How about that name, huh?

• Dostoevsky was 26 or 27, about the same age as the White Knight, when he wrote this book in 1848
• in 1849, he was arrested for his association w/ the socialist Petrashevsky literary circle, subjected to a mock execution, and instead had his death sentence commuted to a 4yr stint at the Siberian labor camp
• In 1859 he returns from exile (which included mandatory military service after the labor camp)
• Five years later in 1864 he publishes Notes from Underground
• 1866 he publishes Crime and Punishment alongside The Gambler.

So the turning point in his literary career is in the mid sixties – when he goes from just writing vulnerably about losers, to describing how losers cease to be losers (putting it far too bluntly for the nuanced depravities captured by his great books).

White Nights, then, was something like his last "bad" book. It's not bad in the sense that it praises or rewards the White Knight, but it doesn't do much more other than showcase this loser ramming his impulsive desire against the woman Nastenka who is eager to advantage herself at his expense for just so long as it is convenient for her.

She claims to be uneducated but has read like everything under the sun and seems well off, more cultured than he.

He saves her from a would-be burglar/mugger/something more nefarious drunken dude stumbling down the street at her:

The girl flew straight as an arrow, with the timid haste one sees in all girls who do not want any one to volunteer to accompany them home at night.

So of course the White Knight leaps to the rescue and starts pouring his heart out to her as soon as she awkwardly thanks him:

I am shy with women, I am agitated, I don't deny it, as much so as you were a minute ago when that gentleman alarmed you. I am in some alarm now. It's like a dream, and I never guessed eve in my sleep that I should ever talk with any woman.

Goes on and on describing the solitude of his lonely existence where his friends are the buildings of St. Petersburg, even going so far as to mention how he will in the future look back on this memory of her (as something to be consumed, to subsist off of – weird):

This place is dear to me already. I have already two or three such places in Petersburg. I once shed tears over memories ... like you....

She warns him not to fall in love with him, and he so swears that he shan't, already having done so, and also already pretty much saying so aloud to her.

When they depart on the first night, he mentions how happy the encounter has made him:

In two minutes you have made me happy for ever. Yes, happy;

During their next encounter, he tells her the story of his life as a dreamer, bound up in his own head. I think he must have a job, for he has some money, but those details don't matter to a story like this from D-man. He considers himself to be a loser, too, though:

Do you know that, maybe, I shall leave off grieving over the crime and sin of my life? for such a life is a crime and a sin. And do not imagine tat I have been exaggerating anything–for goodness' sake don't think that, Nastenka: for at time such mister comes over me, such misery...

And later he revisits the utility of fond memories in his vacuous life:

Do you know that I love now to recall and visit at certain dates the places where I was once happy in my own way? I love to build up my present in harmony with the irrevocable past, and I often wander like a shadow, aimless,, sad, and dejected, about the streets and crooked lanes of Petersburg.

After he delivers the letter to Nastenka's beau (or did he!) and he continues not to call on her, she enters the cope of "I dodged a bullet" - to which there is a grain of truth, but rings as pathetic from her lips:

I ... I do not love him, for I can only love what is magnanimous, what understands me, what is generous; for I am like that myself and he is not worthy of me–well, that's enough of him. He has done better than if he had decieved my expectations later, and shown me later what he was....

and proceeds to love the White Knight as a brother, that is until she crosses paths with her #1 at which point she ditches WK immediately for him. Rather than devolving into further incellular soliloquy, though, the hero(?) muses:

My God, a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for the whole of a man's life?

and i think it is marginally easier for me to scoff at this remark from my cushy vantage point of modernity than it would be for a Russian serf in the 19th century, but it does beg the question about whether this was all the median man had to look forward to in his lifetime, perhaps qualified with in Russia, and certainly via the temporal 175 years ago?

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