&±ç³Ü´Ç³Ù;â€�But how could you live and have no story to tell?â€�

Summer nights are for dreamers. The world opens itself up into lush landscapes teeming with life and the nights, so full of star light and mystery, seem as vast as the aspirations of first time lovers. Anything seems possible amidst the summer nights, as if the afterhours were a doorway that takes you into a fairy tale world where magic and mayhem await you. Such is the feeling permeating Fydor Dostoevsky� White Nights, an early tale first published in 1848 of a nameless narrator coming to life and love under the white nights of St. Petersburg. �I am a dreamer,� he tells us and embarks on a story that feels as if set in a dreamscape, softly pulling us through the four nights he spends talking with the young Nastenka whom he met sobbing upon a bridge. Over these few days the pair come to know each other fondly, and despite his promise to not fall in love with her as she is engaged to another man, our narrator can’t help but blissfully trip into romantic affection in what seems Doestoevksy’s portrayal and preference of altruistic love. Learning to look and live outward instead of inwardly dreaming, the narrator breaks from isolation and sees that although living towards dreams may go awry, having lived in the world is better than loneliness.

�It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader.�

I love a good story that takes place over the span of a mere few days, the type that reminds you how life seems to slow down with every moment elevated and vibrating with implied importance when you feel like you’ve stumbled into a narrative within your own life. A handful of days you feel you’ve occupied more than entire months. White Nights excellently embodies this and you feel, as the reader, the feverish excitement of the narrator as if it is running through your own veins and not his; a talent of Dostoevsky’s I first became enamored with long ago while reading Crime and Punishment is his ability to transpose the characters emotions onto you such was the intensity of guilt and anguish I felt alongside Raskolnikov as he sweated in his bed. I was also particularly empathetic to his account of feeling left behind and in a state of a �strange anguish,� finding himself befriending his own city as he wandered the streets aimlessly. I recall a time when I had my own personal loneliness and sadness, spending summer days wandering my own city and finding a particular joy and camaraderie with the landscape one can only enter when out within it walking. The poets have written on this for centuries. Another phenomenon of walking and thinking, especially in summer, is that the whole world feels possible and that around any corner everything might change, fall into place, or trigger a story. And so this tale begins.

�I am a dreamer. I know so little of real life that I just can't help re-living such moments as these in my dreams, for such moments are something I have very rarely experienced.�

While perhaps not much occurs in this story, we also feel that it shifts the entirety of the narrators world, he who upon his first conversation with Nastenka admits �I will no longer think so badly of myself as I have done at times,� simply because he had an experience with her. There is a real youthfulness blossoming on every page here with our narrator, somewhere in his twenties but feeling life already leaving him behind, and his loquacity is only matched by his awkwardness. Luckily she find him charming, sharing her own feelings of loneliness spending her days quite literally pinned to her grandmothers dress since the elder woman fears Nastenka will be taken off by a man (a bit on the nose but it works), and is more amused than bemused by his poetic way of rambling. Upon his first explanation of himself she remarks �You talk as though you were reading it out of a book.� Its this sort of inability to temper one’s awkward excitement coupled with a penchant for poetic flourishing that first marks him as a dreamer, but also reminds me of the characters in early Knut Hamsun works, particularly Hunger when the narrator’s romantic prospects are dashed by the self sabotage of his grand speeches. Hunger always recalled Doestoevksy’s narrator from Notes from Underground and in White Nights we see Dostoevsky practicing the sort of long-winded storytelling he would later use for his underground man.

�I don’t know how to be silent when my heart is speaking.�

A dreamer, our narrator tells us �is not a human being, but a creature of an intermediate sort.� He lives his life dreaming but never truly living, inventing all sorts of wishes he can play out in his head but never actually having the experiences beyond imagination (perhaps one may see a dreamer as a sort of step-sibling to a reader). He casts himself as the �hero� in his telling, just as in his dreaming, but is nothing but a spectator speculating. And while he has charmed himself with many fantasies of love and lovers, he has never truly known it firsthand and is beginning to regret occupying his time with what amounts to nothing.

�Because at moments like that I start to think that I am incapable of living a proper life, I seem already to have lost any sort of judgment, any apprehension of the real and actual; because after all, I have cursed my very self; because after my nights of fantasy come moments of sobriety which are appalling…after all one matures, outgrows one’s former ideals: they are shattered into dust and fragments; and if you have no other life, it behooves you to construct one from those same fragments.�

At least with Nastenka he is experiencing life. She too has a story to tell, one of a man to whom she is promised to be wed upon his return to St. Petersberg yet he has been home a few days and has not come to her. Our dreamer, eager to please and to experience life, agrees to take a letter to him. In his dealings with Nastenka we see a sort of idyllic, altruistic purity to his love, one of a boy who puts her best interests before himself and she with no intent to deceive or use him. It feels very much like high school, doing something for your crush in a tale of unrequited love where, deep down, you know they will never be with you but you do it anyway.

�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!�

It is, perhaps, what a youth would be snickered at by peers and teased for being ‘friend-zoned�, but we see that there is a sincerity here. We also see why the subtitle for this tale is �A sentimental story from the diary of a dreamer� because it is indeed sentimental and tugs heartstrings that reverberate in the tune of nostalgia and young, doomed romance.

Of course our young narrator, against her wishes to not fall in love with her, does, but in her grief over the continued absence of her fiancée, she begins to bend her heart towards him as well. Why not, he clearly cares for her. The story takes a twist and we see our dreamer sad but not regretful, because he has experienced life. And life comes with loss as much as love, we just only hope the scales tip more towards sweetness when we tally up our total when the curtain falls for us. We leave the dreamer as he ponders if this one moment of happiness was worth it all.

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

Doestoevsky forever holds a special place in my heart. While some authors tear out your heart, tear it to pieces and build you back stronger, Dostoevksy achieves the same results in a different way. He shows you inside your own heart and, in recognizing his words capturing inner feelings your own heart could never have expressed so eloquently, it begins to shake and vibrate in harmony with his ideas until it flies into pieces. Then he puts you back together, wiser and thankful for it. White Nights is a minor work yet it hits so soothingly and with all the bliss of a grand summer’s night. This is one for, as Kermit the Frog once sang, the lovers, the dreamers, and me.

5/5

â€�[A]sk yourself again: what have you done with your best years, then? Where have you buried the best days of your life? Have you lived or not?â€�&±ç³Ü´Ç³Ù;

&±ç³Ü´Ç³Ù;â€�Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.â€�

Rainer Maria Rilke puts forth the question �must I write?� in these letters from the great poet to the unknown Mr. Kappus. �Dig into yourself for a deep answer,� he tells the young poet, �and if this answer rights out in assent, if you meet this solemn question with a strong, simple “I must�, then build your life in accordance with this necessity.� Letters To A Young Poet, written between 1903-08, contains some of the most passionately moving words of encouragement and examination into the life of an artist. Rilke advises that �a work of art is good if it has risen out of necessity�, that they must feel they �would have to die if you were forbidden to write.� From there, he instructs towards the soul-searching life of solitude which best cultivates the artists gift. With powerful prose that often reaches the same sublime peaks found in his poetry, these magnanimous, heart-felt letters are some the most empowering words of wisdom into undertaking of the arts as well as an impressive portrait of Rilke himself.

It is difficult to accurately explain the powers of transcendence contained in these letters. What is especially difficult is to do so in the realm of reviewing, a sort of critique that bastardizes the original message by having it be received tainted from my amateur perspective as it passes through me¹, as Rilke himself cautions against reading any sort of literary criticism, positive or negative in his very first letter.

�Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism: they always result in more or less fortunate misunderstandings. Things aren’t all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experience is unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life.

While, as Rilke point out, the ethereal joys brought about in me while reading this are ineffable, I would still like to take a few moments of your time to discuss how beautiful these letters are. It is a sort of minor-key beauty, spending much time navigating through the implications of solitude and painful soul-searching, yet it elevates the heart to such high levels and is sure to make anyone reach for a pen in order to try their own hand at poetry.

�We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us,� Rilke writes. Constantly he tries to impress upon the young poet that the road to greatness is a difficult, lonely path, and that any meandering towards what is easy is destined to lead to failure or mediocrity. �It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.� In the Bukowski poem How to be a Good Writer, he examines the life of those he considers great and asks :

remember the old dogs
who fought so well:
Hemingway, Celine, Dostoevsky, Hamsun.
If you think they didn't go crazy
in tiny rooms
just like you're doing now
without women
without food
without hope
then you're not ready.

This is merely a more blunt and coarse explanation of Rilke’s own sentiments. While it may seem a frightening truth, that we must always take the hard road, and that we must seek solitude in ourselves to mine the gold buried within us, that we may reach a point of near-madness, he presents it as such a beautiful gift, a place of inner turmoil that is bliss to the writer because it is how language is able to take root in our souls and grow.

�What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside yourself and meet no one for hours � that is what you must be able to attain. To be solitary as you were when you were a child, when the grownups walked around involved with matters that seemed large and important because they looked so busy and because you didn’t understand a thing about what they were doing.�

Rilke advises that childhood is one of the richest places to seek ourselves and our inspirations. Not only to call forth our dusty memories and let language polish and remold them into something remarkable, but to use a childlike �not-understanding� to best examine the world.

�Why should you want to give up a child’s wise not-understanding in exchange for defensiveness and scorn, since not-understanding is, after all, a way of being alone, whereas defensiveness and scorn are a participation in precisely what, by these means, you want to separate yourself from.

What really stood out to me about Rilke was his utter humbleness. Rilke responds to Kappus as if Kappus were the most important person in the world, and he begins each letter with an honest apology for the delay in his responses. Rilke remains ever humble in his words, and though he offers brilliant, shining insights, suggestions and long investigations on a variety of topics beyond writing (God, love � especially his distaste for those who mistake lust for love and how it damages the artistic heart, Rome, paintings, etc.), he never asserts himself as anything but a man with no answers, only direction. He reminds Kappus �Don’t think the person who is trying to comfort you now lives untroubled among the simple and quiet words that sometimes give you pleasure. His life has much trouble and sadness��. We all face our anxieties day by day, and even those we look up and even idolize were never able to reach perfection. We are all human, and Rilke manages to both send us reaching for the heavens while still remaining firmly grounded here on the Earth.

This is a fantastic short collection for anyone with any interest in writing. It is one of the most beautifully empowering books I have ever read and reminds the reader of the mindset they must accept in order to let the arts flourish in the soil of their souls. Whatever the topic he discusses, it is wholly pleasant to be immersed in the flow of his writing - each word is a warm embrace. While the letters are intended for Mr. Kappus alone, and his side of the conversation is missing, the message is universal. From the man who wrote some of the finest poetry of the 20th century, this book should be read by everyone before they pick up a pen to write (the same goes for Sorrentino’s Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, but that is a discussion for another time). I’m surprised this isn’t required reading in all freshman college literature courses. This is truly a gift of writing, it sustained a smile across by face the entire time.
5/5

'Just the wish that you may find in yourself enough patients to endure and enough simplicity to have faith; that you may gain more and more confidence in what is difficult and in your solitude among other people. And as for the rest, let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right, always.'

¹ For more on the corruption of literature through any attempt at interpretation or criticism, I highly recommend reading Susan Sontag essay (thank you to Mike for showing me this essay). Also, for further reading on the distortion of Rilke’s words, William H. Gass has his take on translating the great poet: Reading Rilke: Reflections on the Problems of Translation

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