The Theme in the Work
The book is made of memory in two senses. It is a written memory: the narrator recounts the nights already knowing how they ended, and the Third Night is written on the very rainy day when he does not see Nastenka. And it is a book about people who live on the past: the Dreamer turns each moment into a memory before the moment ends, the grandmother lives on the old days, and Nastenka waits a year for a promise made on a bench (The embankment and the bench). The past, here, is not what has passed: it is what each character keeps to revisit.
What the theme shows in the Dreamer is a memory without substance. He no longer recalls facts, he recalls daydreams, and he confesses to Nastenka that he celebrates anniversaries of sensations that never happened. At the end, her letter (The letter) promises to keep him as a sweet memory, and he receives back, as his destiny, exactly what he used to do with his own moments.
On the First Night, asking to return to the embankment, he explains that he has so little real life that he repeats in daydream the rare moments he lives:
Я мечтатель; у меня так мало действительной жизни, что я такие минуты, как эту, как теперь, считаю так редко, что не могу не повторять этих минут в мечтаньях, I am a dreamer; I have so little real life that moments like this one, like this very moment, are so rare that I cannot help repeating them in my daydreams.
On the Second Night, he confesses how far he has gone:
я уже принужден справлять годовщину своих ощущений, годовщину того, что было прежде так мило, чего в сущности никогда не бывало, I am already obliged to celebrate the anniversary of my sensations, the anniversary of what used to be so dear and that, in essence, never happened.
Looking again at the places of a year before, he holds himself accountable for the time:
что же ты сделал с своими годами? куда ты схоронил свое лучшее время? Ты жил или нет?, what have you done with your years? Where did you bury your best time? Did you live or not?
In Nastenka's story, Second Night, Nastenka tells how her grandmother lives on the old days, when she was younger, the sun was hotter and the cream soured more slowly, and that in those days she played Rosina in a home theater; it is out of this longing that the grandmother accepts going to the opera with the lodger (The Barber of Seville). Nastenka's own wait is memory too: the night on the bench, at ten, a year before.
On the Fourth Night, the book returns Nastenka to her position of the first night:
она стояла, как тогда, в первый раз, облокотясь на перила набережной, she stood as she had then, the first time, leaning on the railing of the embankment.
On the Morning, her letter says the Dreamer's love will stay in her memory as a sweet dream, remembered long after waking, and asks him to come see them. The room ages before him, and what he sees of the future is the past repeated:
я увидел себя таким, как я теперь, ровно через пятнадцать лет, постаревшим, в той же комнате, так же одиноким, с той же Матреной, I saw myself as I am now, exactly fifteen years from now, aged, in the same room, as lonely as I am now, with the same Matryona.
And it ends by placing the minute lived in the place of a whole life:
Боже мой! Целая минута блаженства! Да разве этого мало хоть бы и на всю жизнь человеческую?.., My God! A whole minute of bliss! Is that little, even for an entire human life?...
The Dreamer's memory works ahead of time: he asks to remember the encounter when the encounter has not yet ended, and that is what the whole book does, written as a memory of the four nights. In the Morning he receives the role he gave to his moments, that of a sweet memory in another person's mind, and what remains for him is a future drawn in the image of the past, the same room, the same maid, fifteen years older. The only new thing memory gives him at the end is the decision to call the minute whole.
The subtitle of the novella, Sentimental Romance. From the Recollections of a Dreamer, presents the whole work as the narrator's memory.
Who Embodies It
The Dreamer is the memory of someone who lived little. On the First Night he says he has two or three places in St. Petersburg to which he returns to remember, and he imagines the young woman was crying over a memory too.
The grandmother is the memory of someone who lived before. In Nastenka's story, Second Night, everything in her points to the old days, and it is from her that The Barber of Seville comes, bringing the granddaughter closer to the lodger.
Nastenka is the memory that waits. In Nastenka's story, Second Night, she keeps for a year the night on the bench, and on the Morning she promises to keep the Dreamer as a faithful memory.
Where It Appears
- First Night: The Dreamer asks to return to the embankment at the same hour to remember the encounter, and says he repeats in daydream the rare moments of his real life.
- Second Night: The Dreamer says he already celebrates the anniversary of sensations that never happened, and asks where he buried his best time.
- Second Night, Nastenka's story: The grandmother lives on the old days, when she played Rosina in a home theater, and Nastenka keeps the promise made on the bench a year earlier.
- Fourth Night: Nastenka waits for the Dreamer leaning on the railing, as she did the first time.
- Morning: Nastenka's letter promises to keep the Dreamer's love as a sweet dream, and he sees himself fifteen years from now in the same room.
Where the Readings Diverge
The Dreamer's memory can be read as flight, a way of not living the present, or as the proper form of his life, the only one in which he manages to possess anything. The text sustains the first on the Second Night, where he himself calls the life spent in daydream a round zero, and the second on the Morning, where the memory of the minute is what he chooses to keep.
The two readings meet within the book itself: if memory were only flight, the memory of the four nights would be one more daydream; but what he remembers this time actually happened, and it is his first memory with substance.