Osip (Iosif) Alexeevich Bazdeev

Character Analysis

This is the guy who introduces Pierre to Freemasonry and becomes Pierre's mentor. He dies right before the French occupy Moscow, and Pierre then seizes the chance to hide out at Bazdeev's house incognito, planning to assassinate Napoleon. A little ironic, no, that the man whose main point to Pierre was the need for pacifism is a member of an organization so devoted to weird, arcane, and half-crazy theories of number and letter coincidences that Pierre uses their beliefs to convince himself that he needs to commit murder? What are we supposed to make of this?