Maslova Recalls the Past

Tolstoy has the ability to create scenes that really have a way of leaving an impact on me. He has a balance which combines the right levels of drama and emotion and he really cracks the human character.

Again, we see his strength to articulate a human and his/her emotions in a way unlike other authors.

I’m not sure what attracts me to the scene below. Perhaps it illustrates a scene that could have played out in my own life.

From chapter XXXVII -

It was a warm, rainy, and windy autumn night. The rain now pelted down in warm, heavy drops, now stopped again. It was too dark to see the path across the field, and in the wood it was pitch black, so that although Katusha knew the way well, she got off the path, and got to the little station where the train stopped for three minutes, not before, as she had hoped, but after the second bell had been rung.

Hurrying up the platform, Katusha saw him at once at the windows of a first-class carriage. Two officers sat opposite each other on the velvet-covered seats, playing cards. This carriage was very brightly lit up; on the little table between the seats stood two thick, dripping candles. He sat in his closefitting breeches on the arm of the seat, leaning against the back, and laughed. As soon as she recognized him she knocked at the carriage window with her benumbed hand, but at that moment the last bell rang, and the train first gave a backward jerk, and then gradually the carriages began to move forward.

One of the players rose with the cards in his hand, and looked out. She knocked again, and pressed her face to the window, but the carriage moved on, and she went alongside looking in.

The officer tried to lower the window, but could not. Nekhludoff pushed him aside and began lowering it himself.

The train went faster, so that she had to walk quickly.

The train went on still faster and the window opened.

The guard pushed her aside, and jumped in.

Katusha ran on, along the wet boards of the platform, and when she came to the end she could hardly stop herself from falling as she ran down the steps of the platform. She was running by the side of the railway, though the first-class carriage had long passed her, and the second-class carriages were gliding by faster, and at last the third-class carriages still faster.

But she ran on, and when the last carriage with the lamps at the back had gone by, she had already reached the tank which fed the engines, and was unsheltered from the wind, which was blowing her shawl about and making her skirt cling round her legs. The shawl flew off her head, but still she ran on.

"…but still she ran on." Just beautiful.

There was a time in my life where I could have been Nekhludoff in that train…and someone that I loved and still love very much could have been Maslova running down the train platform.

I made a decision and “she” agreed with this decision and the scene above never played out for me.

I couldn’t leave her behind. She had too much potential and I loved her too much to not have her in my life.