Nastenka, a diminutive of Anastasia, is the seventeen-year-old girl whom the Dreamer finds weeping on the embankment on the First Night. Orphaned of father and mother, she lives with her blind grandmother in a small wooden house in Petersburg, pinned to her dress by a pin, and for a year has been waiting for the return of a lodger who left for Moscow promising to marry her.
On the First Night she still has no name: she accepts the arm of a stranger, laughs at his confession and sets the condition that he not fall in love. She only says her name on the Second Night and, after his discourse, tells her story: the mischief at fifteen, the pin, the lodger who lent her books by Walter Scott and Pushkin and took her and the grandmother to The Barber of Seville, and the night she went up to his room with a bundle, saying that without him she could not live.
She is the other half of the book's loneliness. The Dreamer lives with no one; she lives clinging to someone. That is why she says she understood everything he told, because she lived the same way, pinned to her grandmother's dress. On the following nights, she says she loves him because he did not fall in love, compares the two men ("He is worse than you, though I love him more than you") and, on the Fourth Night, asks herself whether her love for the lodger was not "an illusion of the senses, of the imagination".
Her relationship with the Dreamer can be read in two ways. In one, she is sincere from beginning to end: she warns him that he must not fall in love and, in the final letter, refuses to pretend that she does not love him. In the other, she needs him without measuring the cost: he carries the letter, consoles her while she waits, and offers her a place if the other does not come. The text gives material for both readings.