Symbols

The white night The bright nights of early summer in St. Petersburg, when the sky does not fully darken, and which give the book its title. The text barely names them: the expression white night appears only once, on the Third Night, in the Dreamer's mouth. What the book... The embankment and the bench The embankment of a deserted canal in St. Petersburg, with the railing on which Nastenka leans to look at the water, and the bench where she and the Dreamer sit. It is the only fixed place in the book outside the Dreamer's room: all the encounters take place... The pin The pin with which the blind grandmother fastens Nastenka's dress to her own, to watch over her without seeing her, after a prank the granddaughter does not tell. According to the grandmother, the penalty is for life, unless the granddaughter becomes better,... The spiderweb and the room The Dreamer's room, with green, smoke-stained walls and the ceiling covered in cobwebs that Matryona cultivates, and the corner where the dreamer of the speech hides from the light. The cobweb opens and closes the book: it is on the ceiling on the first... The letter The letters in the book: the one the Dreamer dictates in Nastenka's name, the one she had already written and sealed for the lodger, the reply that does not come, and her letter to the Dreamer that opens the Morning. These are four forms of a single gesture,... The Barber of Seville Rossini's comic opera, in which Rosina, watched over by an old guardian, exchanges notes with a young lover and ends up marrying him. In the book it is the opera to which the lodger takes Nastenka and her grandmother, the grandmother's youthful spectacle,...