Rostov Tells Nina About the Rules for Princesses

Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov’s conversation with Nina Kulikova about the rules of being a princess turns an afternoon tea into a lesson in conduct—and a quiet contest over who gets to define good manners. Rostov offers a code grounded in social refinement, respect across class lines, and gratitude; Nina listens, challenges his examples, and accepts some principles on her own terms. The encounter makes etiquette less a fixed inheritance than a practice that must answer to judgment.

The Tea and Nina’s Request

Five days after their acquaintance began, Nina invited Rostov to tea at three o’clock in the Metropol’s ground-floor coffeehouse. He arrived fifteen minutes early and claimed a table for two near the window. When Nina arrived five minutes after the hour in a light yellow dress with a dark yellow sash, he rose and held out her chair. Their exchange of French courtesies, the ordered samovar, and remarks about rain gathering over Theatre Square established the expected ceremony before Nina shifted the conversation to more serious concerns.

Rostov was prepared for the change in tone. He leaned forward at a carefully measured angle and arranged his expression to convey whichever response the moment might require. That readiness reflects his confidence in the social forms of tea: in his experience, after a few pleasantries, a hostess could bring the purpose of a formal invitation to the table before the first cake was sampled. Nina’s request made that purpose explicit. She wanted him to explain the rules of being a princess, extending an earlier discussion of the liberal arts into the practical education of a young woman’s place in society.

A Code of Manners and Respect

Rostov began with refinement of manners. In his account, a princess would learn how to comport herself in society, how to address people, how to behave at table, and how to hold her posture. Nina immediately queried whether posture counted as manners, testing the boundaries of the list rather than simply receiving it. Rostov then introduced respect for elders. When Nina bowed toward him, he clarified that he meant gray-haired people, not himself, whom he presented as practically a youth like her.

His definition of elders deliberately crossed class boundaries. Shopkeepers, milkmaids, blacksmiths, and peasants belonged within the category, not only people of rank. Rostov grounded this respect in an obligation between generations: those who came before had planted fields, fought wars, advanced the arts and sciences, and made sacrifices, so their efforts deserved gratitude regardless of how humble their station. Nina’s frown showed that the principle had not yet persuaded her, and Rostov answered not with another abstract rule but with a story.

Princess Golitsyn’s Choice

Rostov’s example concerned Princess Golitsyn on a stormy night in St. Petersburg. On her way to the annual ball at the Tushins’, she saw an eighty-year-old woman, hunched against the rain, while crossing Lomonosov Bridge. The princess stopped her carriage and invited the nearly blind woman inside. The woman was travelling to visit her son, a blacksmith in Kudrovo, more than seven miles away; the princess had apparently assumed that her passenger would be going somewhere nearby.

The carriage soon approached the Tushins’ house, lit from cellar to ceiling and attended by a footman on every step. The princess could have excused herself and sent the carriage onward with the old woman, and the driver slowed the horses for her instruction. Instead, she told him to drive on. When they reached Kudrovo, the blacksmith’s family gathered around the carriage, and the old woman invited the princess in for tea. The blacksmith winced, the coachman gasped, and the footman nearly fainted; Princess Golitsyn accepted the invitation and missed the Tushins’ ball altogether. Rostov’s lesson is not that the princess performs courtesy while preserving her social schedule, but that she lets regard for the older woman redirect it.

Nina acknowledged the choice as behavior befitting a princess, though she would have preferred a marriage to the blacksmith’s son as the story’s conclusion. Rostov did not add the tale’s less harmonious coda. In his usual telling, the Countess Tushin had been greeting guests beneath her portico when the princess’s well-known bright blue carriage slowed at the gates and then drove on. The slight caused a rift between the Golitsyns and the Tushins that might have taken three generations to repair, had the Revolution not ended their outrage. By withholding this ending, Rostov preserves the success of his example for Nina, even as the omitted consequence complicates the idea that one gracious act leaves every social obligation satisfied.

Gratitude, Argument, and Qualified Agreement

Rostov next used the tea cakes themselves to introduce a rule of everyday speech: a princess should say please when asking for a cake and thank you when one is offered. Nina accepted the first part but saw no reason to thank someone for an unsolicited offer. Rostov compared manners to bonbons: they could not be selected only when convenient, nor could a half-bitten one be put back. Nina answered with a distinction between requesting something and merely accepting what another person chose to offer. If she had asked for a cake and received it, she agreed, thanks were due; if it had been offered without a request, she considered acceptance a favor to the giver rather than a debt owed by the recipient. She punctuated her reasoning by eating a lemon tartlet.

Rostov conceded that her argument had merit, while invoking a lifetime of experience; Nina promptly suggested that his claim to such experience might be premature. The exchange lets the teacher’s authority remain present without making it final. Nina then stated what she would actually do: work on her posture and say please and thank you when asking for things, but refuse to thank people for things she had never requested. Her conclusion is neither simple compliance nor rejection. She takes up the practices she finds persuasive and draws a boundary around the one she regards as undeserved.

The lesson therefore joins inherited form to active interpretation. Rostov’s story makes respect visible in a costly choice of time and social expectation; Nina’s argument brings the same question down to a cake and a spoken courtesy. In both cases, manners matter because they shape how one person responds to another, but the conversation leaves room for the younger listener to decide what gratitude should mean.