Having previously identified Natasha with the springtime, Tolstoy uses her as the means for Prince Andrey's emotional renascence. Natasha's debut at the grand ball provides a fairytale atmosphere where the"princess" enkindles immediate love in the heart of a"prince charming." Tolstoy expands this romantic formula by forcing the heroine to undergo a test before she can prove herself worthy to marry the hero. This mythic beginning for the love relationship between Natasha and Prince Andrey strikes a note of unreality which foreshadows disaster for the newly conceived romance.
At the same time, his romantic passion provides Prince Andrey with a point of reality. Against his emotional fulfillment, he can measure the value of all his other activities. Suddenly love is Andrey's"real life" and his political business and committee services become mere reflections of life. Compared to Natasha's laughter, Speransky's laugh seems an echo of the deadness Andrey discovers among all the court officials.
Pierre's sense of reality receives a similar shock in these chapters as he begins to see the futility of finding emotional fulfillment through freemasonry. He realizes he has joined the organization to seek answers to his personal disorders, not those of the world. When Pierre discovers that the problems he symbolizes in his dreams — his sexual desires, for instance — are more substantial than the hollow virtues he seeks to achieve through freemasonry, he can already begin toward self-perfection.
Tolstoy has thus turned the concepts of worldly reality into unreality and dream-life and passion of an individual into substantial qualities."Real life," according to Tolstoy, are the struggles of the"inner man," and these struggles for self-knowledge provide the only means with which to understand the outer world.
