Natasha

“ With a heavy rustle an evil serpent begins to stir in the darkness of her wearied memory.
Slowly and sorrowfully Natasha turns her steps homeward. Her eyes are drowsy and seem to look aimlessly, with fallen and fatigued glances. The grass now seems disagreeably damp, the wind malicious; her feet feel the wet, and the hem of her thin dress has grown heavy with moisture. The new light of a new day, resplendent, glimmering with the play of the laughing dew, resounding with the hum of birds and the voices of human folk, becomes again for Natasha tiresomely blatant. ”

“ Deep hidden in the soul of this light woman lies a certain moral force and beauty which has never had any chance of development. This power is love. Natasha is a strong and womanly nature, who can only love once, and she is capable of sacrificing all and everything to her love. ”

“ The grey-white, dry paper trembles in Natasha’s hands. Natasha feels a sudden tug at her heart. She speaks incoherently:
“What is it? Oh my God! Sign, did you say?”
She runs to the table. Her hands tremble. She has managed somehow to scrawl her family name “Ozoreva,” the pen hesitating and scratching upon the grey paper.
“Here is the signature.”
Across the little door-chain she thrusts the signed paper and a tip into the hand of the messenger. Then she bangs the door to after him. Now she is in front of the lamp. What can it be? ”

“ When Natasha was two years old the black pall of desolation fell suddenly on our lives, and blasted our great happiness with a misery so utter and complete that we, who were wont to count ourselves among the fortunate ones of the earth, were cast down so low that the beggar at our doors might have looked down upon us. ”

“ Natasha meets Anatoli Kuragin: she yields to the fascination of his beauty, his boldness. He shamelessly addresses a few coarse, flattering words to her; and she is intoxicated by this unrefined incense more than by delicate homage. She forgets that she is plighted to Prince Andréi: she allows herself to listen to words of love. She loves; and she loves so passionately, that, without hesitation, she consents to all that her seducer has planned to lead her to irretrievable ruin. ”

“ Mikheyevna conquered in the end. Kolya emerged from the wardrobe red as a peony, angry and abashed. His hair stuck out like the quills of a porcupine, and his eyes flashed like a wolf's. Natasha was the fault of it all. She had discovered and betrayed him, and that's why Kolya was angrier with her than with anyone else.
"Don't touch me," he shouted, when Natasha took him by the elbow to drag him from the wardrobe.
"Mama has already given you one slapping to-day. Do you want another?" asked Natasha, straightening the new dress hanging in the wardrobe. ”

“ Natasha and Boris follow one another. All around them the dry ears of rye waver and rustle, and among them are the blue-eyed little cornflowers. The two fragilely slender human silhouettes answered to the same wavering motion.
Natasha goes ahead. She turns to see why Boris has lagged behind. The boy, brown and slender, with large burning eyes, attired in his linen jacket, is gathering the little blue flowers. He has already gathered almost as many as his hands can hold. ”

“ She ordered the housekeeper to the cow house, and carried off the girl Natasha, as her daughter's maid, to St. Petersburg, from the first hour letting her feel the lash of her bitter tongue and despotic will. Natasha had tried in vain to dry her mother's tears. With growing anger and sorrow she watched the old house as they drove away, and looking at the old princess she said to herself, "I hate her! I hate her! I will never forgive her!"
Princess Anna, bidding her maid good-by, disappeared into the night. The next morning the old princess learned of the flight. ”

“ This, at any rate, was the line of thought which led the Princess and Colston each to express their unqualified satisfaction with the state of affairs arrived at in the compact that had been made between Natasha and Arnold—"armed neutrality," as the former smilingly described to the Princess while she was telling her of the strange wooing of her now avowed lover. Natasha was no woman to be wooed and won in the ordinary way, and it was fitting that she should be the guerdon of such an achievement as no man had ever undertaken before, since the world began. ”

“ From broken remarks about Natásha and his father, from the emotion with which Pierre spoke of that dead father, and from the careful, reverent tenderness with which Natásha spoke of him, the boy, who was only just beginning to guess what love is, derived the notion that his father had loved Natásha and when dying had left her to his friend. ”

“ If they would but send us!”
“What is the sorrow of a single mother compared to the suffering of an entire nation!” thinks Natasha proudly.
There rises up for an instant a mental image of the ashen-pale face of her mother, her intensely dark, eloquent eyes. A sharp pain, lasting a moment, pierces her heart. What of that? It is, after all, but a single instant of weakness. A proud will shall conquer this slight suffering of a single relative by conferring great love upon the many, the strangers, the grievous sufferers.
What is the woe of one mother! ”

“ Betrothed to Prince André, the only man she truly loves, Natasha yields to a fatal fancy for a miserable fellow. Disenchanted finally, she learns that André is wounded and dying, and goes to nurse him in a mute agony of despair. This part of the book presents the inexorableness of real life in its sudden calamities. After André’s death, Natasha marries Pierre, who has secretly loved her. French readers will be horror-stricken at these convulsions in the realms of passion; but it is like life, and Tolstoï sacrifices conventionality to the desire to paint it as it is. ”

“ Are we prepared to improve upon his method, to re-write his book as we think it ought to have been written? Well, at any rate, it is possible to imagine the different effect it would show if a little of that large, humane irony, so evident in the tone of the story at the start, had persisted through all its phases. It would not have dimmed Natasha's charm, it would have heightened it. While she is simply the heroine of a romance she is enchanting, no doubt; but when she takes her place in a drama so much greater than herself, her beauty is infinitely enhanced. ”

“ So long as her love has not yet ripened, Natasha dissipates her forces, so to speak, in current coin; it amuses her to make everyone fall in love with her with whom she comes in contact. She is merely a sympathetic, attractive, undisciplined woman; she knows she is captivating, and is quite contented. Lacking the enlightenment of religion and culture—for she is a friendless orphan—she has but one object in life—to live gaily. Then appears the man destined to touch the latent chords of her better nature, and she is transfigured. Life loses all worth for her, so long as she cannot reach her goal ”

“ Roses bloomed at the foot of the plain pedestal. They added the enchantment of their brief aromatic existence to the enchantment of eternal beauty.
Very quietly Natasha addressed the Aphrodite.
“If he should come to-day, I will put into the buttonhole of his jacket the most scarlet, the most lovely of these roses. He is swarthy, and his eyes are dark—yes, I shall take the most scarlet of your roses!”
The goddess smiled. Gathering up with her beautiful hands the serene draperies which fell about her knees, silently but unmistakably she answered, “Yes.” ”

“ With a sinking heart, wretched as she always was now when she found herself in a crowd, Natásha in her lilac silk dress trimmed with black lace walked—as women can walk—with the more repose and stateliness the greater the pain and shame in her soul. ”

“ She's gone! And her mother has cut her off from the inheritance," Natasha continued with an exultant smile. "I looked through the scrap basket, and have brought some papers with me."
"What sort of papers?"
"Oh, letters and notes. They are all in Princess Anna's handwriting. Shall I give them to you?" jested Natasha. "Have a good look at them, examine them, learn her handwriting, so that you can imitate every letter. That kind of thing is just in your line; you are a first-class copyist, so this is just the job for you."
The engraver listened, and only shrugged his shoulders. ”

“ Added to this, remember that Natasha, after all, is a woman, and, more than that, a woman devoted heart and soul to a great cause, in which great deeds are soon to be done. Great deeds are still the shortest way to a woman's heart, and that is the way you must take if you are to hope for success. ”

“ Natasha, in fact, seems to show us the limitations in Tolstoy's patriarchal view of woman; he regards her not really as an individual, an end in herself, but as a means towards the race, and the individual loss is nothing to regret; he seems to realise and rejoice in the shock he gives us when he tells us of Natasha the generous become parsimonious, of Natasha the sylph tearing round in a dirty morning wrapper ”

“ Oh, the treacherous speech of the Serpent Tempter! He turns our heads and he entices, and he makes our poor earth seem like some fabulous kingdom.
Again there is a slight wavering stir in the sea of the heat-exhausted ears of rye, studded over with little blue flowers which lower timidly their sweetly-dazed heads from sultriness.
Natasha and her brother Boris are walking together, on an inviting narrow path among the golden waves of rye. ”

“ She did not think of applying submission and self-abnegation to her own life, for she was accustomed to seek other joys, but she understood and loved in another those previously incomprehensible virtues. For Princess Mary, listening to Natásha’s tales of childhood and early youth, there also opened out a new and hitherto uncomprehended side of life: belief in life and its enjoyment. ”

“ His illness pursued its normal physical course, but what Natásha referred to when she said: "This suddenly happened," had occurred two days before Princess Mary arrived. It was the last spiritual struggle between life and death, in which death gained the victory. It was the unexpected realization of the fact that he still valued life as presented to him in the form of his love for Natásha, and a last, though ultimately vanquished, attack of terror before the unknown. ”

“ During that fortnight of anxiety Natásha resorted to the baby for comfort so often, and fussed over him so much, that she overfed him and he fell ill. She was terrified by his illness, and yet that was just what she needed. While attending to him she bore the anxiety about her husband more easily.
She was nursing her boy when the sound of Pierre's sleigh was heard at the front door, and the old nurse—knowing how to please her mistress—entered the room inaudibly but hurriedly and with a beaming face. ”

“ A few minutes passed in questions, answers, embraces, and tears.
Boris said very little.
“Don’t cry, mamma. I am not afraid. There is nothing else they can do. They don’t feed you at all badly here. Remember me to all. And you, Natasha, take care of mother. One sacrifice is enough from our family. ”

“ Her maternal instinct told her that Natásha had too much of something, and that because of this she would not be happy. ”

“ Natasha’s lover, the giddy creature for whom she 174 has sacrificed everything, is not much better. I know that we must not expect lovers to be reasonable beings, and that it is more philosophical to admire the power of love, irrespectively of its object; but the general novel-reader is not supposed to be a philosopher; he would like the adored hero to be interesting at least, and would prefer even a rascal to an idiot. In France, at all events, we cannot endorse such a spectacle, although it is both true to nature and consoling; an exquisite type of woman devoted to a fool. ”

“ In this poisonous air, where everything withers and dies, we nevertheless find character. Natasha, a young girl, still retains her wholesome instincts. She had never known love or sympathy, had gone hungry all her days, and had tasted nothing but abuse from her brutal sister, on whom she was dependent. Vaska Pepel, the young thief, a lodger in the house, strikes a responsive chord in her the moment he makes her feel that he cares for her and that she might be of spiritual and moral help to him. Vaska, like Natasha, is a product of his social environment.
[Pg 306]
Vaska. ”

“ She is willing to elope. A providential chance prevents her departure. Pierre Bezúkhof arrives in time to reveal to the unfortunate young woman that Kuragin is married: [Pg 290] he gives him a pretty rough experience of his giant hand, and compels Lovelace to return Natasha’s letters, and to pack off.
Natasha [52] falls ill with sorrow, shame, and remorse. The doctors cannot get the better of this moral suffering. Religion alone puts an end to it. A lady who lives in the country near the Rostofs comes to Moscow during Lent, and takes Natasha with her to perform their devotions. ”

“ Having found what she was looking for in the reticule she handed it to Natásha. It was a letter from Princess Mary.
“She has written to you. How she torments herself, poor thing! She’s afraid you might think that she does not like you.” ”

“ As he spoke now he was considering what impression his words would make on Natásha. ”

“ The maid's fate had been a strange one. In one of the districts beyond the Volga lived a noble, a bachelor, luxuriously, caring only for his own amusement. He fished, hunted, and petted the pretty little daughter of his housekeeper, one of his serfs, whom he vaguely intended to set free. He passed hours playing with the pretty child, and even had an old French governess come to give her lessons. She taught little Natasha to dance, to play the piano, to put on the airs and graces of a little lady. ”