First Night: The encounter
Or was I created only for this: / to be, if only for an instant, / in the neighborhood of your heart?
Explanation and analysis
Before the First Night, the novella has only an epigraph, three lines signed by Turgenev. There is no name of a character or a place: there is an I, a you, and a question, and the reader does not yet know to whom it applies. Only after four nights and one morning does the question find its owner, the nameless narrator who will spend a few hours beside a young woman waiting for another man.
The question measures what the book will give. It does not promise a life beside someone, it promises an instant, and not even inside the beloved's heart: in its neighborhood. The verb create gives the question the weight of a destiny, as if a whole existence could be justified by a moment of closeness. This is exactly what the Dreamer receives on the nights by the embankment, and it is with a question of the same size that he closes the story, in the Morning, when he speaks of a minute of bliss. Between the epigraph and the last sentence, the whole book works as the answer the epigraph asks for.
The question allows two readings, and the novella does not choose between them. It may be a complaint: only for this, an instant, and in the neighborhood? It may be a consolation: at least for this, and that would already be enough. Whoever reaches the last page has both available, and the narrator's tone, which blesses rather than accuses, does not decide between them.
I was afraid to be alone, and for three whole days I wandered the city in deep anguish, without understanding in the least what was happening to me.
Explanation and analysis
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I would certainly have said: Madam!, if I did not know that this exclamation had already been uttered a thousand times in every Russian novel about high society.
Explanation and analysis
Why, for no one, for an ideal, for the woman who appears in a dream. I create whole novels in my daydreams.
Explanation and analysis
I am a dreamer; I have so little real life that moments like this one, like now, are so rare that I cannot help repeating them in my daydreams.
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don't fall in love with me... That cannot be, I assure you.
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I was so happy... Until tomorrow!
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Second Night: The Dreamer and Nastenka's Story
so I have lived, as people say around here, on my own, that is, entirely alone, alone, completely alone; do you understand what it means to be alone?
Explanation and analysis
New dream, new happiness! A new dose of a refined and voluptuous poison!
Explanation and analysis
I already find myself obliged to celebrate the birthday of my sensations, the birthday of what was once so dear to me and that, deep down, never happened.
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what have you done with your years? where did you bury your best time? Have you lived or not?
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she took a pin, fastened my dress to hers, and right then said that we would stay like that our whole lives, unless, of course, I became a better person.
Explanation and analysis
I said I could not live with my grandmother, that I would run away from her, that I did not want to be pinned down with a pin, and that, if he wanted, I would go with him to Moscow, because I could not live without him. Shame, love, pride, everything spoke in me at the same time
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But, I repeat, if in a year that does not happen, one day it will, without fail; of course, provided that you do not prefer another to me, because I cannot and dare not bind you with any word.
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Third and Fourth Nights and the Morning: The wait and the outcome
Yesterday was our third meeting, our third white night...
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I love you because you did not fall in love with me.
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Why isn't he you? Why isn't he like you? He is worse than you, though I love him more than I love you.
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Oh, Nastenka, Nastenka! If you only knew what loneliness I am in now!
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It is impossible, but I love you, Nastenka! That's it!
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that, even if you still loved him and went on loving the man I do not know, you still would not perceive that my love weighs upon you in any way.
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perhaps all my love was an illusion of the senses, of the imagination, perhaps it began as a prank, over trifles, because I lived under my grandmother's watch?
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No, better that we hear not The Barber, but something else.
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Oh God! If only I could love both of you at once! Oh, if only you were him!
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And the cobweb, I took it all off the ceiling; now it can even get married and invite guests.
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I saw myself just as I am now, exactly fifteen years from now, grown old, in the same room, as lonely as I am now, with the same Matryona.
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May you be blessed for the minute of bliss and happiness you gave another heart, a lonely and grateful one!
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My God! A whole minute of bliss! Is that too little, even for an entire human life?