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Part 2: The Second Night
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in White Nights, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The Pain of Unrequited Love
Isolation and Alienation
Dreams and Fantasies
Overpowering Emotions
Imprisonment and Escape
The Value of Art and Beauty
Summary
Analysis
Asking the Dreamer not to interrupt her, Nastenka begins her tale. She lives with her grandmother and has done so since she was orphaned at a young age. Two years earlier, when she was 15, she got into “mischief” and as a result, her grandmother no longer allowed her to receive lessons. And then, she started pinning their skirts together to keep Nastenka close. She successfully snuck out once, leaving her grandmother’s deaf maid Fyokla pinned in her place, but she was in such trouble after her grandmother discovered the deception that she never tried it again.
Nastenka won’t specify what kind of mischief she got up to, but given her grandmother’s concern about the handsome lodger and the content of the books, there’s a strong implication it was a romantic attachment of some sort. This in turn indicates that Nastenka struggles to rule her emotions but allows herself instead to be ruled by them. Be that as it may, it’s not hard to see why Nastenka finds the situation intolerable, as it deprives her almost entirely of autonomy and—crucially, in the eyes of the book—of human interaction.
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The grandmother owns the house where she and Nastenka live and rents out the attic to lodgers to make a little money. When they got a new lodger—a young, handsome one—the grandmother started to worry about him corrupting Nastenka. One day, in his presence, Nastenka jumped up and tried to leave the room without remembering to undo the pin connecting her to her grandmother, inadvertently showing him her situation when she pulled her grandmother right out of her chair. Nastenka was mortified because the new lodger saw the infantilizing way her grandmother treated her.
The new lodger breaches Nastenka’s nearly complete isolation. The degree to which she’s started to accept her situation as normal can be seen in how she forgets to undo the pin. Of course, she knows this isn’t how most 17-year-old girls live, otherwise she wouldn’t be embarrassed. But her complacency illustrates the need for her to escape her grandmother’s control before she loses her chance at a normal life.
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A few weeks later, the new lodger offered to lend Nastenka and her grandmother books for reading. Only after making sure that he wasn’t clandestinely using them to deliver love notes and that they weren’t full of racy content did the grandmother allow it. It changed Nastenka’s life. There were French, Russian, and British novels, and reading them brought joy to her formerly dreary existence. She even stopped dreaming of her Chinese prince.
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Not long afterward, the new lodger ran into Nastenka on the stairs and engaged her in a conversation about her life. She told him her grandmother almost never allowed her to leave the house. A week later, he invited both women to accompany him to a production of the Barber of Seville at the opera. It was one of the best nights of Nastenka’s life. From that point on, he invited them to the theater once a month, but Nastenka rarely saw him between those trips. She started to experience the disorienting emotional symptoms of unrequited love.
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Exactly one year ago, Nastenka now tells the Dreamer, the new lodger told her grandmother that he would be returning to Moscow the following day. Heartbroken and desperate, Nastenka gathered her personal belongings, then climbed the stairs and threw herself on the mercy of the new lodger. He told her that he understood her feelings and that he loved her too, but that he was too poor to marry her. He promised that, if his business in Moscow went well, he would return for her in a year’s time.
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It has been a year, Nastenka says, and the new lodger has returned to St. Petersburg, but he hasn’t contacted her. She bursts into such bereft sobbing that it nearly breaks the Dreamer’s heart. He wonders if the man has simply been delayed. Nastenka is certain that he has returned and that his failure to present himself means that his heart has changed. The Dreamer suggests that she write a letter making it clear that her feelings haven’t changed but asking to know if his feelings have. That’s exactly the thing she would have thought to do, Nastenka says, and the fact that the Dreamer suggested it confirms that it was the right idea.
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In fact, Nastenka reveals, she and the new lodger already selected some “good people” as go-betweens for just such a circumstance. And she wrote her letter some time earlier. She hands it, in a sealed envelope, to the Dreamer, begging him to deliver it to her go-betweens for her the next morning. As they prepare to go their separate ways, they sing a few lines from The Barber of Seville. And they promise to meet again the next evening.
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