“Your hand is cold, mine burns like fire. How blind you are, Nastenka!”
As the chilling hands of Winter grasp onto the last of Autumn’s gentil tenderness, draining the season’s warmth and vibrant colour, we transition from Shelley’s haunting gothic landscapes into Dostoevsky’s realm of dark psychological and philosophical fiction. For many readers, White Nights is a comforting companion in the cold evenings when we need of a short, unforgettable novella that holds volumes of suggestive meaning.
For those who aren’t familiar with the work of Russian writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, White Nights would be the best place to start. It is a perfect introduction into his signature multidimensional characters – whose humanity and morality are ripped apart – the cold and desolate settings of dim lit streets of Russia and a feeling of unfulfilled satisfaction that leaves readers eternally marked by Dostoevsky’s dark and twisted work. Yet, beneath these poetic words lies the silent truths of each character’s emotional fragility reflected in the ‘marvellous’ and ‘starry’ nights of the weather.
The title itself ‘White Nights’, refers to the twilight phenomenon of St Petersburg occurring from mid-June to early July, when the Sun barely dips below the horizon and the sky remains luminous well past midnight. through the text Dostoevsky poses a question that echoes throughout the novella:
Is there always an inescapable darkness lingering beneath the bright ‘white nights’ of summer, that even the dreamer cannot flee from?
The story of White Nights follows a nameless, solitary figure living in St Petersburg who falls in love with a young woman called Nastenka. This nameless man – or what many like to refer to as the dreamer – is a character who embodies solitude, yearning, and the fleeting joy of finding someone with whom one feels an indescribable connection with.
These intimate conversations between Nastenka and the Dreamer forms a seemingly instant bond built around their mutual vulnerability that grows stronger over four nights, as they learn more about one another and their shared feelings of loneliness in a world that has forgotten them. Dostoevsky coveys how the dreamer quietly accepts that some joys are momentary, and some loves are meant to be felt rather than kept for oneself.
However, the cold becomes its own character, one in which is meant to be a sudden awakening, piercing through the dreamer’s fantasy and brings him back into the reality. Dostoevsky emphasises how we are all as a collective ‘the dreamer’ to suggest that this natural and universal longing for someone to truly see us – even if that is only for a night. In this sense, the cold in White Nights is both the literal weather and a metaphor – both for atmosphere and an omen:
“Look at the sky, Nastenka, look! a blue sky, what a moon! … now that yellow cloud is covering it … look, look! … No, it has passed by. …”
One particularly striking detail, now a fan-favourite in the recent conversations about ‘men who yearn’, is how the dreamer mentions Nastenka’s name 138 times, while she never once asks for his.
Yet, Dostoevsky also highlights how the cold isn’t always something we should fear but instead something that teaches. The dreamer’s heartbreak represents a moment of transformation – a painful yet perhaps a necessary moment. It becomes this idea of melancholy and despair, highlighted through the shift from the ethereal and fantasy of ‘white nights’ to the ‘grey’ and ‘dreary’ nights – eliciting the end of the dream.
This contextual part of the narrative taking place in the summer has surprised many readers, with this preconception that Dostoevsky only writes in the shadows of cold winter. However, instead he uses seasons symbolically through emotional landscapes in comparison to merely setting: the heated, tortuous tensions of psychological states in Crime and Punishment unfolds in summer, while moral collapse in Brothers Karamazov plays out in Autumn.
Like every piece of art, it has its fair share of interpretations and criticisms, with some readers describing this lack of authenticity in {Nastenka and The Dreamer’s} bond made the story feel hollow. It is so secret that the style of classic Russian writers, from Dostoevsky to Bulgakov, are a certain niche of literature that simply doesn’t hold deep emotional resonance than how it does with other readers.
In the end, whether the cold in White Nights is just the cool breeze of St Peterburg, or perhaps the fragile hopes of the dreamer, Dostoevsky leaves us with one final truth that remains even after the final page: yearning becomes its own season.
Like the Dreamer, we stand beneath the brief glow of the sun’s embrace until we fade into the quiet and inevitable cold, changed not by what we gained but what we dared to feel, knowing that it was never really meant to last.
Read more: The cold. The Dostoevsky effect