LITMIR.BIZ

      Why, why would he want her? Hasn’t he got anyone else to go to the movies with? It is not like there was a lack of beauties at their university or even the whole big city.

      “Don’t think about it!” she heard suddenly. It was her Inner Voice. “Do you want to go on this date?”

      “Yes… I do.”

      “Then go. Don’t worry about the other beauties for the moment.”

      On Beauty

      Dina did not even consider herself cute.

      Not because of an inferiority complex, so often present in young ladies, who were not fortunate to become the center of universal male attention. Not at all. The reason was that Dina’s ideas of beauty were based on such unattainable ideals that even the girls others considered beautiful and attractive did not deserve such labels in her opinion. Perhaps only Rimma Yakovleva, the second-year girl that Dina shared a room with, could be called cute… Therefore, there was no point in getting upset if you weren’t born looking like Anna Magnani! You had to be satisfied with what you had.

      It was Anna Magnani who was the benchmark of female beauty for Dina, and not Brigitte Bardot and Sophia Loren, whom all the girls her age were obsessed with.

      “She is hideous like Baba Yaga!” laughed her classmates at first, and then the girls at university, looking at the portrait of the little-known actress.

      “You just don’t know anything about beauty!” replied Dina with a quiet dignity and the unwavering certainty in her right to have an opinion that differed from the majority.

      She did not become offended. What did she have to be offended about? The fact that they lacked the emotional subtlety to sense – sense rather than see – what true beauty was? She should not be offended by them but pity them.

      Dina did not yet have a benchmark for male beauty. Nevertheless, the sickly-sweet blue-eyed Frenchman that everyone swooned over conjured up in her a feeling of dislike, almost disgust. Muslim Magomaev, on the other hand, whom Dina had only seen in magazine photographs, but knew and loved his voice, thrilled Dina. And Jean Marais… Although Dina would not have been able to say with certainty whether it was the character of d’Artagnan, the valiant musketeer, that she loved, or the actor playing him. One way or another, in both d’Artagnan and Jean Marais, Dina sensed the important thing that every woman subconsciously seeks in a man: nobility and virtue, and the ability to protect the lady from all troubles. Dina did not yet know if nobility and inner strength went hand-in-hand with external beauty.