The Dreamer

Who He Is

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). He lives in a room with green, smoke-stained walls and cobwebs on the ceiling (The spiderweb and the room), with a maid, Matryona, and lives on daydreams: he knows the city by its façades and by the faces he crosses every day, talks to the houses and invents whole novels in his imagination. The book is the memory he writes of four nights and a morning, and the reader sees only what he saw, already touched by what he knows of the end. He wants company and fears the life that company asks for; he describes his own illness with precision and irony; and he deceives himself precisely where he knows himself best, by taking for tenderness aimed at him the joy of Nastenka, who is waiting for another man.

The subtitle of the novella, Sentimental Romance. From the Recollections of a Dreamer, makes him the author of those recollections.

Trajectory

On the First Night, three days of groundless anguish end in a discovery: the whole city has left for the country houses and no one invited him. He calls the departure of people who do not know who he is abandonment:

At the same beginning he gives voice to the houses he knows and truly suffers over a little pink house painted yellow. He returns late along a canal embankment, humming, and sees a young woman crying against the railing. What stops him from speaking at that moment is literature:

A drunk in a tailcoat is chasing the young woman, and the Dreamer, with a knotted cane in hand, settles the matter without having to say anything. He gives her his arm, explains that he trembles because he is shy with women and has never known any, and says whom he has fallen in love with:

When she wants to take her leave, he asks to return to the same place at the same hour (The embankment and the bench), and the reason he gives is that of someone who already treats the encounter as a memory:

She agrees to return, on the condition that he not fall in love, and he goes away too happy to enter the house: he walks until day breaks.

On the Second Night, he reaches the embankment two hours early. Nastenka asks him to tell his story, and he answers that he has no story, only solitude:

He then strikes a bookish pose and speaks of the dreamer in the third person, as of a creature hiding from the light in a corner of the city:

He recounts the hour when the working day ends, when Zhukovsky's goddess Fantasy weaves an invented life for the hero, the little old woman who asks him the way and makes him tremble, the dinner he does not notice until Matryona brings him his pipe. He says of daydreaming that it is happiness and poison at the same time:

He lists the roles that daydreaming gives him (a friend of Hoffmann, the heroines of Walter Scott, Hus before the prelates, the little house in Kolomna) and reaches the high point of the speech, the invented life as a work of art:

The speech ends in a complete novel, with an abandoned garden, a palace in Italy and a friend who bursts in shouting that he has just come from Pavlovsk. He expects Nastenka to laugh, she does not, and he drops the pose. He says he has lost his best years and that fantasy is already tiring:

And he asks himself, in the second person, the question that torments him as he looks again at the places of a year before:

Then he hears her story, gives the advice she asks for, dictates a whole letter in her name, and discovers that the letter was already written and sealed (The letter). The two remember Rosina, and he agrees to take the letter to the acquaintances who will get it to the lodger.

On the Third Night, he writes on a rainy day when she does not come. He recounts the third encounter with a possessive (The white night):

On writing, he understands that he took her tenderness for genuine currency, when it was joy at the arrival of the other man. On the night recounted, he lets go of her hand on hearing footsteps, asks the time so that she will count the chimes, and soon regrets it, beginning to console her with arguments that delight him. When she asks whether they are now together forever, he does not answer her, only the paper:

On the Fourth Night, Nastenka receives the news that there is no letter, weeps leaning on the railing and asks whether he would abandon a girl who came to him of her own accord. He cannot bear it:

The love he offers already places itself in second place:

For a few hours, the life he had only imagined becomes a plan: the twelve hundred he has, the grandmother's pension, the two maids living together, the mezzanine he will rent in order to be her lodger. A young man passes, stops and calls Nastenka by name; she runs to the other man, comes back to kiss him and leaves taking the other man by the hand. He stands looking for a long time.

On the Morning, with fever, he receives Nastenka's letter from Matryona, rereads it, lets it fall and covers his face. Matryona announces that she has taken the cobwebs off the ceiling, and he sees the maid, the room and the house across the way age all at once:

He bears no grudge and ends by blessing her for what he received:

Themes Embodied

The Dreamer is the only character in the book who knows how to name its own mechanism. On the Second Night he describes the dreamer as a type, in the third person, and speaks of daydreaming as happiness and poison in the same line; what the novella shows next is that the diagnosis does not cure him. On the Third Night he is charmed by his own arguments as he consoles Nastenka, and on the Fourth Night he lives, in a few hours, a whole life of plans, as he used to live the novels of his room. Being able to describe daydreaming does not get him out of it.

From the first night he wants a day of real life, and the first thing he does with real life is turn it into a memory. He asks to return to the embankment to remember the encounter before the encounter is over (First Night), confesses that he already celebrates anniversaries of sensations that never happened (Second Night), and ends by keeping the minute he had as a whole thing (Morning). Daydreaming and memory are, in him, the same operation: taking from the present hour an image that can be revisited alone. The novella, written as a memory, is the last example of this operation, and the most successful.

Divergent Readings

The ending admits two readings, and the text leaves them side by side. In one, the blessing of the Morning is true gratitude: a man who spent his life dreaming received a real minute, and calling it whole is the first time he is content with what exists. In the other, the blessing is the last daydream: he has just seen himself alone in the same room fifteen years from now, and gives himself the noble role of the one who blesses, because he knows how to play that role.

The two readings depend on the same final sentence, which ends in a question rather than an affirmation, and so neither wins. What weighs against the ironic reading is that the Dreamer, on the Fourth Night, in fact offered a love that did not demand to be preferred, before knowing he would be left; what weighs against the consoling reading is that the vision of fifteen years comes before the blessing and is not disavowed by it. On the side of the later work, Notes from Underground takes up the St. Petersburg man who lives in a corner, without this narrator's tenderness.

Relationships

• Nastenka: the young woman he finds crying on the embankment on the First Night, to whom he tells his life on the Second Night, for whom he declares himself on the Fourth Night, and who leaves him for the lodger at the end of that same night.
• The lodger: the rival he never sees until the Fourth Night; the Dreamer carries the letter that calls him back (Second Night) and plans to occupy the mezzanine that was his.
• Matryona: the maid who tends the cobwebs on the ceiling on the First Night, brings him his pipe on the Second Night, and the letter on the Morning.
• The grandmother: enters his plans on the Fourth Night, when the two agree to take her to live with them.