Достоевский, "БЕЛЫЕ НОЧИ," Dostoevsky's "White Nights" Runs Amuck

                                   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, Marcelo Nogueira, 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.