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Chapter Two The Spirit of St. Petersburg: White Nights Spirit is not in the I, but between I and Thou. It is not like the blood that circulates in you, but like the air in which you breathe. Man lives in the spirit, if he is able to respond to his Thou. He is able to, if he enters into relation with his whole being. Only in virtue of his power to enter into relation is he able to live in the spirit. —Martin Buber Where there are no gods, the phantoms reign. —Novalis A S W E H AV E S E E N, challenging assumptions about the surface of things can lead to unexpected insights into their inner nature. As a “physical person,” a civil servant in St. Petersburg in the mid-1840s, Makar Devushkin enacts a conventional story of selfless love frustrated by circumstance . As a spokesman for romantic literature, however, he represents a host of intangible dangers. These dangers are related to the seductive, erotic lure of fantasy. Dostoevsky plays with the boundary between the unpredictable forces and tensions of the inner life and observable, measurable material reality. Responding to criticism from literal-minded and humorless contemporaries, the writer famously claimed that his “fantastic realism” was more realistic than ordinary life: “I have my own special view of reality (in art), and what the majority call almost fantastic and exceptional sometimes constitutes the very essence of reality for me.”1 The uneasy fit between style and subject in Dostoevsky’s work may reflect the artificiality of his use of the conventions of late eighteenth-century western European sentimental fiction to describe a specifically Russian reality. His struggle to make these models serve his artistic purposes is a symptom of the national identity crisis shared by the Russian writers of his generation. At the same time, the extremes of his art illustrate a deeper, and universal, drama: the writer’s struggle to create Truth out of fiction. For that borderline space where the 27 Chapter Two 28 subjunctive (fantasy) encounters the indicative (facts) is where art enters the world. If Dostoevsky introduced this theme in his first novel, he distills it to its essence in the acclaimed but, I contend, misunderstood early novella White Nights (Belye nochi, 1848). White Nights tells a simple tale. Over the course of a few May evenings during the white nights in St. Petersburg, the lonely, unnamed narrator meets a young girl (Nastenka), falls in love with her, and then loses her to her original suitor. A predominant critical view praises this short work as a lyrical interlude, a brief celebration of youth and love that contrasts sharply with the tense and tormented tone of the author’s other works of the period and later. Konstantin Mochulsky speaks for the critical tradition when he characterizes the tale as infused with a “magic, poetic luster” and an “enchantment of youth, infatuation, spring” and describes its protagonist as a “youthful idealist with an ardent heart”: “There is nothing of the ‘underground,’ nothing stale or musty, in the image of the young poet. [. . .] His love for Nastenka is innocent, trusting, and pure. [. . .] How ample his heart proves to be!”2 Other readers echo this tone: “White Nights stands out from the tragicomic and satirical universe of his early creations by the beautiful lightness and delicacy of its tone, its atmosphere of springtime adolescent emotionality, the grace and wit of its good-natured parodies.”3 Donald Fanger claims that the novella is free of the “passionate condemnation of reverie that went into the ‘[Petersburg] Chronicle.’”4 And Victor Terras mentions, but deemphasizes, the presence of dark undertones in the dreamer ’s character, claims that his love for Nastenka is devoid of desire, and notes his “droll humor.”5 The universal acclaim for White Nights cites its lyricism and the poignancy of its tragic plot, which tells of a love so pure it cannot be realized. Still, in spite of the widespread tender enthusiasm for the White Nights narrator, readers may profit from caution. Nothing in Dostoevsky is ever as simple as it seems. In reading White Nights, I will blur the usual ontological boundaries between characters and ask, from a fresh perspective, who or what is Dostoevsky’s “dreamer” and what is he up to? The narrator of White Nights is one variant of the multifaceted figure of the dreamer figure (mechtatel’) who migrates freely through Dostoevsky’s early work. This is a sensitive creature who...

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