Meanwhile, my grandmother, cheerful and glad to be back in the village, exclaims: “How beautiful it is outside! Everything is flooded with sunshine, the sky is thick blue, and the illuminated branches are brighter than it, not to mention the snow-covered roofs, which shine in the sun. Chepyzh is completely naked, something I have not seen for a long time and which is strangely surprising. How good! How to live well. One thing: why am I alone, why am I not loved? And all this time, all these wonderful moments I am experiencing alone, why not with my husband?
All year long, Tatyana dreams of meeting a person she can love and admits: “And all the changes I made and felt during this time are completely useless to me. I have not become wiser; on the contrary, I am confused and terribly tired.”
Gratefully accepting all that life has given her, especially “the means to create for herself,” Tatyana decides “to start drawing again and learn very seriously, strictly and systematically, first to draw well and then to write.”
For several winters, Tatyana attends the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. She devotes most of her time to her favorite hobby: “I draw, draw, write, study perspective.” She adds: “In general, one should not be too strict with drawing.” However, from time to time she is distracted by some family member or guests who visit them frequently. Tatyana is interested in everything: she likes good music, has long admired beautiful paintings and hopes to succeed in this field. She has undoubted artistic talents – everyone is sure of that. She is happy, but she could be even happier if she were better, smarter, more demanding of herself and smarter.
But here comes a very difficult moment for Tatyana, a moment of doubt, a new milestone in the life of a girl so sensitive to good and beauty: “One thing is that I don’t need anything except what I have, and that’s what I have. I have so much joy that I don’t need anything else. One thing that sometimes torments me terribly is that my life up to now has been full of mistakes and bad deeds. Sometimes it occurs to me that I will have to atone for all this with even greater suffering than I endured this fall, and that I cannot be loved after all that has happened.” What are these “bad deeds”? We can only guess.
Is it jealousy of her beloved younger sister Masha, who enjoyed her father’s special favour, or a desire to continue to attract the attention of her numerous admirers, or an inability to give up the luxury that surrounds her?
Tatyana admits in her diary how bitter and lonely she sometimes feels, and yet at such moments she “smiles with all her soul,” as her father says. Behind the endless pursuit of perfection lies a constant desire to please Tolstoy, although she does not always understand or share her father’s views on the main issues of existence. Her father is constantly at the center of her thoughts.
From the first to the last page of the diary, Tatyana judges herself harshly and at the same time thinks about marriage, even though she is aware that it could distance her from her father.
