Anyone Else Out There Notice This Weird Thing in the Knopf/Pevear/Volokhonsky Version of War and Peace?

I'm reading Tolstoy's War and Peace.  You call yourself a reader, you call yourself a lover of fiction, you have to have tackled it at sometime in your reading career.

This is not a review, but here's a quick hit:  Too many princes, too many princesses, too many counts, too many people with the same name, too many different names for the same individuals, and families difficult to account for as the scenes shift.  But after an initial struggle, I was drawn in, and I'm enjoying it very much.  Classic Russian literature is so astonishingly different from modern English literature.  The characters feel everything very deeply, express their feelings exuberantly, and the author explains everything in detail.  (Same experience with Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.)  A far cry from Hemingway and the moderns' denatured heroes and heroines and an insistence on "showing, not telling."

This particular report is peculiar to the 2007 Alfred A. Knopf publication of the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation in hardcover, which I believe is now considered the standard modern translation.  It looks like this. 

 

One of the major characters of the novel, Pierre Bolknosky, had become a Mason, as in Freemasonry, as in Masonic Lodges, with all of the mysteries and secrets and alleged conspiracies.  (Not flatteringly portrayed in the novel.)  In a passage that occupies one page in Volume III, Part One, Chapter XIX, Pierre considers the Masons' assignment of numbers to letters of the alphabet - 1 through 10 to letters a through l, and 20 through 160 (multiples of 10) to the remainder of the alphabet. When applied to "l'emperuer Napoleon," the corresponding numbers add up to 666, the Number of the Beast in the Revelation of St. John.  (Napoleon = villain, as he was in the process of invading Russia.)  Pierre then manipulates his own name with various honorifics and misspellings to reach the same sum.  The page looks like this (my copy, my fingers) -- you can see the chart of letters corresponding to numbers at the top  (it is not necessary to read this page to get the punch line here):

At the bottom you see the three dots, indicating that this passage has concluded.

I turned the page.

This is the first thing I see.

I thought sure the internet would yield up some commentary on this somewhere, but I haven't been able to find any, perhaps because surely this coincidence -- that is how I regard it -- is limited to the original 2007 Knopf publication of the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation (this one happens to be from the fourth printing).  

I'll check the Knopf paperback next time I'm at Barnes & Noble.  If you have noticed this, leave me a note or email per below.

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