By Hind Baytamouni | Staff Writer
Warning: This article contains spoilers of “White Nights” by Fyodor Dostoevsky
“Because it begins to seem to me at such times that I am incapable of beginning a life in real life.” – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Dear dreamers,
You don’t have to feel alone, for I found an old letter left for you. From the ethereal city of St. Petersburg, from a dreamer who dreamt too far.
“White Nights” by Dostoevsky is a story of a man who only observed St. Petersburg’s life without being a part of it. He crafted his own world and became his own narrator. Sounds lonely, doesn’t it?
And he was. It sounds sad, but you can get addicted to a certain kind of sadness, to the point where it becomes comforting.
Our dreamer suffered from loneliness – until one night, he found a young lady, Nastenka, crying by herself. And oh, what loneliness does to a man! “Oh, Nastenka! You know, we thank some people for merely living at the same time as we do. I thank you for the fact that I met you, that I will remember you for all my life!”
This novel isn’t just a love story. It’s a story of isolation, desperation, a man’s tragic confession, and a young woman’s happy ending. Similar to the narrator, when life seems like a strange place we’re stranded on, one might return to their fantasies to cope with reality. Simply taking a step back, from a bird’s eye view, observing the running life, afraid to join the race.
Afraid? But this bubble of isolation isn’t safe either. You need to wake up.
It is Dostoevsky’s warning: the longer you fantasize, the more of a dreamer you’ll become, and the more desperate you are. As in a span for a few nights, our narrator found himself falling in love with Nastenka, even though she warned him not to as she was already committed to her lover, who had yet to return from his travels. But dreamers know this: when you’ve forced yourself to live inside a dream for so long – where you are both protagonist and narrator, where everyone and everything is of your own creation – being deprived of authentic human connection for so long means that when you finally experience it, something inside you ignites. It screams. Your heart can no longer be contained.
“I don’t know how to be silent when my heart is speaking.”
It doesn’t have to be about love; when you get a brief glimpse of what you’ve always craved, you’ll hold onto it so dearly that the simple thought of losing it will upset you.
And that’s what our narrator went through: he had nothing, then he “had” Nastenka, whose lover returned in the end, and he lost what he almost had.
But I don’t think he was simply in love with Nastenka. I think the narrator was in love with the idea of Nastenka.
At some point, he confesses he had been waiting for her for a long time. He had already been in love with a person who would listen to him and help him out of his isolation in his dreams before even meeting her. A predetermined love, not “a love at first sight.” It might sound relatable: he didn’t choose to fall in love; his isolation did that for him. And now, he had to learn how to tolerate reality.
“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 to sobriety, which are awful!” Nastenka, who was not simply a young woman, but the embodiment of his fantasies, the ideal he married long ago before it stepped into reality, is now gone. Now, she’s simply a person with her own life and desires, the protagonist of her own story. But one’s happy ending might be the tragedy of another, and these are the parallels drawn between our two protagonists. “Here, my tears are falling, Nastenka. Let them flow.” A heart-wrenching love story that gave our dreamer a realistic ending, abruptly pulling him out of his fantasies. And yet, he still held onto a kind image of the ideal he once admired, never bearing a grudge after she chose her own path. How gentle it is to be a dreamer; and yet, how dangerous it is to be lost in dreams.
So, to you whose reality will never match the beauty of imagination; to you who simply exist without truly living; to you still searching for authenticity, I say: “May your sky always be clear, and may your dear smile always be bright and happy.” Don’t look for an ideal, take a step forward and find beauty in what already exists.