“White Nights” (1848)

I often think of desire as a fundamental element of fiction.  In most stories, a character wants something, but an obstacle hinders fulfillment.  The vast majority of stories operate this way.

But there’s a snag to this sort of storytelling.  It just doesn’t square with my experience.  To want something wholly, with no reservations whatsoever, seems to be the sole privilege of a rare maniac.  The rest of us find even our strongest desires riddled with doubts.  Thus, after reading a book, I can feel like I’m missing out if I’m not experiencing a supernatural romance, or I can attribute to passing passions something more fundamental than they actually possess.

Not so when I read Dostoevsky.  Perhaps the reason I find the two main characters in “White Nights” so compelling is that their desires are just as fragmented as mine.  The Dreamer seems to prefer his fantasies to real life.  He sees the world as dull, cold, sullen, and hostile compared to his magical, opulent dreams.  Yet at the same time, he sees his life whiled away in daydreaming as pathetic, poisonous, cursed.  Sometimes he feels like he would trade all his fantasy-filled years for one day of reality, no matter how gloomy.

When he tells Nastenka of this, she relates, but in a different way.  She has spent her life hovered over by her Granny, who pushes her toward romance while simultaneously forbidding it.  Their two backstories run parallel—The Dreamer’s fantasies and Nastenka’s Granny are slowly destroying each of them by splitting their desires.

But this is only the beginning.  Nastenka is waiting for the return of a man she wishes to marry.  While waiting, she meets the Dreamer, who quickly develops feelings for Nastenka.  The crucial question then becomes: who is Nastenka going to pick?

But the further the story presses into this question, the more unclear I feel about which man Nastenka prefers.  She herself doesn’t seem to know.  Trying to get to the bottom of her desires is like trying to get to the bottom of a staircase designed by M.C. Escher.

But how can such a story be told?  Desire is the thrust of fiction.  These characters’ desires are so contradictory that the narrative should grow inert and die.  Contradictory desires cancel each other out, so in terms of moving the plot forward, contradictory desires should function the same as no desires.  Without the wind of desire, a story can’t sail.

Yet “White Nights” does.  Why?  Dostoevsky is able to cultivate in me a sense of hope that the instability in these characters isn’t too stable itself—that there’s something solid beneath the ambiguities that’s worth investigating.  

First, the tone of the story is one of contagious curiosity.  The writing feels energized with a sort of dogged determination to get to the bottom of the matter.  Nothing about the tone seems to suggest that sort of despairing throwing up of the hands that says, “Well, I guess we’ll never know.”  Dostoevsky is determined to get closer to a why.  The Dreamer spends two evenings racking his brains trying to discover why his room made him so uneasy.  He examines his walls and furniture in detail.  And when he tells his story to Nastenka, he tells much of it using only “why” questions.  Again and again, Dostoevsky invites me to interrogate his characters’ motives.  I can’t but help but hope that all this interrogation won’t be in vain.

Second, Dostoevsky lays out tantalizing patterns of theme.  There are two major themes in this story—that of dreams versus reality, and that of lingering moments versus the quick passage of time.  He returns to both of these themes in almost every paragraph, so I can’t help but wonder how these themes are related.  Once again, he gives me a fragmentation and a longing to fuse together the pieces.  And he offers me abundant opportunities to do so.  He often mentions how time passes differently in dreams versus reality.  

The Dreamer finds spring in Petersburg so ephemeral that he hasn’t time to fall in love with it.  He dislikes how reality consists of moments that pass by.  He finds it morbid and associates it with death.  For a dreamer, a moment isn’t enough.  But a moment is all reality has to offer—it can only be experienced that way.  In his fantasies, on the other hand, he can prolong moments; he can rehash them and squeeze out all their sweetness.  But because of this, there are no real moments in his dreams.  They are a blur of noncommittal superficiality.  The Dreamer can’t commit to the dying moment, thus he can’t truly know grief or sacrificial love.

By presenting us with these two separate but cross-talking themes, Dostoevsky gives us another layer of patterns by which we can come to a deeper understanding of his characters.  

As usual, Dostoevsky doesn’t come out and say what desire lies at the bottom of these equivocal characters.  But he does give us enough material to make progress with what seems to be the crucial question of the piece: what does it mean to love?

One thing that’s amazing about these characters is that they aren’t rational, but this irrationality isn’t a mere flaw but a sign of something deeper.  There’s more to their desires than their own logic and understanding of their well-being.  They both have a need for love to be stable, but the romance where they are trying to find it isn’t—it’s breaking apart beneath the weight of their need.  Romantic attraction comes and goes, but the need behind it is something pure, something profound.  

“You can’t help believing,” The Dreamer says, “that there is something alive and palpable in his vain and empty dreams!”  Who hasn’t felt that need, that need for a moment, yes, but a lasting moment, a moment that doesn’t die?  Who hasn’t felt that need to love like they do in the stories, to love purely, with no contrary strains, no adulterations?  When romances fail and dreams go sour, that need remains.