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Dolokhov
Boris is Anna Mikhailovna Drubetskoy’s son. He serves in the Semyonovsky guards. He and Natasha have a mutual crush before he goes off to war, though he discourages Natasha from kissing him in secret and promises to propose to her after she turns 16. Boris is also Count Bezukhov’s godson, though he doesn’t get the inheritance his mother hopes for. Unlike his friend Nikolai, Boris is a career-minded young man who unabashedly positions himself for social connections and advancement every chance he gets. He and Natasha reunite when she’s 16 and still like one another, but Countess Rostov dissuades him from pursuing Natasha further. Not long after, he starts courting the wealthier Julie Karagin instead, and they get married.
Boris Drubetskoy Quotes in War and Peace
The War and Peace quotes below are all either spoken by Boris Drubetskoy or refer to Boris Drubetskoy. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Volume 1, Part 3: Chapters 6–9
Quotes
Rostov was a truthful young man, not for anything would he have deliberately told an untruth. He began telling the story with the intention of telling it exactly as it had been, but imperceptibly, involuntarily, and inevitably for himself, he went over into untruth. If he had told the truth to these listeners, who, like himself, had already heard accounts of attacks numerous times and had formed for themselves a definite notion of what an attack was, and were expecting exactly the same sort of account—they either would not have believed him or, worse still, would have thought it was Rostov’s own fault that what usually happens in stories of cavalry attacks had not happened with him. He could not simply tell them that they all set out at a trot, he fell off his horse, dislocated his arm, and ran to the woods as fast as he could to escape a Frenchman. […] They were expecting an account of how he got all fired up, forgetting himself […] how his saber tasted flesh, how he fell exhausted, and so on. And he told them all that.
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Boris Drubetskoy Quotes in War and Peace
The War and Peace quotes below are all either spoken by Boris Drubetskoy or refer to Boris Drubetskoy. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Volume 1, Part 3: Chapters 6–9
Quotes
Rostov was a truthful young man, not for anything would he have deliberately told an untruth. He began telling the story with the intention of telling it exactly as it had been, but imperceptibly, involuntarily, and inevitably for himself, he went over into untruth. If he had told the truth to these listeners, who, like himself, had already heard accounts of attacks numerous times and had formed for themselves a definite notion of what an attack was, and were expecting exactly the same sort of account—they either would not have believed him or, worse still, would have thought it was Rostov’s own fault that what usually happens in stories of cavalry attacks had not happened with him. He could not simply tell them that they all set out at a trot, he fell off his horse, dislocated his arm, and ran to the woods as fast as he could to escape a Frenchman. […] They were expecting an account of how he got all fired up, forgetting himself […] how his saber tasted flesh, how he fell exhausted, and so on. And he told them all that.
Related Characters:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
