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Chapter Four Natasha: Tears in Laughter OF HIS F IVE protagonists, perhaps the one most central to Tolstoy's meaning and method is Natasha. She enters the novel on her thirteenth name day (or Russian birthday). We hear a chair falling over, the sound of footsteps running, and in she darts to the middle of the drawing room where her parents are making conversation with their tiresome callers. "Ma chere, there is a time for everything," her mother gently scolds; but Natasha can't wait. After leaving the grown-ups, she sees her brother Nicholas make up a quarrel with Sonya by kissing her, tries to get Boris to oblige her in the same way and, when he hesitates, jumps onto a flower tub and kisses him. That evening, when the music begins, she marches into the drawing room and charms twenty-one-year-old Pierre into dancing with her, flirting ,vith him even though she is supposedly in love with Boris. When both Boris and Pierre have disappeared, she will fall in love with her Italian singing teacher. From the start, Natasha feels free to fling herself at life: falling endlessly in love, wanting to fly off into the moonlight, shrieking with joy, bursting into song, or maybe into tears-doing whatever she does (even sulking) "with all her heart and all her might" (11:8). After dinner on her name day, when she finds Sonya upstairs sobbing, she herselfbegins "to wail like a baby without knowing why, except that Sonya was crying"-but a minute later both girls are laughing as Natasha converts Sonya to her own happy mood (1:10). And when Nicholas first arrives home on furlough from the army, "Natasha, after she had pulled him down toward her and covered his face with kisses, holding him tight by the skirt of his coat, sprang away and pranced up and down like a goat and shrieked piercingly" (4:1). Her responses are volatile and immediate-so immersed in the moment that it seems pOintless to her to write to Boris at army camp, or (later) write to Prince Andrew when he is abroad. Writing letters is living retrospectively ; and reactions she might try to remember to include would lose their meaning out of context, become dead butterflies. "No, I can't! I'm not telling it right ..." she writes to Andrew, trying to describe, in a letter, how it felt to get lost during a mushroom hunt (10:2.5). She welcomes not the 43 Tolstoy~s Phoenix recall but the onrush of life, intuiting each shade of feeling in others, reacting spontaneously to each new person she meets. As Pierre tells Princess Mary, Natasha is not clever; she doesn't "deign to be" (8:4). Like a painting or a song, or like life itself, she is-and what she is is enchanting, in a different way depending on each situation, impossible to recapture in retrospect. If she thinks about herself it is in relationship to individuals, yesterday and tomorrow ; if she looks back on her life at all, it is in terms of whether it is or isn't being wasted by haVing so much, so urgently, to share and no one to share it \vith. "I am in love with your brother once and for all," Sonya (at fifteen) tells Natasha, "and, whatever may happen to him or to me, shall never cease to love him as long as I live" (3:.5). But such fixed feelings and long time spans are not in Natasha's repertoire. Writing to Boris in army camp would, she says, seem awkward and make her "ashamed": ashamed of losing interest when a person isn't around. Not because she is fickle but because her constant need is for live interchange, for giving expression and getting response. The first time Prince Andrew called, a few days after the Grand Ball, she sang; and, "As soon as she finished she went up to him and asked how he liked her voice. She asked this and then became confused, feeling that she ought not to have asked if' (6:11). Princess Mary, in such a situation, would have blushed and hurried from the room right after the song was finished, but Natasha couldn't resist asking this new beau-she had to know how she was doing. Her actions might be startling or begUiling, impatient or even, on occasion , rude. But they are never ridiculous, because they are genuine: they...

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