Cheap Gimcrack Cover Art of White Nights Bestseller in Brazil
Illustrations by M. Dobuzhinsky
White Nights
Runs Amuck in Brazil, Spain, England
Thanks apparently to an “influencer” in Brazil, who has
scads of followers on BookTok—the literary affiliate of TikTok—young readers
all over the world have taken to Dostoevsky’s early novella (1848), «Белые ночи» (White Nights). Sales
are over the top in at least the three countries mentioned above. In Russia
itself, where even young readers may have already been familiar with this work,
no such enthusiastic new readership appears to have developed.
Influenced by the young Dostoevsky’s attraction to German
Romantic fiction and the School of Sentimentality, this short work describes
the ecstasies of a dreamer-narrator enthused by his fantastical reveries about
brotherly bonding and romantic love. He meets by chance a young girl, Nastenka,
and falls madly in love with her. She, however, has set her heart on a rival,
who soon is to return to her. As one critic has written, everything in this
story is “illumined by the gentle light of Petersburg’s white nights,” the long
evenings of midsummer.
In fact, White Nights is probably the most gentle,
the softest of all fictional works written by Dostoevsky. As Mochulsky has noted, it “strikes a chord of serene and joyful melody, a note of lightness
and gentle irony that is simply not there in Dostoevsky’s later, most famous
works.” In the late forties of the nineteenth century, when this story was
written and published, the School of Realism—later to be embraced by such
titans as Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky himself—was already on the horizon.
With White Nights he may have been playing with an already outmoded
literary genre, half parodying the sentimental novel of the eighteenth century.
It is not hard to imagine how this story of a lonely young dreamer, isolated from the world at large, could appeal to puerile readers of
our own time. The work’s popularity can be attributed, at least in part, to its
length. It is barely long enough to be called a novella, and could be viewed as
a long story. As for the love relationship in White Nights, the
dreamer-narrator is a romantic idealist, as is the girl Nastenka. Neither of
these two main (practically only) characters is a sensualist, and erotic love
is absent in the book. They meet in person only a few times, and if they had
cell phones in those days, one could imagine their communicating with each
other exclusively by text.
Nastenka is unlike hardly any other female character in
Dostoevsky’s fictions. She is full of life and charm, a simple, but not stupid
girl of seventeen. Her portrayal demonstrates that even in his earliest
writings Dostoevsky had a subtle grasp of human psychology. But in his mature
works the females are much more complicated, neurotic, dominated by pride,
often, in fact, hysterical and irrational. They are deeply wounded by the way
men use, or try to use them. Dostoevsky’s favorite theme—later thoroughly developed
by Nabokov in Lolita—featuring old lechers in pursuit of very young
girls, is foreshadowed in this book, in the scene where the Dreamer recues
Nastenka from a lecherous old man. That theme, in fact, was adumbrated even in
Dostoevsky’s first published fictional work, the epistolary novel Poor
People.
You wonder if the young readers of White Nights these
days will graduate up to the more profound works of this profoundly
psychological and philosophical writer. White Nights leads us—if we wish
to take the trip—directly to two more works featuring Petersburg dreamers. The
first of these, published in 1864, is Notes from the Underground. The
critic Victor Terras has written that the unnamed narrator of this novella, a
disillusioned romantic dreamer of forty, is simply the young Dreamer of White
Nights some twenty years later. But the Underground Man, one of the most
perverse and deliberately paradoxical figures in all of world literature, has
left behind all the softness, love of humanity, and gentle irony of his
predecessor. The work is comic, yes, humorous, but in a deeply dark way. Typically, in fact (unlike White Nights), "Dostoevskian."
One step further and we come to Crime and Punishment,
the first of Dostoevsky’s great broad-themed and lengthy novels, published in
1866. Its lonely dreamer protagonist, Raskolnikov, sits dazed, half-crazy, making
big plans in his cramped, stuffy room, which resembles a coffin. He staggers
his way through the grungy streets of St. Petersburg, disturbed enough to
border frequently on insanity. Raskolnikov, among other things, is a murderer.
The “Nastenka” character, the young girl Sonya of Crime and Punishment,
is a tormented prostitute, and one of the subplots of the book involves her
attempts to bring Raskolnikov to atone for his crime and return to Jesus.
In terms of artistic quality Dobuzhinsky's wonderful illustrations to White Nights, scenes of St. Petersburg on the Griboyedov Canal, are better than the novella itself.
