With war inching closer towards the homeland, Pierre finds himself at the precipice of yet another crisis. However, it appears this is not a crisis of existential nature, but rather one of love. All he can think about is Natasha. Life is worth living again because of her, and certain recurring thoughts hint at his desire to marry her. This in addition to the mounting tension of the war culminate in Pierre’s conclusion that a catastrophe looms on the horizon. A life-changing event is eminent and he feels the need to confirm this in hidden signs.
Introduced by a fellow Mason to Pierre, numerology is the study of hidden significance in numbers. Using the numbers of your birth date as well as the numbers associated with the letters in your name, it assigns you a purpose and various character traits, similar to astrology. Some numerologists even make major life decisions based upon the sum of these numbers. It is believed that Pythagoras was the first to conceive of this belief system. He firmly believed in the objectivity and practicality of numbers. To him and many of his contemporaries, the world was structured by numerical relationships, and numerology was simply a way to interpret the world much like any other science.
Pierre’s encounter with numerology is akin to a person pulling petals off of a flower to determine whether they are loved: to take miscellaneous phenomenon and extract meaning from them. His fellow Mason convinces him that Napoleon is the beast of the Apocalypse of St. John because the sum of the numbers of his name add up to 666. Extrapolating on this theory, Pierre attempts to find the answer to Napoleon, the one who will play a pivotal role in this part of history. After trying various names, he calculates the sum of his own name. After not receiving the desired result, he adjusts his name (or rather purposely misspells it) so that its sum also equals 666. As if it is somehow a surprise that his number matched Napoleon’s, he suddenly decides that he cannot enter the military, for his purpose in life has yet to be realized. He now has a role in the grand scheme of things and he must not deviate from his path, for he is convinced that it will inevitably cross Napoleon’s.
The absurd, even comical, nature of this scene could represent a deeper unconscious drive in Pierre towards a different life, one that isn’t cemented in the “spellbound, worthless world of Moscow habits,” one in which he can openly express his feelings for Natasha. But he can’t bring himself to tell Natasha how he feels nor can he find the strength to leave behind his troublesome habits and join the military. It appears that he still struggles with finding his own purpose in life, so he assigns himself one. He is so desperate for something to fill this void that he buys into an artificial fantasy about his destiny. This is the most interesting part about this scene: Pierre knows he arbitrarily manipulated his name so that he would find the answer for which he was looking. But he has no trouble buying into this fantasy while conscious that it is entirely fabricated. It seems then that locating meaning in the sublime realm of numerology and prophecy allows him to live out the plot to his own movie in which he is the the chosen one and Napoleon is the beast. Numerology, in a sense, offers an easy escape from recognizing his own lack of willpower and allows him to settle for a loveless life of sin.
Sources:
http://www.astrology-numerology.com/numerology.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerology
Reading War & Peace 
Thanks for the interesting post! As a reader, I really like Pierre. I think that, as a character, his struggle to find meaning and his actions and failures can be especially easy to identify and empathize with. While I thought that Pierre’s misspelling of his name was slightly comical, I also thought it wasn’t unreasonable. I find that people will try very hard to make sense of the world, even if it takes questionable leaps of logic to get there.
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I really appreciate the background you provided on numerology. When I got to that portion of the book, I was utterly confused about what numerology entailed. This post helped me to pin more significance on what Pierre was doing during the text. In fact, this post emphasizes more and more how much of an enigma Pierre really is. Thanks for the post!
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This post is two years old, and I didn’t check to see if this blog is still active, but here goes:
The values attached to the letters u-v incorrect. They shouldn’t be 110, 120,…160, but instead 200, 300,…700. It doesn’t matter, though, because Tolstoy isn’t subscribing to numerology. Either it’s an inconsequential error on Tolstoy’s part, or he was subtly pointing out that Pierre was glossing over the errors in the basis of the system because of the anxiousness of his superstition.
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