Heidi’s Reviews > The Bear and the Nightingale > Status Update

Chp 27: Such is the strength of men. We who live forever can know no courage nor do we love enough to give our lives. But your father could.

Chp 25: V: did you change the straw? Was that magic?!
Morozko: you are too attached to things as they are. You must allow things to be what best suits your purpose, and then they will. You can’t change it to a brush, because that would be to believe it is now straw. Just allow it now to be a brush.
Nothing changes. Things are or they are not. Magic is forgetting that anything ever was other than as you willed it.

Chp 16:
V: Why linger here? The world is wide, and our corner of the Earth is so small.
K: God gave me a task.
V: We are men and women. We are not a task. Go back to Moscow and save all there.

Chp 16:
V: Why do you stay here? You hate it here!
K: I have a task. I must save you from yourselves. God has punishments for those whose stray.
V: A self-appointed task. In service of your own pride. Why is it for you to say what God wants? The people would never revere you so if you had not made them afraid [in the first place].

Part 2 Chapter 12:
Vasya: I am only a country girl. I have never seen Tsargrad, or angels, or heard the voice of God, but I think you should be careful, Battushka, that God does not speak in the voice of your own wishing. We have never needed saving before.

Part 2 Chapter 12:
Konstantin: It is not a fit subject for girls
Vasya: you did not want to come here did you? We have no music or lights. And precious few people, can you not go away again?
K, coldly: I go where God sends me. If my work is here then I stay here.
V: and what is your work, Battushka?
K: to save souls
V: are you going to save us then?
K: if God gives me strength, I will save you

Part 2 Chapter 12: Vasya asks Konstantin about the church men’s chorus and she thinks it must be “like heaven.” K is young Orthodox priest sent from Moscow to the village of Lesnaya Zemlya. K agrees and recalls to himself what it was like back home. “Memory had him by the throat. Gold and silver, music, learned men, and freedom. The forest chocked him.”

Part 2 Chapter 12: Walking the newly arrived religious leader Konstantin to the forest to show him where he can find ingredients to make paint dyes for religious icons, Vasya asks after her siblings who live in the same city that Konstantin came from. They are doing well and that makes Vasya happy.

Vasya (Vasilisa Petrovna) is a young woman in medieval Russia with the ability to see and interact with traditional household spirits (no one else can see them). Konstantin Nikonovich is a charismatic, pious, prideful Christian priest whose efforts to eliminate these pagan beliefs, which he deems evil, create a dangerous conflict.