White Nights Study Guide

Fyodor Dostoevsky was the second of his parents’ nine children. Although his father was a distinguished physician and the family was fairly wealthy, Dostoevsky grew up on the grounds of the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, which was situated in a poor section of the city. From a young age, Dostoevsky was exposed to a wide range of literature. He received his education at exclusive boarding schools, where he felt out of place among the other, predominantly aristocratic students. When he was 14, his parents compelled him to enter a military engineering academy in St. Petersburg. One year later, Dostoevsky’s mother died of tuberculosis, and his father passed away when he was only 17. Despite his dislike of the military academy, Dostoevsky successfully completed his studies and began a career as a military engineer. However, when his first novel, Poor Folk, brough him literary acclaim in his early 20s, he resigned his military commission. Dostoevsky wrote throughout his 20s but was exiled in 1849 after having been implicated in a revolutionary group accused of, among other things, reading banned, anti-tsarist literature. His death sentence was commuted to four years of exile in Siberia, followed by another year of compulsory military service. Upon his release, he was allowed to resume his literary career, although he was surveilled for the rest of his life. His harsh punishment contributed to the rapid deterioration of what had always been poor health, and he suffered from increasingly frequent seizures throughout his life. His first, brief marriage was intensely unhappy and ended with his wife’s death. His second marriage produced four children. Dostoevsky’s long and distinguished literary career—which included 13 novels, 3 novellas, and 17 short stories—brought him acclaim during his life, but his gambling addiction and poor health contributed to his family’s financial precarity. Dostoevsky died in 1881 at the age of 59, following a series of pulmonary hemorrhages. 

White Nights undertakes an intense exploration of unrequited love. This subject has a long and enduring presence in Western literature and it’s important to understand the novella in that context. Stories of unrequited love appear in the earliest recorded literature in the Western tradition, including The Iliad and The Odyssey, The Aeneid, and many works from the Medieval and Early Modern periods. It even shows up in works that predate the Western tradition, like Ancient Egyptian love lyrics and The Epic of Gilgamesh. By the 19th century, unrequited love, especially as an ennobling force (the way the Dreamer wants to understand it) was a common theme in fiction, and one of the ways to understand White Nights is as a realist critique of overly romanticized depictions in sentimental fiction. White Nights was originally published in a Russian literary magazine in 1848. Over 150 years later, it experienced a renaissance of interest in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Modern critics have connected the book’s 21st century draw with the relatively common experiences of social isolation and loneliness during the nadir of the pandemic, when many localities imposed varyingly strict limits on gatherings. They have also noted the ways in which the book’s themes of isolation, loneliness, and the escapism of dreams correlate with the ways in which social media is changing human society by driving people into increasingly online and individual experiences of the world.

The isolation and alienation experienced by the Dreamer in White Nights anticipate the exploration of these themes Dostoevsky undertook about 18 years later in his seminal novel, Crime and Punishment (1886). Rodion Raskolnikov, the protagonist of that book, considers himself an extraordinary man unbound by the rules that apply to everyone else. But after he kills an old woman in pursuit of the financial security that will allow him to achieve the great things he believes himself destined for, he slowly spirals into madness, realizing belatedly how important human connections truly are. White Nights also explores the idea that love—especially unrequited love—can make the suffering lover into a better person. Other works which explore this trope include Edmond Rostrand’s 1897 play Cyrano de Bergerac in which an ugly but intellectually gifted man helps a beautiful but inarticulate one become worthy of a fair lady’s love. Victor Hugo’s 1831 novel The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, alternatively, depicts the ways in which the disabled and brutish Quasimodo’s love for the beautiful Esmerelda transforms him into a selfless hero. Readers interested in a more contemporary exploration of isolation, loneliness, and the sometimes-sharp pain of unreturned love can turn to The Solitude of Prime Numbers, an Italian novel published in 2008 by Paolo Giordano. This novel follows two protagonists whose lives are marred by trauma and isolation as they grow up and befriend each other but ultimately fail to breach each other’s solitude.