White Nights Page #7

"White Nights," a novella by Fyodor Dostoevsky, is a poignant exploration of dreams, love, and loneliness set against the backdrop of St. Petersburg's enchanting white nights. The story follows an unnamed narrator, a lonely and introverted young man, who encounters a mysterious woman named Nastenka. Over the course of four nights, they share their dreams, hopes, and vulnerabilities, forming an intense emotional connection. As their relationship unfolds, the narrator grapples with his feelings of unrequited love and the bittersweet nature of human connection. Through this intimate narrative, Dostoevsky delves into themes of isolation, longing, and the complexity of romantic relationships.

• Novel

								

imagination, but that it is concrete, real, substantial! Why is it,
Nastenka, why is it at such moments one holds one's breath? Why, by what
sorcery, through what incomprehensible caprice, is the pulse quickened,
does a tear start from the dreamer's eye, while his pale moist cheeks
glow, while his whole being is suffused with an inexpressible sense of
consolation? Why is it that whole sleepless nights pass like a flash in
inexhaustible gladness and happiness, and when the dawn gleams rosy at
the window and daybreak floods the gloomy room with uncertain, fantastic
light, as in Petersburg, our dreamer, worn out and exhausted, flings
himself on his bed and drops asleep with thrills of delight in his
morbidly overwrought spirit, and with a weary sweet ache in his heart?
Yes, Nastenka, one deceives oneself and unconsciously believes that real
true passion is stirring one's soul; one unconsciously believes that
there is something living, tangible in one's immaterial dreams! And is
it delusion? Here love, for instance, is bound up with all its
fathomless joy, all its torturing agonies in his bosom.... Only look at
him, and you will be convinced! Would you believe, looking at him, dear
Nastenka, that he has never known her whom he loves in his ecstatic
dreams? Can it be that he has only seen her in seductive visions, and
that this passion has been nothing but a dream? Surely they must have
spent years hand in hand together--alone the two of them, casting off
all the world and each uniting his or her life with the other's? Surely
when the hour of parting came she must have lain sobbing and grieving on
his bosom, heedless of the tempest raging under the sullen sky, heedless
of the wind which snatches and bears away the tears from her black
eyelashes? Can all of that have been a dream--and that garden, dejected,
forsaken, run wild, with its little moss-grown paths, solitary, gloomy,
where they used to walk so happily together, where they hoped, grieved,
loved, loved each other so long, "so long and so fondly?" And that queer
ancestral house where she spent so many years lonely and sad with her
morose old husband, always silent and splenetic, who frightened them,
while timid as children they hid their love from each other? What
torments they suffered, what agonies of terror, how innocent, how pure
was their love, and how (I need hardly say, Nastenka) malicious people
were! And, good Heavens! surely he met her afterwards, far from their
native shores, under alien skies, in the hot south in the divinely
eternal city, in the dazzling splendour of the ball to the crash of
music, in a palazzo (it must be in a palazzo), drowned in
a sea of lights, on the balcony, wreathed in myrtle and roses, where,
recognizing him, she hurriedly removes her mask and whispering, 'I am
free,' flings herself trembling into his arms, and with a cry of
rapture, clinging to one another, in one instant they forget their
sorrow and their parting and all their agonies, and the gloomy house and
the old man and the dismal garden in that distant land, and the seat on
which with a last passionate kiss she tore herself away from his arms
numb with anguish and despair.... Oh, Nastenka, you must admit that one
would start, betray confusion, and blush like a schoolboy who has just
stuffed in his pocket an apple stolen from a neighbour's garden, when
your uninvited visitor, some stalwart, lanky fellow, a festive soul fond
of a joke, opens your door and shouts out as though nothing were
happening: 'My dear boy, I have this minute come from Pavlovsk.' My
goodness! the old count is dead, unutterable happiness is close at
hand--and people arrive from Pavlovsk!"

Finishing my pathetic appeal, I paused pathetically. I remembered that I
had an intense desire to force myself to laugh, for I was already
feeling that a malignant demon was stirring within me, that there was a
lump in my throat, that my chin was beginning to twitch, and that my
eyes were growing more and more moist.

I expected Nastenka, who listened to me opening her clever eyes, would
break into her childish, irrepressible laugh; and I was already
regretting that I had gone so far, that I had unnecessarily described
what had long been simmering in my heart, about which I could speak as
though from a written account of it, because I had long ago passed
judgment on myself and now could not resist reading it, making my
confession, without expecting to be understood; but to my surprise she
was silent, waiting a little, then she faintly pressed my hand and with
timid sympathy asked--

"Surely you haven't lived like that all your life?"

"All my life, Nastenka," I answered; "all my life, and it seems to me I
shall go on so to the end."

"No, that won't do," she said uneasily, "that must not be; and so,
maybe, I shall spend all my life beside grandmother. Do you know, it is
not at all good to live like that?"

"I know, Nastenka, I know!" I cried, unable to restrain my feelings
longer. "And I realize now, more than ever, that I have lost all my best
years! And now I know it and feel it more painfully from recognizing
that God has sent me you, my good angel, to tell me that and show it.
Now that I sit beside you and talk to you it is strange for me to think
of the future, for in the future--there is loneliness again, again this
musty, useless life; and what shall I have to dream of when I have been
so happy in reality beside you! Oh, may you be blessed, dear girl, for
not having repulsed me at first, for enabling me to say that for two
evenings, at least, I have lived."

"Oh, no, no!" cried Nastenka and tears glistened in her eyes. "No, it
mustn't be so any more; we must not part like that! what are two
evenings?"

"Oh, Nastenka, Nastenka! Do you know how far you have reconciled me to
myself? Do you know now that I shall not think so ill of myself, as I
have at some moments? Do you know that, maybe, I shall leave off
grieving over the crime and sin of my life? for such a life is a crime
and a sin. And do not imagine that I have been exaggerating
anything--for goodness' sake don't think that, Nastenka: for at times
such misery comes over me, such misery.... Because it begins to seem to
me at such times that I am incapable of beginning a life in real life,
because it has seemed to me that I have lost all touch, all instinct for
the actual, the real; because at last I have cursed myself; because
after my fantastic nights I have moments of returning sobriety, which
are awful! Meanwhile, you hear the whirl and roar of the crowd in the
vortex of life around you; you hear, you see, men living in reality; you
see that life for them is not forbidden, that their life does not float
away like a dream, like a vision; that their life is being eternally
renewed, eternally youthful, and not one hour of it is the same as
another; while fancy is so spiritless, monotonous to vulgarity and
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