White Nights

Characters

The Dreamer The narrator of White Nights has no name. He is a twenty-six-year-old man who has lived for eight years in St. Petersburg without making a single acquaintance, and who presents himself as a dreamer (First Night) and, the next night, as a type (Second Night).... Nastenka Nastenka, a diminutive of Anastasia, is a seventeen-year-old young woman, orphaned of father and mother, who lives with her grandmother in a little wooden house in St. Petersburg, pinned to her grandmother's dress by a pin (The pin). On the First Night she... The lodger The lodger is the young man who rents the mezzanine of the grandmother's house and for whom Nastenka has waited a year. He has no name, hardly speaks, and appears in person for only a few seconds, at the end of the Fourth Night. Everything known about him... The grandmother Nastenka's grandmother is a blind old woman, owner of a little wooden house with three windows, as old as she is, with a mezzanine she rents. She raised her orphaned granddaughter, taught her French and paid a tutor, and lives on the pension and the rent from... Matryona Matryona is the Dreamer's maid, an old woman who cooks, serves the table and looks after his room, or does not: the ceiling is covered with cobwebs that she cultivates successfully (The spiderweb and the room). She speaks little, calls her master "little... The little old man of the Fontanka The little old man of the Fontanka is a stranger the Dreamer meets every single day, at the same hour, on the embankment of the Fontanka in St. Petersburg, and with whom he has never spoken. He appears in a single paragraph, at the beginning of the First...

Other characters

The gentleman in the tailcoat: the drunk of respectable age but wholly unrespectable gait, who runs after the young woman on the embankment and backs off before the Dreamer's cane (First Night)
The acquaintance who visits the dreamer: the visitor who finds the dreamer of the speech disturbed in his corner, cannot manage a conversation, invents an appointment and leaves laughing (Second Night)
The old woman who asks for directions: the respectable lady who, in the Dreamer's speech, stops the hero in the middle of the sidewalk to ask the way and makes him start with fright (Second Night)
The friend from Pavlovsk: the cheerful young man who, in the invented novel of the speech, bursts through the door shouting that he has just arrived from Pavlovsk (Second Night)
Fyokla: the grandmother's deaf maid, whom Nastenka puts in her place and who, without hearing the grandmother's question, unfastens the pin and runs off (Nastenka's story, Second Night); in the plans of the Fourth Night, she goes to live with Matryona
The old lodger: the dried-up, mute, blind and lame little old man who lived in the mezzanine before the lodger and died, and who, according to Nastenka, knew how to keep silent better than the Dreamer (Nastenka's story, Second Night)
Mashenka: Nastenka's only friend, who went to Pskov, as she tells the lodger when he asks whether she has no friends to visit (Nastenka's story, Second Night)
Nastenka's acquaintances: the good, simple folk who know nothing, through whom the lodger was to send word and to whom the Dreamer takes the letter (Nastenka's story, Second Night, Third Night)
The postman: the one who brings Nastenka's letter through the city post, which Matryona hands to the Dreamer (Morning)