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White Nights · First Night

The encounter

LoveHappinessDream and FantasyMemory and the PastLoneliness and Isolation

Summary of the night

The First Night presents a man who knows the whole city and knows no one. The Dreamer, a narrator without a name, has lived for eight years in St. Petersburg without making a single acquaintance, and at the start of summer, when everyone leaves for the country houses, he feels abandoned by people who do not even know he exists. The night in which everything begins closes a day that began in anguish and ended happily, and the encounter with Nastenka, still unnamed, is born from a weeping heard on the embankment and from a drunkard who pursues her. The girl agrees to return the next day for a reason she keeps to herself, and sets a condition: that he not fall in love. He leaves so happy that he does not go home.

Analysis

The subtitle «Сентиментальный роман. Из воспоминаний мечтателя» (Sentimental Romance. From the Recollections of a Dreamer) accompanies the title of the novella. The epigraph, signed Ив. Тургенев (Turgenev), opens the text.

Иль был он создан для того, / Чтобы побыть хотя мгновенье / В соседстве сердца твоего?.., Or was he created only for this: / to be, if only for an instant, / in the neighborhood of your heart?

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First Night

LoveHappinessDream and FantasyMemory and the PastLoneliness and Isolation

Summary of the night

The Dreamer, a man of twenty-six who has lived in St. Petersburg for eight years, spends three days anguished without knowing why. He knows the city by the faces he passes every day at the same hour, without ever having spoken to them: a little old man from the Fontanka, with whom he nearly exchanges greetings and who, he is sure, would miss him if he did not show up, and the houses speak to him as he walks by. The reason for the anguish comes to him one morning: the whole city is leaving for the country houses, and no one has invited him.

That same night, on his way back along the embankment of a deserted canal, he sees a girl weeping and does not know what to say, because the only phrase that occurs to him is already worn out from the novels he has read. A drunkard is pursuing her, and he defends her with his walking stick. He offers her his arm, confesses that he is shy, that he has never known any woman and has only ever fallen in love with ideals, and asks to return to the same place the next day, because he wants to remember the meeting. She agrees for reasons she keeps to herself and sets a condition, that he not fall in love, because a secret already occupies her heart. He leaves so happy that he walks all night.

Analysis

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Reading of the night

Analysis

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