«As ’twas growing dark last night»

«As ’twas growing dark last night» is a hunting song performed by “Uncle” for Natasha Rostova during an evening in the country. What begins as a rustic song becomes the emotional center of the episode: “Uncle” sings it with unstudied conviction, Natasha learns its guitar chords, and the melody follows her into the night as she and Nicholas Rostov return toward Otradnoe. The song gives musical form to a happiness that Natasha can feel more easily than explain, while its recurrence gathers together the impressions of music, landscape, family affection, and thoughts of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky.

The Song and Its Performance

“Uncle” sings the opening words, “As ’twas growing dark last night / Fell the snow so soft and light...,” after playing another song and a waltz. His performance is not polished in the formal sense. He sings as the peasants sing, with complete and naive conviction that the meaning resides in the words, while the tune seems to arise of itself and merely supplies measure to them. Precisely because the melody is unconsidered—likened to the song of a bird—it acquires an extraordinary naturalness. The song therefore represents a mode of musical expression outside cultivated display: direct, instinctive, and inseparable from the life that produced it.

Natasha is transported by the performance. Her response is not simply admiration for “Uncle” as a singer; the song alters her sense of what music can be. She resolves to abandon her attempts to learn the harp and to play only the guitar, then asks for “Uncle’s” guitar and immediately finds the chords. The act is both practical and emotional. By working out the chords herself, Natasha turns a fleeting performance into something she can carry, repeat, and make her own. The song passes from “Uncle’s” voice into Natasha’s hands without losing its rural immediacy.

A Refrain Carried into the Night

After nine o’clock, two traps and three mounted men arrive to bring Natasha and Petya Rostov home. Their parents have not known where they are and have become anxious. Petya is carried out and laid in the larger trap, while Natasha travels in the other with Nicholas. Before they depart, “Uncle” wraps Natasha warmly and takes leave of her with newly awakened tenderness. He walks beside the party as far as the bridge that cannot be crossed, directs them around by the ford, and sends huntsmen ahead with lanterns.

His farewell is itself transformed by the song. Calling “Good-by, dear niece” from the darkness, he no longer sounds like the “Uncle” Natasha had previously known; his voice is now the voice that sang «As ’twas growing dark last night». The song has become an acoustic sign of his identity, so that Natasha carries not merely its words but the altered perception of the man who performed it. In the village, red lights and the cheerful smell of smoke accompany the travelers, extending the song’s world of warmth and communal life into the surrounding darkness.

Natasha’s Happiness and Assimilation of Experience

Once they reach the highroad, Natasha declares that “Uncle” is a darling. She feels neither cold nor discomfort, but an almost perplexing sense of complete well-being. The night is dark and damp; the travelers cannot see the horses and hear only their splashing through unseen mud. Against these materially uncertain conditions, the song functions as an inward source of orientation. It does not remove the darkness, but it gives Natasha a form in which the darkness can be experienced as pleasurable, intimate, and full of possibility.

As the journey continues, Natasha suddenly sings the air again. She has been trying throughout the ride to recover the tune and has finally caught it. The phrase therefore records a small but decisive act of memory: the song is no longer confined to the earlier room or dependent on “Uncle’s” presence. It has entered Natasha’s consciousness as a living pattern. The narrative presents her receptive, childlike soul as eagerly catching and assimilating the diverse impressions of life; the melody is the clearest audible proof of that process, gathering a scattered evening into one repeatable emotional shape.

Memory, Association, and Prince Andrei Bolkonsky

The song also accompanies Natasha’s private associations. Nicholas asks what she had been thinking about, and their familiar question opens a chain of playful and serious reflections. Nicholas has thought first of Rugay, the red hound, imagining that if the dog were a man he would keep “Uncle” near him, whether for riding or for his manner. Natasha, in turn, imagines that the travelers may not really be going home at all, but may suddenly arrive in Fairyland. The song’s return helps create this transition from ordinary travel to imaginative transformation.

Natasha denies that she has been thinking of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, although she has in fact been thinking of him alongside everything else and wondering how much he would have liked “Uncle.” The denial does not erase the association; it makes the song a discreet vessel for feelings she is not ready to state openly. Her thoughts move among “Uncle,” the journey, Fairyland, Prince Andrei, and Anisya’s bearing, not as separate subjects but as impressions absorbed into one mood. Her spontaneous, ringing laughter at the end confirms the song’s function as a refrain of unguarded happiness rather than a declaration with a single fixed meaning.

Narrative Significance

The song’s importance lies in the way it joins folk art to emotional perception. Its words evoke falling snow and the onset of darkness, while its performance produces warmth, intimacy, and delight. The contrast makes the song more than background music: it turns a potentially anxious return—parents searching, difficult roads, a dark ford—into an experience of freedom and wonder. The melody’s apparent simplicity also resists the cultivated forms represented by the harp and the waltz. Natasha’s immediate preference for the guitar marks her attraction to a music that seems to emerge directly from life rather than from technical convention.

Its repetitions structure the passage with increasing intimacy. “Uncle” sings it before the departure; his voice remains attached to the song when he says farewell; Natasha recalls and reproduces it on the road; and the melody becomes the medium through which the evening’s people and sensations remain connected. The song thus converts an isolated performance into a shared memory. By the time Natasha laughs, «As ’twas growing dark last night» has become inseparable from the countryside, the journey home, “Uncle’s” unexpected tenderness, Nicholas’s companionship, and Natasha’s unspoken awareness of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky. Its decisive significance is not the information contained in its words, but the way its recurring sound makes an entire emotional world newly perceptible.