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White Nights
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
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This first story has a title borrowed for a vivid film, one that came in some time during last two decades before the millennium, but had nothing to do with this story, unless one sets up an allegory about Soviet persecution and the escape of the dancer; and a good many of us came to know about this story due to this connection, beginning then; subsequently there was a Hindi film early in the new millennium that adapted the story, and the sheer artistic beauty of the film finally brought one to begin reading this when one found it.
As one reads, one is impressed anew with the said film. To carry the sense of the dreamy protagonist and his dreamworld in a film meant for audience far larger than the readership familiar with this, and also not familiar with Nordic latitudes, is highly nontrivial, and the film did more. It brought the flimsy wispy dream web world to life, not only via the sets that were openly theatrical in this era where shooting on locations is the basic, but had a blue twilight convey the mysterious atmosphere of Northern evenings. The boy's eyes and singing conveyed his dreamworld, as did the girl's.
So the one thing one wasn't quite ready for is the long monologues in the story, and yet, how else does the author write a lonely dreamer!
Dostoevsky has painted a miniature saga of a profound, deep loneliness and alienation of a sensitive soul in a crowded city, leaving unsaid the other side - that of someone being connected, rooted when in country - and a chance connection of two such souls for a few minutes producing a deep, everlasting connection, such that it leaves only a love filled with benediction even when one of the two makes a choice for someone else.
In this the Hindi adaptation differed, the director choosing to portray the young man as one who arrived from unknown origins one day, and heartbroken, leaving just as suddenly one night, leaving no address for any messages to be forwarded to (the young woman in the film left without any messages of gratitude, much less love, for him, unlike Dostoyevsky's Nastenska); the heartbreak of the young man in film was devastating, unlike the Dostoevsky protagonist who leaves the narrative with a total benediction for her.
Funnily enough, it was in the first film directed by RK, the grandfather of the young artist who played the role on the film adaptation of the story (incidentally his first film, in turn), that this exact benediction was used more than once, as the object of his love left him. Wonder if that was due to the natural choice, or was the then very young artist the grandfather RK was aware of Dostoyevsky's works, and picked this bit, although the rest of the film had little or nothing to do with White Nights? Or did he have writers working with him who were responsible, although he was someone known to be involved completely in every part of the creative process of his films?
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""You are sorry for me, Nastenka, you are simply sorry for me, my dear little friend! What's done can't be mended. What is said cannot be taken back. Isn't that so? Well, now you know. That's the starting-point. Very well. Now it's all right, only listen. When you were sitting crying I thought to myself (oh, let me tell you what I was thinking!), I thought, that (of course it cannot be, Nastenka), I thought that you ... I thought that you somehow ... quite apart from me, had ceased to love him. Then—I thought that yesterday and the day before yesterday, Nastenka—then I would—I certainly would—have succeeded in making you love me; you know, you said yourself, Nastenka, that you almost loved me. Well, what next? Well, that's nearly all I wanted to tell you; all that is left to say is how it would be if you loved me, only that, nothing more! Listen, my friend—for any way you are my friend—I am, of course, a poor, humble man, of no great consequence; but that's not the point (I don't seem to be able to say what I mean, Nastenka, I am so confused), only I would love you, I would love you so, that even if you still loved him, even if you went on loving the man I don't know, you would never feel that my love was a burden to you. You would only feel every minute that at your side was beating a grateful, grateful heart, a warm heart ready for your sake.... Oh Nastenka, Nastenka! What have you done to me?"
""I love him; but I shall get over it, I must get over it, I cannot fail to get over it; I am getting over it, I feel that.... Who knows? Perhaps it will all end to-day, for I hate him, for he has been laughing at me, while you have been weeping here with me, for you have not repulsed me as he has, for you love me while he has never loved me, for in fact, I love you myself.... Yes, I love you! I love you as you love me; I have told you so before, you heard it yourself—I love you because you are better than he is, because you are nobler than he is, because, because he——"
"The poor girl's emotion was so violent that she could not say more; she laid her head upon my shoulder, then upon my bosom, and wept bitterly. I comforted her, I persuaded her, but she could not stop crying; she kept pressing my hand, and saying between her sobs: "Wait, wait, it will be over in a minute! I want to tell you ... you mustn't think that these tears—it's nothing, it's weakness, wait till it's over."... At last she left off crying, dried her eyes and we walked on again. I wanted to speak, but she still begged me to wait. We were silent.... At last she plucked up courage and began to speak.
""It's like this," she began in a weak and quivering voice, in which, however, there was a note that pierced my heart with a sweet pang; "don't think that I am so light and inconstant, don't think that I can forget and change so quickly. I have loved him for a whole year, and I swear by God that I have never, never, even in thought, been unfaithful to him.... He has despised me, he has been laughing at me—God forgive him! But he has insulted me and wounded my heart. 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 deceived my expectations later, and shown me later what he was.... Well, it's over! But who knows, my dear friend," she went on pressing my hand, "who knows, perhaps my whole love was a mistaken feeling, a delusion—perhaps it began in mischief, in nonsense, because I was kept so strictly by grandmother? Perhaps I ought to love another man, not him, a different man, who would have pity on me and ... and.... But don't let us say any more about that," Nastenka broke off, breathless with emotion, "I only wanted to tell you ... I wanted to tell you that if, although I love him (no, did love him), if, in spite of this you still say.... If you feel that your love is so great that it may at last drive from my heart my old feeling—if you will have pity on me—if you do not want to leave me alone to my fate, without hope, without consolation—if you are ready to love me always as you do now—I swear to you that gratitude ... that my love will be at last worthy of your love.... Will you take my hand?""
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"Either the sunbeams suddenly peeping out from the clouds for a moment were hidden again behind a veil of rain, and everything had grown dingy again before my eyes; or perhaps the whole vista of my future flashed before me so sad and forbidding, and I saw myself just as I was now, fifteen years hence, older, in the same room, just as solitary, with the same Matrona grown no cleverer for those fifteen years.
"But to imagine that I should bear you a grudge, Nastenka! That I should cast a dark cloud over your serene, untroubled happiness; that by my bitter reproaches I should cause distress to your heart, should poison it with secret remorse and should force it to throb with anguish at the moment of bliss; that I should crush a single one of those tender blossoms which you have twined in your dark tresses when you go with him to the altar.... Oh never, never! May your sky be clear, may your sweet smile be bright and untroubled, and may you be blessed for that moment of blissful happiness which you gave to another, lonely and grateful heart!
"My God, a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for the whole of a man's life?"
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June 20, 2021 - June 22, 2021.
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June 03, 2021 -
June 20, 2021 - June 22, 2021.
Purchased February 13, 2021.
Kindle Edition
Published by Public Domain
(first published 1848)
ASIN:- B005051MQQ
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