Countess Rostova’s maiden name - Shinshina
So, I saw someone say that the fact that Natasha’s mother’s maiden name was Shinshin (Shinshina, actually - Shinshin is an anglicization) means that she “isn’t white.” Now…this confused me a bit because even when I was reading the book (in Russian) the first time, the last name didn’t sound particularly foreign to me. But I decided to poke around some Russian resources and see what I could find re: the name’s origins.
The information is really pretty scarce because this is not a common last name. But. It seems like this is actually a Ukrainian-origin last name. Now, I did read a theory that the root word of the name is a Ukrainianization of a Circassian word meaning horseless/one who lacks horses (i.e. is of small means). I…can’t say how reliable this theory is, but it’s not improbably: there would have been plenty of cultural exchange in that area, especially in, what we would think of as, the late Renaissance/early Enlightenment period, especially via the Crimean Tatars. So, it’s possible that a long-ago ancestor of someone with the last name Shinshin would have been a Circassian or a Tatar. But…again, even in this theory the word is a Ukranianized version and the name itself is considered Ukrainian, not Tatar or Circassian.
Oh, but while we’re on the subject of various Southern Russian/Ukrainian and Turkish ethnicities - I’ve also seen people point out that the text will occasionally mention Natasha’s mother having “Oriental” (literal translation being “Eastern”) features (though Natasha doesn’t seem to have inherited them.) This is a really vague description - in Russia people will use this description loosely. Anything like narrow-ish eyes or high ~Mongolian cheekbones can get your features labeled as Asian. Interestingly enough, some, otherwise very Slavic (lineage and looks wise), Russian people will sometimes have certain facial features that look distinctly Mongolian/Turkish. (This is the case with my mom and I.) I haven’t done any kind of academic research on this, but like…Russia spent a ton of time under Mongol occupation. It was all the way back when but genes are a funny thing - they sometimes pop up many generations later.
But also, Asian (or “Eastern”) doesn’t necessarily refer to Far Eastern (like China, Japan, Korea, etc). in conversation, people will often refer to “Eastern” (e.g. “eastern looks,” “eastern culture,” “eastern customs”) to also refer to a broad concept of Asian, i.e. Turkish or Arabic/Middle Eastern. Everyone can get kinda lumped together in this definition, though, admittedly, the most common usage does refer to Far East Asia. It seems most likely to me, at any rate, that if Natasha’s mother’s family did have some non-Slavic roots (though, I would argue, these would have been a few generations back), they are more likely to be Circassian or Mongolian or Tatar or some other ethnicity along those lines.