Dostoevsky - White Nights

If you find Dostoevsky’s long novels to be a bit overwhelming but at the same time admire his writing style, then White Nights is a perfect choice to read. Consisting of three short stories, Dostoevsky showed how individuals are often tortured, interrogated, and mocked by what seemingly is ‘fate’. In A Nasty Business, poor Pseldominov never expected Ivan’s arrival. In The Meek One, neither the character nor the reader would have seen the tragic twist coming without the character stating the conclusion right at the start of the story. In White Nights, the sudden appearance of Natshenka’s dream person is also very surprising. The characters in all three stories are all dreamers, and they have dreamed or envisioned a life they would like to live. As the story develops, they all seem to come very close to achieving that dream, but dreams can exist no more than illusions and the essence of dreams is a denial of reality, hence, as soon as the narrator or the main character captures joy in life, he or she is immediately denied of it. The characters were thrown in a whirlpool, unable to exert control over anything, and every turn of events seems to be a result of bad luck or fate. But is that really the case?

Under the mask of ‘fate’ is class division, poverty, economic recession, and poverty in 1800s Russia. The roadblock to achieving happiness is almost always realistic factors — characters are forced to succumb to marriage, and to be separated from each other due to low socioeconomic status, power imbalance, and shortage of resources in general. With a lack of resources comes a lack of right — the ultimate right to decide one’s own fate. A stark contrast is drawn between the innocence of our ‘dreamers’ and the harsh reality everywhere in the stories. This idea of losing the power to decide one’s own fate is introduced straightforwardly in the satirical A Nasty Business: even though the narrator is a general of high social status, he lives in constant fear of being denied his right or joy of living a dignified life — he still suffers from isolation and alienation, despite him already having accumulated physical wealth. It is the insecurity that is deeply rooted in his heart and is unable to shrug off that leads to his terrible behaviour at the wedding, and such insecurity is a result of his hyper-fixation with himself, making it impossible for him to truly understand people of lower socioeconomic status. A Nasty Business hence implies that at least in the context of the story, it is impossible to reconcile the gap between the upper-middle class and the working/lower class. The Meek One also includes elements of a wedding; in fact, it centres around a marriage. The abusiveness of the way the narrator treated his wife and the lack of understanding between the two are also results of poverty, showing how poverty can drive people to extremes. When basic needs can’t be met, it is no wonder that people gradually become more and more unkind and cruel to each other and to themselves, because it is always the economic basis that determines the superstructure, including moral values. White Nights is less enjoyable to read for me personally, with a plot that isn’t as thick as the other two and a more sentimental theme of romance. What’s lurking beneath the sentimental surface of the story, however, is still Dostoevsky’s critique of the Russian society where loved ones were forced to separate in the first place because their right to marriage is almost always determined by senior family members who view marriage as a trade for more resources and a tool to elevate socioeconomic status. For those that are rooted in poverty, like the narrator and Natshenka before her reuniting with the man, their right to love seems also to be denied, and they can only live like dreamers, feeding on fantasies, with white nights becoming sleepless nights, rather than those bright, pleasant summer nights full of hope.