Her poor affair with Anatole Kuragin is Natasha's uneasy entrance into maturity and she becomes aware, for the first time, that the actions of an adult bear moral consequences. But Tolstoy says a great deal more than this through the vehicle of his heroine's false love affair. In showing what it means to lose one's childhood in civilized society, Tolstoy points out the paradoxical nature of the social order; that society encourages false moral values and then punishes those that transgress.
The beauty of Natasha's nature is her belief in her own emotions and her ability to respond to natural impulses. And, with her characteristic intensity and directness, she discovers that not only is it wrong to give way to her natural impulses but that she can no longer trust them. At once, her entire self is destroyed and there is no way possible for her to replace the loss. Pierre, however, holds out future hope for Natasha as she intuitively recognizes him as the only one she can trust.
The way Tolstoy depicts Natasha's coming-of-age and loss of innocence during the course of an opera is a brilliant exercise in irony. Natasha is fulfilled with a sense of her womanly attractiveness by the attention she receives as she enters her box. At the same time she poignantly realizes her femininity is an empty gesture as long as Prince Andrey is not here to claim it. In this serious mood, the first act of the opera seems to her grotesque and unnatural. But the bare décolleté of the women around her, especially that of the dazzling Ellen Bezuhov whom she meets during the first intermission, and the sensual stimulation of the stagecraft itself soon have an effect on Natasha. By the second act she is intoxicated by the unreality of her surroundings, and the opera now seems natural and normal to her. In other words, society has perverted Natasha's pure feelings of love into sexual terms and she is unable to distinguish between truth and illusion. The opera symbolizes this confusion.
