It is clear from his short preface that he was busy on this story for the better part of a month. The first page of the original draft of the story bears the date of November 19, 1876. In the previous number of A Writer’s Diary Dostoevsky tells of the incident which led him to write the story. “About a month ago,” he writes, “all the Petersburg papers carried a small news item in a few lines of small print about a suicide in Petersburg. A poor girl, a sempstress, threw herself out of a fourth floor window ‘because she could find no work to keep herself alive.’ It was added that she had thrown herself out of the window clasping an icon in her hands. This icon in the hands of the young girl is a strange and unheard-of feature in a suicide case! This indeed is a gentle, meek sort of suicide.”

In this story, one of the most powerful he ever wrote, Dostoevsky analyses one more reason leading to disaster in human relationships. It is the insensibility of one human being towards another, the failure to realise what is passing in another human being’s heart, the lack of sympathy which is the cause of so much cruelty of man towards man.

Dostoevsky was very fond of sub-titles to his stories, and one cannot help feeling that the sub-title A Fantastic Story to A Gentle Creature is due to this fondness rather than to the reasons he adduces for it in his preface. But the same sub-title to The Dream of a Ridiculous Man is fully justified, since it is essentially a tale of the imagination. The subject of the Golden Age occupied Dostoevsky for many years. He refers to it in Notes from the Underground, and he again refers to it in 1865 in his first draft of Crime and Punishment, where he puts the following stray reflections into the mouth of Raskolnikov: “Oh, why isn’t everything a matter of happiness? The picture of the Golden Age. It is implanted in men’s hearts and minds. How is it that it doesn’t come?” Among Raskolnikov’s other reflections are these anticipatory echoes of The Dream: “I never saw Venice or the Golden Horn, but I expect life must be long extinct there.… Flew to another planet.” But Dostoevsky made no use of any of these fragmentary notes in the final draft of the novel. The picture of the Golden Age was first outlined by him in a finished form in the so-called “Stavrogin’s Confession,” a chapter of The Possessed not included in the novel, where the episode of the Golden Age was connected with Claude Lorrain’s picture Acis and Galatea which Dostoevsky had seen in the Dresden Museum. The whole episode was later incorporated by Dostoevsky in his novel The Adolescent, where it is given as part of Versilov’s speech. For the last time Dostoevsky dealt with this theme in The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.

Taken together with the first part of the Notes from the Underground, The Dream gives us Dostoevsky’s final judgment on man. And negative though this judgment is on the whole, Dostoevsky never despaired of man. The vision of the Golden Age may be a dream, but it is a dream that makes life worth while even if it can never be realised; indeed, it makes life worth while just because it can never be realised. In this paradox Dostoevsky the creative artist seemed to glimpse some meaning in man’s tragic story. But he did not stop there. He was appalled by the arrogance of the intellect, and in The Dream he again stresses the fact that reason without feeling, mind without heart, is evil, is a dark cellar; for reason bears within itself the seeds of destruction. Only through pity, love and mercy can man be saved. This message, as Dostoevsky himself put it in The Dream, is “an old truth”; but, like the hero in The Dream, he went on preaching it all his life.

—–

DAVID MAGARSHACK’S translations include works by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov, Gorky, and Pushkin. He has also written biographies of Dostoevsky and Gogol.

*Belinsky was writing about Dostoevsky’s first novel, Poor Folk.

*The special reason for the banning of the journal was an article on the Polish uprising by Strakhov, a regular contributor.

*Dostoevsky went abroad in July, 1865, while writing Crime and Punishment, which was published in 1866. In the same year he met his second wife, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, whom he engaged as a stenographer for his novel The Gambler, and whom he married in 1867. She was nineteen at the time. On April 14 of the same year he went abroad again, where he started work on The Idiot, which was published in 1868. This time he spent four years abroad, during which he wrote The Eternal Husband and The Possessed. He returned to Russia in July, 1871, leaving for his next trip abroad in June, 1874, when he began to work on The Adolescent. He went abroad again in May, 1875, July, 1876, and finally, in July, 1879, when he was working on The Brothers Karamazov, published in 1879 and 1880.

†“I am weak in philosophy, (but not in my love for it;) in my love for it I am strong.” (Letter from Dresden to the Russian journalist Strakhov, June 6, 1870.)

WHITE NIGHTS

A SENTIMENTAL LOVE STORY

From the Memoirs of a Dreamer

And was it his destined part
Only one moment in his life
To be close to your heart?…

—IVAN TURGENEV

FIRST NIGHT

It was a lovely night, one of those nights, dear reader, which can only happen when you are young. The sky was so bright and starry that when you looked at it the first question that came into your mind was whether it was really possible that all sorts of bad-tempered and unstable people could live under such a glorious sky.