The Theme in the Work
Daydreaming is the mechanism of the book. The Dreamer's solitude is the state (see Solitude and isolation); the dream is what he does with it, the machine that fabricates a whole life inside the room, with loves, journeys and battles. The book treats this mechanism with an almost clinical precision: it shows how it begins (the return home at the end of the working day), how it works (the goddess Fantasy weaving while he eats dinner without noticing), what it yields (happiness, tears, sleepless nights) and what it charges (lost years and the doubt about whether he has lived). The most singular thing is that the one who makes the diagnosis is the patient himself, aloud, to a young woman he has just met.
The dream is not his alone. Nastenka also dreams, pinned to her grandmother's dress, first with a Chinese prince, then with the lodger the books brought her, and on the Fourth Night she comes to wonder whether her love was not the work of imagination. The book sets the two dreamers face to face and decides the end by their difference: her dream has a face that can arrive from the street.
On the First Night, the Dreamer confesses to the young woman, on the very first walk, whom he has ever been in love with:
Да ни в кого, в идеал, в ту, которая приснится во сне. Я создаю в мечтах целые романы, Oh, with no one, with an ideal, with the one who appears in a dream. I create whole novels in my daydreams.
The same mechanism is already at work when he asks to return to the embankment, not to see her, but to repeat the moment in thought:
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, the Dreamer's speech describes the hour of daydreaming: the goddess Fantasy, Zhukovsky's goddess, weaves for the hero a life that does not exist while he walks home, and when one dream collapses, another already begins to summon phantoms:
Новый сон — новое счастие! Новый прием утонченного, сладострастного яда!, New dream, new happiness! A new dose of a refined, voluptuous poison!
The roles he gives himself range from a friend of Hoffmann's to the heroines of Walter Scott, from the St. Bartholomew's Day night to the little house in Kolomna, and the result is a freedom that dispenses with others:
потому что он сам художник своей жизни и творит ее себе каждый час по новому произволу, because he is himself the artist of his life and creates it for himself every hour, by a new whim.
Dropping the pose, he asks himself the question the daydream leaves behind:
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?
On the Third Night, Nastenka tells him that the dreamer he described is not him, that he is getting better. On the Fourth Night, she applies to her own love the word he used for life:
может быть, и вся любовь моя была обман чувств, воображения, может быть, началась она шалостью, пустяками, оттого, что я была под надзором у бабушки?, perhaps my whole love was an illusion of the senses and of the imagination, perhaps it began as mischief, as trifles, because I was under my grandmother's watch?
On the Morning, her letter (The letter) calls what they lived a dream, and the Dreamer's last daydream is not a palace in Italy, it is his room fifteen years from now:
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.
In the book, daydreaming is not the opposite of real life: it is a way of living it in anticipation and in memory, without the risk of the present. The Fourth Night shows what happens when the dream and life coincide for a few hours: the plans with Nastenka move at the same speed as the novels of the room, with rent, maids and the opera settled during a walk, and they are undone by the one thing daydreaming does not control, another person passing in the street. On the Morning, the imagination that used to invent palaces knows only how to project repetition, and the book ends with the mechanism intact and nothing left to feed it.
Who Embodies It
The Dreamer is daydreaming that knows itself as daydreaming. On the Second Night he speaks of himself in the third person, as one reading aloud, and Nastenka asks him to speak in a less beautiful way; he answers that he does not know how to speak otherwise.
Селится он большею частию где-нибудь в неприступном углу, как будто таится в нем даже от дневного света, и уж если заберется к себе, то так и прирастет к своему углу, как улитка, He usually settles in some inaccessible corner, as if he hid even from daylight, and once he has got himself home, he clings to his corner like a snail.
Nastenka is daydreaming with a way out. On the Second Night, she says that beside her grandmother she has already married a Chinese prince in her thoughts; in Nastenka's story, Second Night, she tells how the lodger's books made her stop dreaming of the Chinese prince.
Where It Appears
- First Night: The Dreamer says he has never been in love with anyone except an ideal and that he creates whole novels in his daydreams, and asks to return to the embankment to repeat the moment in thought.
- Second Night: The Dreamer describes the dreamer of Petersburg, Zhukovsky's goddess Fantasy, daydreaming as happiness and poison, and wonders whether he has lived.
- Second Night, Nastenka's story: Nastenka says she stopped dreaming of the Chinese prince when the lodger sent her Walter Scott and Pushkin.
- Third Night: Nastenka tells the Dreamer that the dreamer he described is not him and that he is getting better.
- Fourth Night: Nastenka wonders whether all her love for the lodger was an illusion of the imagination, and the two make the plans for a life in a few hours.
- Morning: Nastenka's letter calls what they lived a dream, and the Dreamer sees himself in the same room fifteen years from now.
Where the Readings Diverge
The Dreamer's daydreaming can be read as an illness, which the book diagnoses and whose bill is the lost life, or as a gift, the imagination of an artist without a work, which at least gave him intensity. The text sustains both on the same line, when the new dream is called new happiness and poison.
The book as a whole is itself a memory written by this dreamer, and so it cannot condemn daydreaming without condemning its own form. What it does is show the mechanism working on something real, four nights, and let the reader see the difference between the invented novel of the room and what he writes about Nastenka.