First Night: The encounter
The Dreamer gives up saying Madam! because the phrase is already in a thousand novels, and right after that he tells the girl that he creates whole novels in his reveries. What relationship does the First Night establish between the books he has read and what he manages to do in the street?
The girl says she needs to be on the embankment the next day for her own reasons and, in the same conversation, forbids the Dreamer to fall in love. What do these two remarks reveal about what she expects from him?
The Dreamer asks to return to the same place at the same hour to remember the meeting, when the meeting has not even ended. What does this request say about the way he lives what happens to him?
Second Night: The Dreamer and Nastenka's Story
The Dreamer tells his own life in the third person, like a book, and Nastenka tells hers in the first person, laughing and weeping. What does each way of telling allow the one who tells it?
Nastenka says she understood everything the Dreamer told because she lived the same way, pinned to her grandmother's dress. In what ways is her loneliness like his, and in what ways does it differ?
The Dreamer dictates a whole letter in Nastenka's name and then discovers that she already had one, written and sealed. What did she want from him when she asked for advice?
Third and Fourth Nights and the Morning: The wait and the outcome
Nastenka says she loves the Dreamer because he did not fall in love with her, and later says that he seems to be sacrificing something for her. What does she know, and what does she avoid knowing that night?
The Dreamer asks the time and makes Nastenka count the chimes, and soon regrets it and begins to console her with arguments. What moves him in each of the two gestures?
Nastenka accepts the Dreamer's love after asking herself whether her love for the lodger was an illusion of the imagination, and minutes later she runs to the lodger. What does this sequence show about what she felt for each of them?
In the plans of the Fourth Night, the Dreamer is going to rent the mezzanine and be Nastenka's lodger, and she refuses the opera of The Barber. Why does she refuse The Barber and accept the mezzanine?
In the Morning, the Dreamer sees himself alone in the same room fifteen years from now and, right afterwards, blesses Nastenka for the minute of happiness. How does one thing relate to the other?
Matryona takes the cobweb off the ceiling on the day Nastenka's letter arrives. What does this gesture, made by someone who knows nothing, add to the end of the book?
The whole work
The Dreamer turns the encounter into a memory before it ends and, in the Morning, calls the minute he had whole. In the book, is memory an escape from life, or the only way he has of possessing it?
On the First Night Nastenka imposes that he not fall in love and, on the Third, says she loves him precisely for that. Is she sincere from beginning to end, or does she need him without measuring the cost?
The Dreamer lives with no one, Nastenka lives bound to someone, and the two of them dream. Why does her dream come true and his does not?
The lodger hardly speaks and yet decides the book. What is lost, and what is gained, by knowing him only through Nastenka's voice?
The Dreamer helps write the letter and carries the letter that brings the other back. Does he work against himself without noticing, or does he know what he is doing?
The epigraph asks whether someone was created only to be, for an instant, in the neighborhood of a heart, and the last sentence asks whether a minute of bliss is too little for a whole life. Do the two questions receive the same answer?
In the Morning, the cobweb comes down from the ceiling and the house across the way appears yellow and peeling, like the little house of the First Night. What does the book gain by ending in the room where it began?