity and social position. When Prince Nekhliudof became enraged at their behavior and confronted the staff about their treatment of his guest, the dishwasher supported him while the porter and waiters became submissive. Despite the minstrel's entreaties to leave, Prince Nekhliudof insisted on moving to the main dining room where he seated the dirty minstrel at the same table as an English couple, who promptly left in anger.
Reflections on civilization and human nature
Walking alone along the quay after the minstrel departed, Prince Nekhliudof reflected on what he called "the strange fate of poetry."
All love it, all are in search of it; it is the only thing in life that men love and seek, and yet no one recognizes its power, no one prizes this best treasure of the world.
He pondered why these wealthy guests, who had left their countries and trades to come to Lucerne, who had gathered respectfully to listen to the beggar's song, gave him nothing in return for the pure delight he provided. He considered this event historically significant.
This is an event which the historians of our time ought to describe in letters of inextinguishable flame. This event is more significant...than the facts that are printed in newspapers.
He questioned whether civilization, freedom, and equality had destroyed the instinctive human feeling of sympathy, wondering if the spreading of reasonable, egotistical association had rendered nugatory the desire for loving association. From far away through the night silence, he caught the sound of the little man's guitar and voice, which led him to further philosophical reflection.
One, only one infallible Guide we have—the universal Spirit...which obliges each one of us unconsciously to draw closer together.
Endless are the mercy and wisdom of Him who has permitted...all these contradictions. Only to thee, miserable little worm of the dust...do they seem like contradictions.