The Weight of Sacrifice — War and Peace

Sonya's letter that reached Nicholas as if in answer to prayer grew from a harder squeeze at home. After he wrote of meeting Princess Mary at Bogucharovo, the countess made Sonya's life cruel with humiliating allusions. A few days before they left Moscow she stopped scolding and tearfully begged Sonya to break the engagement and repay the family that had reared her. Sonya had always found her worth in sacrifice, but this time they asked for the one reward that had made every earlier gift possible. Bitterness rose against her benefactors. She grew jealous of Natasha, who never had to give anything up and was still beloved by everyone. A passionate claim began to outrun principle, virtue, and religion. She answered the countess in vague terms, hid, and resolved to bind Nicholas when she saw him, not to set him free.

The last days in Moscow drowned that gloom in practical work. When she heard Prince Andrew was in the house, pity mixed with a superstitious joy: Natasha still loved him, they would fall in love again, and Nicholas could not marry Mary because of the prohibited degrees of affinity. Providence, she thought, was taking her personal side. At Troitsa monastery they rested a whole day. Natasha came from Andrew's room excited, took Sonya's hand, and asked if he would live. Sonya looked through the half-open door and almost screamed. Andrew lay as she had claimed to see him in the Otradnoe Christmas mirror: eyes closed, hands folded, covered with a pink quilt. She had invented that vision then; now she believed it as firmly as any memory, and Natasha cried that the colour had really been pink.

Softened by the fulfilled prophecy, and sure Natasha's renewed love would block the Mary marriage, Sonya felt her old self-sacrificing spirit return. The countess, writing to Nicholas, asked in a tremulous voice whether Sonya would write too. In those weary eyes Sonya read entreaty, shame, fear of refusal, and readiness for hatred if she refused. She knelt, kissed the countess's hand, and with joyful tears wrote the touching release whose arrival so amazed Nicholas.