"White Nights" by Fyodor Dostoevsky

An incredibly lonely young man meets a manipulative woman in a story filled with ambiguities, contradictions and half-turhs.

 A short story rather than a novel; nevertheless I regard it worthy of a blog entry in its own right. It is Dostoevsky after all. And absolutely jam-packed with interest.

It is subtitled: “A sentimental story from the diary of a dreamer.”

Plot with spoilers.

The unnamed narrator is a very lonely man, so lonely that he talks to houses. His awkward manners have driven away any friends he might have had. He regards the people he sees every day on the street as his friends, although he can never summon up the courage to talk to them. As a result, “They, of course, do not know me, but I know them.” Even his emotions are controlled by others: if the people he ‘knows’ are smiling he feels happy etc. 

But in this season of 'white nights' (June 11th to July 2nd when there is twilight at midnight because St Petersburg is so close to the Arctic Circle) people are starting to go off to their summer estates so he's missing even these familiar faces and he feels lonelier still.

So lonely that he even anthopomorphises the houses he passes in the street. He imagines one “cute rosy-pink” (and feminine) being painted yellow [which was the colour of lunatic asylums] thus being defiled by barbarians. Is this some sort of rape fantasy; does it imply a patriarchal assumption that a ‘used’ woman is defiled? There's something creepy about his loneliness.

He's also, by his own account, inexperienced with women. “I am a complete stranger to women. ... I am twenty-six and I have never seen any one” though he later qualifies this by saying that he has met two or three landladies [I presume they are lower class so they don’t count; I wasn't sure whether he is a virgin because in those days sex with prostitutes didn't necessarily count]. 

He encounters a girl weeping on the embankment. He passes by, unable to speak, until a drunk chases her and he runs after then to save her from being insulted. The ice broken, he walks her home and begs to meet again the following night. He's so lonely he has fallen in love at once - he tells her “I shall be dreaming of you all night, a whole week, a whole year.” This behaviour might today be seen as a bit stalkerish.

The second night, she asks to know his 'history'. He grows alarmed: "Who has told you I have a history? I have no history. ... I have lived ... keeping myself to myself, that is, utterly alone.” He then goes into a long speech which reveals almost nothing of his 'history' (he doesn't even tell her his name). Instead, he calls himself “a type ... an original ... an absurd person ... a dreamer” and this initiates a long speech full of passion and long paragraphs that reminded me of the character of the Underground Man in Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground. 

She then tells him her 'history'; she too has a highly-restricted social life being (literally) pinned to the skirt of her grandmother in the evenings. Nevertheless she has got a boyfriend who has promised to marry her when he gets back from a year making money in Moscow. However, the year is over and he hasn't returned. The narrator suggests she writes a letter but she already has and she asks him to deliver it which sounds a bit manipulative to me.

By the fourth night when the boyfriend still hasn't shown up she decides to dump him and the narrator professes his love for her and she accepts. They make plans to marry. But as they return to her home, the ex-boyfriend turns up and she goes back to him.

The next day, alone again with his landlady, he imagines growing old, a lonely man. 

Style

The opening line is: “It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader.” The concept is that these are extracts from a diary, but right from the start, Dostoevsky directly addresses the reader in the character of the narrator.

Ambiguity is built into the dialogue through the repeated use of ellipses. This reminded me of how the dialogues in The Turn of the Screw by Henry James frequently used this device to enable to Governess to make assumptions about the motivations of the other characters.

Unreliability is also an integral part of the story. For example, on the third night the narrator tells us “she has not come” when he arrives at their rendezvous and then, after meeting her, "she arrived a whole hour before I did.” Much of what Nastenka says is either manifestly untrue (she can't always be pinned to her grandmother since she is able to meet the narrator on the embankment four nights in a row) or self-contradictory. 

And there's a lot that isn't said. The narrator never tells us his name and gives us very little of his history. Nastenka refuses to specify the "pranks" that got her into trouble when she was fifteen.

Characters:
The narrator-protagonist is unnamed. He calls himself a dreamer. He is socially awkward, interacting so badly with those who try to befriend him that he drives them away. As a result he is lonely. He is too shy to initiate conversations and when chance in the shape of an alpha male who tries to assault a weeping young girl leads to an encounter, he almost instantly and rather creepily falls in love with her. He is passionate and unrestrained and self-obsessed and emotionally crippled and perhaps unreliable and lying to us. 

Nastenka, the young girl. At first sight she is also emotionally crippled, being (literally) pinned to her blind grandmother's dress. Nevertheless, she has rebelled. When she was fifteen she “got into mischief; what I did I won't tell you; it's enough to say that it wasn't very important.” As a result, she has been effectively imprisoned at home. But this can't be true because she has no problem meeting the narrator on four consecutive nights. She's a liar. She's also a manipulator. When the narrator urges her to write a letter to her boyfriend, it appears she has already written one which she wants him to deliver. She teases him along - even when they are waiting to together to meet her ex on the 3rd night, she takes the narrator's hand because, she tells him, she wants her boyfriend to see how fond she and the narrator are of one another; when, also on the 3rd night, they decide that the ex isn't coming she tells the narrator: “We shall always be together shan’t we?” and he thinks “Oh, Nastenka, Nastenka! If only you knew how lonely I am now!” - and when on the fourth night he finally confesses his love for her she acts surprised but she is clearly pretending: “I knew you loved me long ago, only I always thought that you simply liked me very much.” In the end, when she decides that she has been dumped by her ex, she almost immediately settles for second-best in the form of the narrator ... and then dumps him with alacrity when the ex turns up. She still wants to string him along, telling him in a letter he receives on the morning after the fourth night: “You have forgiven me, haven’t you? You love me as before? ... You will like him, won’t you?” Talk about eating your cake and still wanting to have it! I reckon the narrator has had a lucky escape.

Nastenka's grandmother is blind and has hitherto strictly controlled Nastenka, She was concerned that the lodger with whom Nastenka does fall in love is "youngish" and "pleasant-looking" (according to Nastenka). Nevertheless, towards the end of the story she is looking for a new lodger and she seeks an eligible young man because she wants to get Nastenka married off. 

Matrona, the narrator's landlady, is described as “always thoughtful and depressed” in the Second Night and she isn’t bothered about the spiders’ webs in his room, but by the last section (Morning) she has cleaned the place so that, as she says, “you can have a wedding here”. She seems to mimic the narrator, starting as a dreamer and later becoming actively involved. At then end, when he imagines growing old, it is her he sees. 

Cultural references:
During the narrator's long impassioned speech during the second night, he lists a number of things of which he dreams:

• “Friendship with Hoffmann”. I presume this is E T A Hoffmann, a leading romantic writer in the 19th century, whose stories formed the basis for Offenbach’s opera ‘Tales from Hoffmann’, and one of whose short stories inspired Tchaikobsky’s Nutcracker suite
• “St Bartholomew’s Night” Does this refer to the St Bartholomew's day massacre in France?
• “Diana Vernon” who is a character in Walter Scott’s Rob Roy
• “Playing the hero at the taking of Kazan by Ivan Vassilyevich” Ivan Vassilyevich is the tsar better known as Ivan IV 'the Terrible'. He besieged and captured Kazan in 1552, massacring the mainly Tatar population and putting an end to the Khanate of Kazan which was incorporated into the Russian Empire.
• “Clara Mowbray” is the heroine of another Waverley novel by Sir Walter Scott, this one called St Ronan’s Well.
• “Effie Deans” is yet another Scott heroine, this time from The Heart of Midlothian. At the start of the novel she is in prison for child murder. After her half-sister Jeanie walks all the way to London to secure a royal pardon for her, Effie flees with her lover. Years later she visits Jeanie as ‘Lady Staunton’ and explains to Jeanie “I am a liar of fifteen years standing”. Is she the model of another mendacious woman?
• “The council of prelates and Huss before them”. Jan Hus, a Czech theologian and proto-Protestant, was convicted of heresy at a church council which he attended after being given a safe-conduct; he was burnt at the stake.
• “The rising of the dead in ‘Robert the Devil’”. This is a chorus from act 3 of the opera Robert le diable by Meyerbeer
• “Minna and Brenda” are characters in ‘The Pirate’ by - guess! - Walter Scott
• “The battle of Berezina” was an action of 1812 in which the Russians failed to destroy the retreating French under Napoleon as they crossed the river of Berezina. 
• “Danton” is, I presume, the French revolutionary
• “Cleopatra ei suoi amante” is Cleopatra and her lover. Another doomed love affair.
• “A little house in Kolomna”. Kolomna is the name of the district in St Petersburg where Dostoevsky lived for a while.

Nastenka also has read the entire oeuvre of Sir Walter Scott (her favourite is Ivanhoe). She has also read Pushkin. Her granny refuses to let her read French novels.

The lodger-boyfriend takes her and granny to the opera, starting with The Barber of Seville by Rossini. This involves a woman (Rosina) who is kept secluded by her guardian (because he wants her dowry, does Nastenka's granny have a financial motive to her holding on to Nastenka?). Count Almavira wants to marry Rosina and to gain access to her disguises himself as first a poor student, then a drunken soldier and then a singing teacher. Rosina at one moment agrees to marry her guardian but is later persuaded to marry the Count, so another example of a flip-flopping woman. The 'Barber' himself is Figaro (Mozart's opera, the Marriage of Figaro, is based on the sequel which was regarded as subversive to the point of seditious when it was written). 

Questions I still haven't answered:

1. Why is the narrator anonymous? (And ‘the lodger’)
2. Is the narrator reliable? To what extent can we trust what he says?
3. Is Nastenka manipulating him? He tells her to write a letter to the lodger ... and she already has it written!
4. In the first part, is NP really a rather sinister stalker?
5. Does NP actually post the letter to the lodger? He offers to be an intermediary but is this so that he can keep the lovers apart?

Selected quotes:

• “In these corners ... quite a different life is lived, quite unlike the life that is surging round us, but such as perhaps exists in some unknown realm, not among us in our serious, over-serious, time. Well, that life is a mixture of something purely fantastic, fervently ideal, with something ... dingily prosaic and ordinary, not to say incredibly vulgar.” (2nd night)
• “The dreamer ... is not a human being, but a creature of an intermediate sort. For the most part he settles in some inaccessible corner, as though hiding from the light of day; once he slips into his corner, he grows to it like a snail. ... Why do you suppose he is so fun of his four walls, which are invariably painted green, grimy, dismal and reeking unpardonably of tobacco smoke? Why is it that when this absurd gentleman is visited by one of his few acquaintances (and he ends by getting rid of all his friends), why does this absurd person meet him with such embarrassment, changing countenance and overcome with confusion, as though he had only just committed some crime within his four walls?” (2nd night)
• “He cannot himself remember what he was dreaming. But a vague sensation faintly stirs his heart and sets it aching, some new desire temptingly tickles and excites his fancy, and imperceptibly evokes a swarm of fresh phantoms. Stillness reigns in the little room; imagination is fostered by solitude and idleness; it is faintly smouldering, faintly simmering, like the water with which old Matrona is making her coffee.” (2nd night)
• “Today was a gloomy, rainy day without a glimmer of sunlight, like the old age before me.” (3rd night)
• "Why is it that even the best of men always seem to hide something from other people?” (3rd night)
• “My God, how it has all ended! What it has all ended in!” (4th night)
• “I saw myself just as I was now, fifteen years hence, older, in the same room, just as solitary.” (Morning)
• “My God, a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for the whole of a man’s life?” (Morning)

Novels by Dostoevsky reviewed in this blog:

• The Brothers Karamazov
• The Double
• Notes from Underground

Originally published in Russian in 1848

I read a translation into English, part of 'Greatest Short Stories of Dostoevsky' published by Fingerprint in paperback in 2025

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

The Greatest Gift" by Philip Van Doren Stern

 The short story on which the film It's a Wonderful Life was based.

It's cute, it's feel-good. The protagonist is contemplating suicide because he feels unimportant when a mysterious stranger shows him how much his being alive has changed the lives of others for the best. It's the classic tale of community in small-town America. It's very gentle. There are no grand sweeping passions (I understand that in the film, which I haven't yet seen, there is rather more at stake) and I found it difficult to understand why this ordinary bloke should be contemplating suicide when there was no great tragedy in his life. But I mustn't judge.

But I found the story as a whole rather insipid and pedestrian. Perhaps that's the point.

Selected quotes:

• “I’m stuck here in this mudhole for life, doing the same dull work day after day. Other men are leading exciting lives, but ... I never did anything really useful or interesting, and it looks as if I never will. I might just as well be dead."
• "The place you grew up in was the one spot on earth where you could really feel at home."
• "You had the greatest gift of all conferred upon you—the gift of life, of being a part of this world and taking a part in it."

November 2022, 64 pages (in the print edition, I'm told; I read it on kindle and it seemed shorter than that). 

I've now watched the film 'It's a Wonderful Life' and a stage version of the radio play based on the film. These are both so much better! For a start, they introduce many extra characters, including a bona fide villain. Perhaps more importantly, the suicide scene with which the novella opens is left until the last quarter of the film; the first three-quarters being a slow explanation of the protagonist and his strengths and weaknesses, and the battle between him and the antagonist (clearly inspired by Scrooge from A Christmas Carol), and, quite late on, the actual incident which drives him to the brink of suicide. By making clear this back-story, it adds to the credibility.

The film, despite sometimes lapsing into sentimental schmaltz, had a strong storyline and the central performance of James Stewart, a fascinating mix of hesitation and leaping-before looking, was perfect.

It was also instructive to watch the radio play which I saw staged at the  Grove Theatre Eastbourne on 3rd December 2022 which showed how you can translate a film with a cast of at least fifty not including the extras into a stage show of five performers and a sound effects man and still create a work of art which has its own identity and can be judged as strong as the film. 

They are both miles better than this book.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Cat" by Colette

This is a novella which I read in a still slim volume with Colette's better known Gigi. I much preferred The Cat.

Alain, spoilt only son to a silk fortune, lives with his mother and the cat he adores in their immaculate home. He marries tempestuous Camille and they move into Patrick's triangular high rise apartment while Camille supervises the alterations that will be necessary before Alain's home will be ready for his new bride. At first they leave the cat, Saha, behind but it pines so Alain, without consulting his wife, takes it to his new home. Camille becomes jealous and Alain, despite enjoying sex with his wife, comes to realise he has made a mistake.

This is a portrait of a marriage doomed from the start. It is both sensitive and brutal, deriving both of these from the uncompromising honesty with which Gigi dissects human relationships. For example, after their first night together, Alain reflects "It is always like this the first night? The bruised, unsatisfactory feeling? This half-success, half-disaster?" (p85) which, for me, is far more realistic than the ecstasy of romantic novels or the utter catastrophe of On Chesil Beach. Camille, on her side, muses: "She was licensed to share his bed, to prop up a young man's naked body against her thigh and shoulder, to become acquainted with its colours and curves and defects. She was free to contemplate boldly and at length the small dry nipples, the loins she envied, and the strange design of the capricious sex." (p 86) I adored that word 'capricious'. It turns on its head the cliche of women being fickle ("La Donna e mobile") whilst at the same time alluding (though actually deriving from the Italian word for a shiver) to Capricorn, the goat, symbol of lechery. Alain thinks the same of Camille: "She could be as violent and capricious as a mountain stream" (p 63). And she is the sexy one; he feels embarrassed by her nakedness: "She paraded for him, so proudly and so completely devoid of modesty that he rather rudely flung her the crumpled pyjama-jacket which lay on the bed." (p 84)

One telling incident comes when Saha, the cat, stands on Alain's chest. "One single claw pierced the silk [remember that Alain's money comes from silk] of the pyjamas, catching the skin just enough for Alain to feel an uneasy pleasure." (p 70). But when, later, Alain draws "his nails slowly and delicately all the way down her stomach" Camille is shocked, goes stiff, "her hair on end and her eyes hostile and threatening" and asks if he is vicious. (p 88) It becomes clear that Alain's relationship with the cat is a sexual one and that Camille has every justification in being jealous, although Alain, who thinks of sex purely as the mechanical act he has done with his mistresses, denies it. But he loves Saha for her experience: "What about your first seducer, the white tom without a tail? Do you remember that my ugly one, my trollop in the rain, my shameless one?" If that isn't grounds for jealousy, what is?

And when he goes back home, after his first night, to see the cat again, "He stole into the garden like a boy in his teens who has stayed out all night." (p 91) This suggests that it is the sex with Camille that he feels guilty about.

Other brilliant lines:

• "June came with its longer days, its night skies devoid of mystery." (p 93)
• "His heart was beating fast because he had meanly eavesdropped without being punished for it and because he had been listening to prejudiced witnesses and unsought accomplices." (p 113)
• "All the untidiness of a hot night ... a garment forgotten on a deck-chair, empty glasses on a metal table, a pair of sandals." (p 126)
• "All through his life, a man has to be born many times with no other assistance than that of chance, of bruises, of mistakes." (pp 150 - 151)

Colette's ability to describe scenes and characters with economy but intense clarity gives this story a power that Gigi never achieves. I loved it!

September 2016; 97 pages
Page numbers represent the Penguin Vintage Classics edition.

Other works by French authors reviewed in this blog can be found here

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Gigi" by Colette

Gigi is half way between a short story and a novelette; I read it is a slim volume where it was paired with Colette's The Cat. Gigi was made into a musical film by Lerner and Lowe, who were also responsible for My Fair Lady; there basic theme of older man moulding and perhaps manipulating a younger girl, who then turns out to be stronger and more moral than he is, are obvious.

Fifteen year old Gigi is the daughter of a minor music-hall singer. Her grandmother and her great aunt, both one time members of the demi-monde, are trying to groom Gig to be a successful courtesan. But what Gaston, heir to a fortune in sugar, loves about Gigi is how natural she is.

For me, the most interesting thing about this story was the ruthless cynicism of the grandmother (now poor) and the great aunt (living off the fabulous diamonds and emeralds she acquired) as they educate this child into how to be a lady so that she can command a higher price.

Colette creates some wonderful characters with a few sure strokes of her pen. She also gives us some wonderful epigrams (although there was a moment when I felt that she was trying too hard to out Wilde Wilde):

• "The heron-like legs of a girl of fifteen" (p 7)
• "'But Grandmamma, I've got on my drawers and my petticoat.' 'Drawers are one thing, decorum is another.'" (p 8)
• "'Can't you ever manage to keep your legs together?'" (p 9)
• "'The three great stumbling-blocks in a girl's education, she says, are homard a l'Americaine, a boiled egg, and asparagus. Shoddy table manners, she says, have broken up many a happy home.'" (p 15)
• "Calling people and things by their names has never done anyone any good." (p 22)
• "For a woman, attention to the lower parts is the first law of self-respect." (p 24)
• "The telephone is of real use only to important businessmen, or to women who have something to hide." (p 26)

A lovely story but it rather left me wondering what people saw in Colette. I preferred the far less well known but, to my mind, infinitely better, The Cat.

September 2016; 50 pages

Other works by French authors reviewed in this blog can be found here

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God