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Kolya
Natasha is a young woman who works as a typist at the publishing house with Sofia Petrovna. Sofia takes a liking to Natasha because of her flawless typing skills, diligent work ethic, and kind, unassuming nature. A quiet woman, she lets Sofia go on at length whenever they stay late at work, giving Sofia the opportunity to talk about her life or gossip about their coworkers. Natasha is a devoted communist, but her application to the Komsomol (a communist youth organization) is denied multiple times because her father was a bourgeois landowner and decorated member of the pre-communist military. Because of her family background, then, the Communist Party doubts that she genuinely believes in socialist principles, assuming that she thinks that her own family deserves more wealth, land, and power than everyone else. In reality, Natasha’s father died when she was very young, forcing her and her mother to move in with a relative. Both her relative and her mother died before Natasha was very old, so she has spent the entirety of her young adult life in relative poverty. In other words, she has never truly lived the life of a bourgeois anti-communist. To the contrary, she believes wholeheartedly in the Communist Party and wants more than anything to join the Komsomol. Amid the hysteria at the publishing house, though, she gets fired for accidentally typing “the Ret Army” instead of “the Red Army” in a company document—a mistake that her superiors claim reveals her intent to undermine the Communist Party. Without a job, Natasha devotes herself to helping Sofia find more information about Kolya. She’s especially invested in helping Sofia because she’s in love with Kolya. When it’s clear that trying to free Kolya is futile, though, she takes her own life.
Natasha Frolenko Quotes in Sofia Petrovna
The Sofia Petrovna quotes below are all either spoken by Natasha Frolenko or refer to Natasha Frolenko. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 5
Quotes
Sofia Petrovna even wrote to Kolya about the injustice Natasha had suffered. But Kolya replied that injustice was a class concept and vigilance was essential. Natasha did after all come from a bourgeois, landowning family. Vile fascist hirelings, of the kind that had murdered comrade Kirov, had still not been entirely eradicated from the country. The class struggle was still going on, and therefore it was essential to exercise the utmost vigilance when admitting people to the party and the Komsomol.
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Chapter 8
Quotes
“They say our director has been abroad,” Natasha recalled. “Also on a mission. Remember Marya Ivanovna, the elevator woman, told us that he’d brought his wife a light-blue knitted suit from Berlin?”
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Chapter 11
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“And who is this Frolenko? She’s the daughter of a colonel who under the old regime was the owner of a so-called estate. What, it is asked, was citizeness Frolenko doing in our publishing house, the daughter of an alien element, appointed to her job by the bandit Zakharov? Another document will tell us about that. Under the wing of Zakharov, citizeness Frolenko learned to blacken our beloved Red Army of workers and peasants, to strike counterrevolutionary blows: she calls the Red Army, the Rat Army…”
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Chapter 12
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“You’re still very young, I assure you, you’re mistaken. It’s all a question of tact. For instance, yesterday I defended Natalia Sergeyevna at the meeting. And the result? Nothing’s happened to me because of it. Believe me, this business with Kolya is a nightmare to me. I’m his mother. But I understand it’s a temporary misunderstanding, exaggerations, disagreement…One has to be patient.
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Natasha Frolenko Quotes in Sofia Petrovna
The Sofia Petrovna quotes below are all either spoken by Natasha Frolenko or refer to Natasha Frolenko. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 5
Quotes
Sofia Petrovna even wrote to Kolya about the injustice Natasha had suffered. But Kolya replied that injustice was a class concept and vigilance was essential. Natasha did after all come from a bourgeois, landowning family. Vile fascist hirelings, of the kind that had murdered comrade Kirov, had still not been entirely eradicated from the country. The class struggle was still going on, and therefore it was essential to exercise the utmost vigilance when admitting people to the party and the Komsomol.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8
Quotes
“They say our director has been abroad,” Natasha recalled. “Also on a mission. Remember Marya Ivanovna, the elevator woman, told us that he’d brought his wife a light-blue knitted suit from Berlin?”
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Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11
Quotes
“And who is this Frolenko? She’s the daughter of a colonel who under the old regime was the owner of a so-called estate. What, it is asked, was citizeness Frolenko doing in our publishing house, the daughter of an alien element, appointed to her job by the bandit Zakharov? Another document will tell us about that. Under the wing of Zakharov, citizeness Frolenko learned to blacken our beloved Red Army of workers and peasants, to strike counterrevolutionary blows: she calls the Red Army, the Rat Army…”
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12
Quotes
“You’re still very young, I assure you, you’re mistaken. It’s all a question of tact. For instance, yesterday I defended Natalia Sergeyevna at the meeting. And the result? Nothing’s happened to me because of it. Believe me, this business with Kolya is a nightmare to me. I’m his mother. But I understand it’s a temporary misunderstanding, exaggerations, disagreement…One has to be patient.
Related Characters:
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Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
