Every food, meal, and hunger reference inside Pierre-focused paragraphs of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (Maude translation), set against the emotional temperature of the surrounding text. 2,492 Pierre paragraphs, 542 food references, 346 with enough emotion words to score.
Average sentiment of the 220-character windows surrounding each food reference, grouped by book. Range is −1.0 (all negative emotion words) to +1.0 (all positive). Books where Pierre is narratively absent are omitted.
Raw count of food / meal / hunger tokens appearing in Pierre-focused paragraphs per book. The three troughs at II, VII, and Ep. 2 are the three books where Pierre himself barely appears.
Does eating itself regulate Pierre’s mood? Mean sentiment of the 220 characters immediately preceding the food token compared with the 220 characters immediately following it, per book. If meals soothed him, the green bars would consistently top the blue.
The 542 references split nine ways. “Meal” names dominate; genuine “hunger” is rare and almost entirely localized to the retreat from Moscow and the prisoners’ column.
77% of scored events land in one of the two extremes. Pierre almost never eats in a neutral emotional register — meals are either deeply warm or deeply unsettled.
Mean, combined window
+0.168
Mean, before window
+0.089
Mean, after window
+0.125
Std. dev., combined
0.869
Median (approx. by histogram)
+0.66
Before vs. after sentiment, per event (n = 346)
+0.084
Book index vs. mean sentiment (n = 14)
−0.115
Book index vs. event count (n = 17)
−0.316
Event count vs. mean sentiment, per book (n = 14)
+0.048
The food reference in each book with the most extreme sentiment in its surrounding window. Red rows are strongly negative scenes; green rows are strongly positive. These are the emotional pinnacles that the summary statistics collapse together.
| Book | Category | Keyword | Sent. | Snippet |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I (1805) | meal | dinner | +1.00 | “Well, what answer am I to take? Will you come to dinner at the Rostóvs’?” |
| III (1805) | drink | wine | +1.00 | …they enjoyed their Rhine wine, sauté, and ices, and however they avoided looking at the young couple… |
| IV (1806) | meal | banquet | -1.00 | Dólokhov’s handsome, insolent, hard, and mocking face as he had seen it at the banquet… pale, quivering, and suffering. |
| V (1806–07) | meal | supper | +1.00 | The old prince came in to supper; this was evidently on Pierre’s account. |
| VI (1808–10) | satiety | satisfied | +1.00 | Berg was satisfied and happy. The smile of pleasure never left his face. The party was very successful… |
| VIII (1811–12) | meal | dinner | -1.00 | …a buzzing in his head after dinner or supper he chatted or listened… under the influence of wine… |
| IX (1812) | drink | drank | +1.00 | Pierre still went into society, drank as much and led the same idle and dissipated life… |
| X (1812) | satiety | full | -1.00 | …his lips trembled and he began to cry, in the way full-blooded grown-up men cry, though angry with himself for doing so. |
| XI (1812) | satiety | self-satisfied | +1.00 | the officer’s handsome, self-satisfied face, and… the eager enthusiasm with which he spoke of women. |
| XII (captivity) | vessel | knife | +1.00 | he took out a knife, cut something, closed the knife, placed it under the head of his bed, and, seating himself comfortably… |
| XIII (1812) | meal | tea | -1.00 | …shoes Karatáev had made for him from some leather a French soldier had torn off a tea chest… went up to the sick man… |
| XIV (1812) | hunger | hungry | -1.00 | …cold and hungry soldiers should have to stand and guard equally cold and hungry Russians who froze and lagged behind… |
| XV (1812–13) | satiety | full | -1.00 | Pierre listened to her with lips parted and eyes fixed upon her full of tears. As he listened he did not think of Prince Andrew, nor of death… |
| Epilogue I | satiety | full | -1.00 | …she did these things not under any external impulse as people in the full vigor of life do… |
A paragraph is “Pierre-focused” if it names Pierre or Bezúkhov, or falls within two paragraphs after such a naming with no intervening rival male proper name. Sentiment scores are normalized as (positive − negative) / (positive + negative) over each window. Books II, VII, and the Second Epilogue contribute no events because Pierre is narratively absent from them. Source analysis script: analyze_pierre.py in the workspace root; raw per-event data in pierre_food_analysis.json.