37. Dostoevsky’s Russian Masterpiece: White Nights

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3:09Dominic Sandbrook: My heart was full. I wanted to say something, but couldn't. Listen, she continued, taking me by the hand. Tell me, would you have acted like this? Would you have abandoned a girl who came to you on her own? Would you have thrown in her face a shameless jeer at her weak, foolish heart? Would you have looked after her? Would you have understood that she was all alone? That she didn't know how to take care of herself? That she didn't know how to protect herself from loving you? That it wasn't her fault? That, finally, it wasn't her fault? That she had done nothing? Oh my God, my God! Nastjenka, I cried out finally, unable to control my agitation.

3:48Dominic Sandbrook: Nastjenka, you are tearing me apart. You are breaking my heart. You're killing me, Nastjenka. I cannot be silent. I must finally speak and tell you what has been welling up here in my heart. As I said this, I got up from the bench. She took me by the hand and looked at me in surprise. What is it? So, hello, everybody. that was an almost tear-jerking moment from Fyodor Dostoevsky's short story White Nights it was first published in 1848 in the Russian periodical Notes from the Fatherland in English as translated from Ronald Mayer and Dominic you tried to get me to say that in the original Russian but as you know I saved my Russian for those who sign up to book club notes to a love of newsletter and also I didn't want to deprive you of the opportunity to show off so would you like to give us the original Russian?

4:41Dominic Sandbrook: Are you not familiar, Tabby, with Autochestvenia Zybyskiy, the brilliant Russian periodical? Well, I'm not reading books for this show. I'm reading that. Surely. Surely. And it's the story of a sad, lonely young man, played there by Dominic, who has never known love. He's never had a girlfriend. He is walking in St. Petersburg one day when he comes across a distraught teenage girl. And this is Nastenka. And over the course of four nights they discuss their lives, their dreams, their disappointments, and they begin to develop a connection which is totally platonic on her side, we think anyway, and romantic on his.

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6:06Dominic Sandbrook: Now, your everyday spending, your payments and your card are all together and in your control. Download the Klarna app to stay on top of your money so that you can think about, well, anything else. Until very recently, it's certainly not one of Dostoevsky's better known works. it's nowhere near as popular as his later Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov and it doesn't really touch on the same themes of good and evil there's nothing here about crime or sin a political morality it does have some of his more popular you know alienation is something that I think he touches on quite a lot but it's unusual I would say for his portfolio it's much more psychological and it's a story about love and loneliness and unrequited love especially and reality and dreams and because of all this I think it's not surprising that he wrote it when he was 26 because it feels like a much much younger man's book written for readers of a similar age you know it has nothing of kind of the haunting existential sophistication of for for example crime and punishment to me anyway yeah and I think that's the key to its extraordinary success so as you rightly said until recently it wasn't terribly well known but it has come from nowhere to become this extraordinary kind of commercial success which is why i've chosen it for the for the show in 2015 our penguin book started a series called little black classics which are these very cool kind of little novellas and stuff and it was to mark penguin's 80th birthday and they're very short and they're very kind of affordable and white knights was the 118th in this range and it came out in 2016 and it became a hit it's well it's become a hit in a way the penguin could not possibly have anticipated so in 2025 white knights was the fourth most biggest selling translated book in britain as you said it's translated by ronald myer it's extraordinary it really is it still slightly blows my mind yeah when you think of how many brilliant translated books there are that this is number four and the reason is largely because of social media so this book is massive on booktok on bookstagram and on goodreads so to give one example there's a bloke who called jack edwards who's the way i would describe him as a gushing book fluencer tabby i don't know if that's a technical term and you say that affectionately of course i do i say that with great admiration and respect he brands himself as the internet's resident librarian yeah and if you watch his clip as i have uh he says white knights is one of the most devastating books about love i've ever experienced he says it broke his heart into teeny tiny little pieces oh dominic you're what you're wiping away tears of sympathetic kinship there i am lovely to see and his posts about on instagram and tiktok have been viewed and liked hundreds of thousands probably millions of times now tabby you're not au fait with this kind of stuff but i am fortunately i'm not really no because there's nothing you like more than internet snooping completely it's that's just so true that's so true anyway i have read the comments on this blake's post so that you don't have to yeah um so people say of his white knight's posts this is the single most devastating and beautiful story of all time this is the story of my life it broke my heart i couldn't love this book more this book broke me and my favorite reading this book made me feel more unhappy so he's coming from a place of um yeah contentment exactly now this isn't just a british thing i did a um some anglo-saxon thing so just last week there was a piece in newspapers across the world run by the news agency afp and it was about the extraordinary global success of white knight so they focused on brazil and brazil sales of this book this short story basically have gone up by 500 in a year it's so popular that in rio they had they've run out of copies and they've had to reprint so obviously there's something about it after 180 years that is really speaking to people, particularly younger readers.

10:13Dominic Sandbrook: And the question is what? And well, the other question, I suppose, is this is actually good. Now, Tabby, we don't want to give the game away completely. No. But had you read this before? And what's your first impression? I had not read it before. I read Crime and Punishment two years ago. And I have to say that it definitely stayed with me. Something of a slog for you, wasn't it? I seem to remember. You always say this. No, I mean, you're just traumatized because you were slogging your way through Phineas Finn at the time. Well, it's your recommendation, actually. I read it back to back with money.

10:45So it was a really weird kind of contrast. Anyway, by Martin Amis, which we're doing soon. So I came to this very open minded. I was relieved to see that it wasn't the same length as Crime and Punishment, to be honest. And I'm obviously not going to give too much away. But I would say it instantly felt like Dostoevsky was writing this much, much younger than when he was writing those later books. It didn't have the sophistication of the prose for me yet.

11:13Dominic Sandbrook: Did it break you? That's the question. Did it break me? You know, actually, shockingly, parts of it left me a little bit cold. Oh no. I'm only saying parts of it. Other parts of it I actually thought were strangely tender, actually strangely modern in the depiction of unrequited love. Yeah. What about you? How did you feel about it? I'm just thinking if you were posting comments, you'd put, reading in this book made me feel even more cold. Yes, even more cold. I now have no semblance of human feeling within me. What did I think? Well, I'd read Dostoevsky. I've read the big ones, actually, Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov, Demons.

11:49Dominic Sandbrook: You're not a big fan, are you? Some people love Dostoevsky and they're obsessed by him. In fact, they're in their acolytes. And at this point, they'll be turning off this podcast. They'll say, well, this fool doesn't know what he's talking about. I'd never quite bought into the Dostoevsky mythos. And those big books did actually leave me a bit cold. However, because I'm very easily influenced. So when I watched that gushing book fluencer. Your brother from another mother. I thought to myself, well, if he thinks it's good, it must be good. So I was very confident opening this book that I would be converted and I'd be wiping.

12:24Dominic Sandbrook: You know, I'm quite a sentimental reader. That's why I've been trying to sort of figure out why it is that Dostoevsky does nothing for you. I think maybe you do have a little bit possibly of impatience with kind of long passages of emotional exploration. Me? The absence of dialogue maybe or something like that. Maybe that's why he does nothing for you. God, am I too? It's like I'm going to a therapist or something. Do I? I mean, I've never been conscious of that personally. Really? Well, clearly these are murky waters and we're going to have to get into these in the second half. but before then we should talk about the author because he is undoubtedly one of the literary giants the literary greats he's not everybody's cup of tea i think he has a bit of a reputation for being heavy angsty overwrought you know i've slightly noticed he's one of those authors where with the big books the most famous ones people often say oh you should listen to him if you can't face like sitting down and reading him i actually think that's i don't know to me he always seems to have this kind of strangely endearing shambolic calm to him maybe and i i think i actually do think he's oddly delighted by the kind of comedy of the human condition how sort of i don't know our emotional intricacies i think there's a degree of truth in that actually that said um another writer that we've done on the show absolutely loathed him and this is your hero this is nabakov he said he is a cheap sensationalist clumsy and vulgar he is less a prophet than a puffed up journalist and a slapdash comedian apparently he absolutely hated sonya in crime and punishment because he said that she was a cliche you know she was a cliche of the golden-hearted prostitute type really i can slightly see that maybe there are loads of websites where you can look up they've done a sort of index of nabikov's views of other writers particularly russian writers they are so damning basically there are so few that he likes and he'll generally just say of them rubbish and dull rubbish, useless that's like the way that all historians feel about other historians so true despite Nabokov's words he is also regarded, I mean obviously as one of the greatest political and moral writers of all time and as you say he is very fashionable today for reasons we'll get onto after the break and this is of course, and I can't tell you how hard I'm straining not to say this in the voice of David Brent.

14:42He is, of course, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.

14:45Dominic Sandbrook: When does David Brent talk about Dostoevsky? Are you kidding? That's such an iconic scene in the office. When he's showing off to that young guy and he says, all that stuff in Siberia, you know, all that. Oh, yeah, of course. The guy who wins the quiz. Yeah, and every single time he runs out of facts about Dostoevsky. He, like, sort of, like, with a pug face disappears. Yeah, yeah. Anyway. So look in the mirror. I digress. Yeah, it sounds a lot like me, actually. So he's born in Moscow in November 1821. And given that he wrote White Nights when he was only 26, we'll only concentrate on his life up to that point.

15:21And then when, you know, next year or whatever, when we do one of his -

15:25Dominic Sandbrook: Big books. Bigger, longer books. Exactly. We'll give you the full biography. So that's something to look forward to. I'm trying to win back the Dostoevsky fans. So anyway, what's unusual about Dostoevsky? So a lot of the big Russian writers of the 19th century, like Tolstoy or Tujenov were from noble families, but he's not. But then I swear that according to the very strict social hierarchies of Tsarist Russia, he technically was hereditary nobility, but just not elite, like very low down to his grandparents. So basically the way that it works, you have a bit of Russian heritage, Tabi, no? I do.

15:59Dominic Sandbrook: So you all know this. This will speak to something in your soul. Yeah. There was this kind of very, very intricate table of ranks, the kind of gradations, the hierarchy. And his family were not originally a noble family. His mother's family were merchants and his father's family, I think, tended to go into the church. And his father, Mikhail, was a military doctor who worked at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, which was on the edge of Moscow. So he's seeing a lot of tragedy kind of from quite a young age, I guess. Totally. Yeah, they lived in a house in the hospital grounds, actually. and Dostoevsky when he was a little boy, he used to see the patients basically sort of shambling around the gardens.

16:35Dominic Sandbrook: Now, his father was elevated to the nobility. I think as part of the sort of promotion, the sort of incredibly hierarchical Russian system, you would get these promotions and you would get onto the ladder, as it were. But because they didn't come from that world, he always said it made a big difference to how he wrote. So he said, basically, writers like Tolstoy, who came from an aristocratic background, wrote about this sort of fixed world of stability and beauty and tradition. whereas he said himself you know i write about accidental families the insulted and the humiliated that's interesting and i think that's that's true because obviously think about crime and punishment or so many of his books he's often writing about people kind of on the margins isn't he yeah definitely um and he like so many of the great authors we do on this show is an enormous reader his nanny introduces him to fairy tales maybe when we do bonus episodes you could take us to your favorite folk tales yeah anyway go on then his mother uses the bible to teach him how to write.

17:30His parents are very bookish. They introduce him to everything from the Iliad and Odyssey, also very good to hear, to Don Quixote, Walter Scott, as well as Russian writers like Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol. The good news is that the family is on their way up because in 1828, when he turns seven, his father is elevated to the very minor nobility. Then in 1831, he buys a country estate, which having grown up in the environment that he did, this must have been blissful and i think you can see this in dostoevsky's writing often when he talks about the contrast between the city and the countryside anyway um so he and his eight siblings they spend their summers that's a lot that is a lot the bad news is that in 1833 when he's 11 he's to a little boarding school in moscow his father has to borrow money to pay for it and theodore feels miserable and lonely he feels like an outsider in comparison to his aristocratic classmates so he's the piggy he's the russian piggy of this of this story yeah so true more bad news um in 1837 his mother dies of tb um and then in 1838 when he's 16 he enters the nikolaev engineering institute inst petersburg because his father wants him to be a military engineer he does not but yeah he does as he's told and he's not really one of life's military engineers

18:52Dominic Sandbrook: is he? God no. There's a quote from his friend Konstantin Trutovsky who's a painter and Trutovsky said there was no student in the entire institution with less of a military bearing than Dostoevsky. He moved clumsily and jerkily, his uniform hung awkwardly on him and his rucksack and rifle looked like a sort of fetter that he was being forced to wear which hung heavily on him. You know if we did like a literary I don't know 15, football 15 or whatever. Tabby you've massively given yourself in a very entertaining Anyway. Wait, how many people in a football team? Oh my God. Okay, go on. When we do this Rugby 15 or Football 11, what are you going to do?

19:32Who do you think would be the captain? The captain? Yeah. Shakespeare. No, because it's about physical prowess.

19:39Dominic Sandbrook: Oh, okay. Oh, somebody huge. Yeah. So Navikoff late period. Lampedusa got quite fat. Anyway, sorry, continue. What kind of a boy is he? He's pale. He's delicate. he would not have been in the team because he's kind of a bit of a weed he's a kind of introvert he's a dreamer he's romantic it's the popular image of Dostoevsky there isn't it? it is completely to be fair to him he's not bullied he's not ostracised he just keeps himself to himself and the other boys call him the monk I mean basically everyone knows somebody like that yeah definitely but then more tragedy strikes because in the summer of 1839 his father dies probably of a stroke but this intriguingly there were rumours he'd been murdered by his serfs.

20:21This is probably untrue, but where did that come from? Did he treat them badly?

20:25Dominic Sandbrook: It was a neighbour or something put this around to try to get the property. Gosh, how Dickensian. Yeah, it's very Dickensian. Even so, Dostoevsky finishes his studies, he qualifies as an engineer cadet, and he moves into an apartment in St. Petersburg with a friend. He's now in his early 20s. And one of his brother's friends said he was usually pretty friendly and polite, but and this is so dostoevsky-esque yeah when he wasn't in a good mood he often looked at everything through dark glasses became vexed forgot his manner and sometimes he completely forgot himself and got carried away to the point of being very abusive his real passion is for books and he dreams of becoming a writer and he starts by translating one of the french writer balzac's novels into russian but he doesn't make much money from it and he needs cash because he Basically, he's actually got an extravagant lifestyle.

21:14Dominic Sandbrook: He spends a 50th income on rent. He spends the rest on going to ballets or to plays. He goes gambling at night in St. Petersburg. He goes betting on games of billiards. And he loses tons of money. And so he basically has to ask friends and relatives to help him out. Money's a problem throughout his life, isn't it? Yeah, very much. So in 1844, he decides he's going to write a novel himself. and he says to his brother Mikhail, if this doesn't pay off my debts, I will hang myself. Well, at least he's got a measured approach to things. Such a Russian mid-century thing to say. Yeah. And this book is his first novel called Poor Folk, published in 1846, and it's basically letters between two cousins, two poor cousins living in St.

21:58Dominic Sandbrook: Petersburg. So they're talking about their friendships and their love lives and how they're trying to make ends meet and all this. I like the sound of it. No, I think it looks quite dull, actually. Really? I found a copy and I was looking through it And I thought, no, it's not for me. Maybe I'm wrong. I mean, I was wrong about A Court of Thorns and Roses. Wouldn't be the first time. So it's a big hit, poor folk. It's one of the great sort of sensations of the day. The top critic in Russia, Viserion Belinsky, says Dostoevsky is a great star. He's going to be the new Nikolai Gogol. And some of the papers, actually in the newspapers, they say, wow, this young man's come from nowhere.

22:32Dominic Sandbrook: And he is writing sort of Western style social novels about poverty and the social question. And that's brilliant. but then straight away he follows it up a month later with this next book later so he must have written them sort of simultaneously i guess yeah and this is a book called the double and it's much less successful and this is more psychological much more dostoevsky like actually it's about who's going insane it's much more um raskolnikov isn't it yeah and the critics don't like this at all this meteor has shot up and now it's coming back down to earth yeah and in more ways than one because by this point his health is suffering.

23:05He's having these epileptic seizures and in later life they were terrifyingly regular, how often he would have these. He's also not massively well liked in literary circles. He seems proud, vain, a bit irritable. But then in the next 18 months two big things happen. So the first thing, most importantly for our purposes, is he writes White Nights. We don't know exactly when but it was approved for publication by the censors. So these were like government officials who reviewed everything before they got printed to make sure they weren't, for instance, clever foreshadowing here, being negative about the Tsar.

23:40So that's approved at the end of October 1848. It's probably written a few months earlier. Then it's published a few weeks later in the 12th issue of Notes from the Fatherland.

23:49Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. What's it called again, Tammy, in Russia? You remind us. It's your time. It's your time to shine. Otostoyevsky. Beautiful. Beautiful. Then the second thing, most important for Dostoevsky, he gets involved with a dissident literary discussion group called the Petroshevsky Circle. These are, of course, the final years of Tsarnikos I, and he ruled for almost three decades. He is the personification of autocracy, orthodox, very conservative. He won't make any concessions to liberal reformers. But the Petroshevsky Circle are keen to discuss utopian and socialist ideas. So the abolition of serfdom, very dangerous for the Tsar, reforming autocracy, you name it.

24:29Then in 1848 to 1849, they come to the attention of the authorities who are understandably very worried about revolutions in Europe. And then in April 1849, the group are rounded up and they're arrested. And this is the cue for the most famous moment in Dostoevsky's life. I mean, it's legendary. They're all condemned to death. They're taken to the square, to a square in St. Petersburg on the 23rd of December. They're lined up before a firing squad. Their hands are tied at this point. like it seems certain that they are going to get executed and then the damascene moment a carriage rattles up very dramatically and a man gets out with a message from the czar they have been reprieved so their sentence is commuted to exile in a prison camp in siberia and this is where dostoevsky remains for the next four years and it is a transformative period in his life this whole incident changes everything from really his perspective on life He writes this letter to his brother just before he goes to Siberia saying, you know, I can't believe I haven't been appreciating life all this time.

25:34Seize the day, et cetera, et cetera.

25:36Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, of course, it would be a massive thing for you. And actually, you can read about this in his book, The Idiot. Yes. Prince Mishkin tells the story of a young man saying this happened. And this is basically Dostoevsky. This is, as you say, like a seismic moment for Dostoevsky. It's still another 10 or 12 years before he writes the big books, Crime, Punishment, The Idiot, Demons and so on. But those books are clearly much darker, more metaphysical, more introverted, more overwrought, more violent than the stuff that he was writing when he was a young man. And of course, that makes them very different from TikTok's beloved White Nights, which he wrote when he was young.

26:10No firing squads there.

26:12Dominic Sandbrook: But the big books are the books that his admirers really point to today, aren't they? And he's just a word on Dostoevsky before we get into White Nights. I think one reason for his sort of ubiquity, as it were, on BookTok and things, he is very fashionable, as well as being fashionable with sort of quite overwrought youngsters. He's fashionable with a particular kind of very, very online readers. So often, I think, very conservative or libertarian, people who are scornful of kind of Western liberalism. And they see, they love Dostoevsky's existentialism. His kind of slight infatuation with his suffering as well.

26:45Yes, exactly.

26:46Dominic Sandbrook: so three examples Elon Musk Elon Musk has tweeted about the Brothers Karamazov he's definitely never read it like the Odyssey which he also had not read so he approved of a tweeter who said oh you'll learn more about human psychology from the Brothers Karamazov than with you know any number of kind of psychology books Jordan Peterson Jordan Peterson loves Dostoevsky the Brothers Karamazov Crime and Punishment they're two of his top three books and Peter Thiel the chairman of Palantir he gave an interview with the Wall Street Journal in which he said there was no better way to think about human irrationality than to read Dostoevsky and you can see why they like him they like him in part because of his rejection of kind of liberalism because Dostoevsky went on this political journey in which he ultimately became a kind of Russian ultra-nationalist super committed to Russian orthodoxy and he wrote of his deep personal revulsion from Western liberal values.

27:42Dominic Sandbrook: So he unites two quite different constituencies, I think. So people who feel very sad and people who, you know, looking forward to sort of, I don't know, the world in which the kind of, you know, the great tech giants rule everything and sort of weedy liberalism is completely obliterated. That seems to me a slight misreading, but... By me or by them? By them. never you ah thanks what's worth stressing here though is that this is this is not the dostoevsky white knights is it no no no not at all because i mean if you've come to this book for great existential themes of you know good and evil suffering and cruelty what is man yeah all of that you're not going to get it in white knights yeah but what are you going to get in white knights yeah well exactly so let's get into the book so remember this is a book written by a young man in Dostoevsky, who's only 26.

28:33He's short of money. He's socially awkward. He spends loads of time in his own head. He's something of a romantic dreamer and definitely indulges, I think, that side of himself. He doesn't really know where he fits in. And this is all true of the narrator of White Nights. The setting is St. Petersburg, which is the capital of the Russian Empire at this time. It's never described in the book, but it's powerfully evoked. It's a mood rather than a place. It's kind of abandoned and a bit desolate. canals, empty streets, this atmosphere of melancholy. It's not as dilapidated as the city in crime and punishment.

29:06Bearer, I would say. Emptier. And the White Knights of the title, I love this detail. I did not know this. They're an annual St. Petersburg institution. It's a natural phenomenon where for about 80 days in June and early July, the sun never sets. So it's this perpetual gentle dusk or twilight that lasts all night and it kind of lends it this dreamy unreal feel you've you've seen this before haven't you i have i saw it and not in well i have been spitsburg i didn't see it when i was there but in um in northern norway tubby so the lfoten islands

29:42Dominic Sandbrook: which is very beautiful you you get there and it's sort of yes so strange the sun never sets so you know the evening proceeds and you know you get to that point where it's sort of seven o 'clock or eight o 'clock and then it just sort of stops and the light fades a little bit and it becomes very soft but all through the night this you've got this kind of soft twilight and it's lovely it's a really remarkable thing yeah it's quite hard to sleep i mean that's the that's the difficulty but no it's um terribly romantic yeah yeah um but the opening of the whole book definitely sets the tone um so it was a wonderful night the kind of night dear reader by the way i I think this is really beautiful writing.

30:20It was a wonderful night, the kind of night, dear reader, which is only possible when we are young. The sky was so starry. It was such a bright night. Looking at it, you could not help but ask yourself, is it really possible for bad tempered and capricious people to live under such a sky? That is also a young person's question, dear reader, a very young person's question, but may the Lord ask it of your heart more often. I think that's lovely.

30:41Dominic Sandbrook: You like that? I do. I do like that. And this all seems brilliant, but actually, yeah this is as positive as the book really gets this is this is the last bit of joy in the heights of optimism because the narrator then goes on to say that from early that morning he's woken up with a terrible melancholy and it's tormenting him and he says it suddenly seemed that i so alone was being abandoned by everyone that everyone was deserting me oh poor felly so i think this is actually reading this i was struck by i think it's quite retro in some ways so in 1848 looking at the what else was going on in literature it's weathering heights it's jane eyre so two books that we've done on the show uh thackeray was writing vanity fair uh or written vanity fair i can't remember which um dickens is just about to start david copperfield so these are books that are overflowing with energy and this is more sentimental it's more melancholy and it's quite in that sense i think it's quite backward looking it's looking back to sort of 18th century books about sort of love-lorn sentimental narrators and things.

31:44Not that popular anymore by this point, this kind of heightened melodramatic language.

31:49Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah, I think it feels quite, I think exactly, I think it feels quite retro. Anyway, the narrator, I mean, as you described him, I think rightly, he's the astonishing melancholy. I mean, he's basically melancholy in human form. He is, dare I say, if I was going to be harsh, is he a bit of a drip, Tabby? I think he is a little bit of a drip, but I think that is a tiny bit harsh. He definitely does that thing, which I think we surely everyone knows someone who does this. Yeah. Where it's like you are enamored of the version of yourself that is miserable and a bit blue and a bit, you know, actually try to shake it off because it's kind of artistically, artistic and romantic.

32:27It's kind of like the romantic, you know, paintings of Ophelia or something, you know.

32:31Dominic Sandbrook: Everybody knows somebody like this. So, yeah, this bloke, this narrator, he describes himself as a type at one point when he's talking to the other main character. and he's dead right. He is a type. He's a bit eccentric. He's a dreamer. He spends all his time basically mooning around and brooding. So he's melancholy. He goes out to the fields, doesn't he? Like you. Yeah. Although the vibe is very different. He hasn't been drinking champagne. He feels that the burden needs to be lifted from his soul, which is, as is very common with Russian writing in the mid 19th century, you know, he thinks that the countryside is brilliant and nature and you know the real russia and he's leaving the city behind his metaphor for the city actually foreshadows his main interest in the book he says that saint petersburg is a weak and sickly girl but when spring comes she becomes inexplicably wonderfully beautiful so you ask what power caused these sad thoughtful eyes to shine with such fire what summon the blood to these pale sunken cheeks what has suffused to these tender features of her face with passion And this basically, this idea of this sort of very miserable person who is suddenly lit up by romantic passion.

33:42Dominic Sandbrook: I mean, that's basically one of the themes of the book, isn't it? Definitely. He comes back from the countryside and he's walking along the canal and he sees this young woman crying. And she's wearing a lovely yellow hat and a sort of black mantilla kind of shawl or something. Like in The Master and the Margarita? Do you know, I've never read that. It's our most requested book, The Master and Margarita. But I've never read it. I think we'll definitely do it next year. She has yellow flowers. So then I wondered when I read this, if that was kind of a nod to this. Yeah. Well, this book is itself nodding to lots of previous books because he thinks to himself, I would call out to this woman who's crying, but for the fact that I knew, I would call to her, madam, but for the fact that I knew that this exclamation had already been uttered a thousand times in all our Russian society novels.

34:27Dominic Sandbrook: So in other words, he's a massive reader. He's very self-aware. and there's a sense i think that both he and the girl are playing they've done a lot of reading and they're playing parts they are they are sort of playing parts that they've learned from reading a lot of sentimental romantic books what part are you playing tubby just out of interest i don't i feel like maybe like the cynical aunt in an oscar wild play something like that what was that character you played no i played the femme fatale i played mrs chievely mrs chievely where you put on that uh upper class actions yeah different from your own honestly i had to go method i really did brilliant to bring that back up on the show yeah exactly so anyway uh i'm playing full staff just so we're clear no you're not so you're lady macbeth if anything oh i'll take it i'll definitely think fair enough a drunken man on the other side of the road accosts this woman and so our narrator rushes to her aid and he rushes across the street and he says take my hand she takes his hand and she's trembling from nervousness and fright he says and he is struck by how pretty she is and that is the point at which she says to him why are you trembling too oh my god that is so unbelievably exciting and romantic why is he trembling what's he going to say who is she why is she crying will they fall in love?

35:54Will she save him from his isolation like Natasha to Prince Andre? Will they end up together? Is white nights any good? Discover after the break.

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37:08Dominic Sandbrook: Shaq here. What's it like to buy a car from Carvana 100 % online and get it delivered to your door? Let me tell you. Your car is here, Mr. Shaq. Thank you, Mr. Carvana guy. Can't wait to take it for a spin. Only the best for you, Mr. Shaq. Hey, have you always been so big, tall, and handsome? Not always. I was 6 '10 once. Seven days to love it or return it, Mr. Shaq. Not that I would. You never do. No, I never do. So buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. See our seven-day return policy at caravana.com. Hi, everyone. It is Tabby here. We love hearing all your opinions about the books that we've been doing on the show.

37:45Dominic Sandbrook: And I know loads of you have sent thoughts and comments and reviews of your own. You've emailed us. You've left comments under episodes on Spotify or on YouTube or whatever. And we love reading them, don't we, Tabby? We do. And we know that you've heard us do a lot of book reviews. But how would you like to hear us dissect your book reviews or answer some of the unanswered questions you may have about various authors, various books, the historical periods that they're born of, everything that we've covered on the show, or explore new books, books that we haven't covered on the show, suggested by you, our beloved listeners.

38:23Dominic Sandbrook: So we've had so many suggestions and so much feedback that we thought it was time to launch a bit of an interactive event. So we always like to give our listeners a little bit extra. So we have decided to put on, and I know Tabby, you're very excited about this, our first ever virtual book club. So this is basically a live online event. we are going to be live on youtube at six o 'clock british time so that's six o 'clock on the 20th of october which is a tuesday so on tuesday the 20th october six o 'clock british time on youtube we'll be discussing your thoughts about the books that we have covered uh we will be taking questions from listeners we will be reacting to your bracing opinions live on air so that is very exciting you You know what it's like, Tabby?

39:15Dominic Sandbrook: It's like a book club. That's what it's like. It is a lot like a book club. So to get the link and join us at 6 p.m. UK time on Tuesday, the 20th of October, all you have to do is sign up to our newsletter, Book Club Notes. I'm pretty sure that if you listen to the show, you've heard us bang on about it. And you can do this by going to thebookclubhq.com. That is thebookclubhq.com to join us for our very first live stream on Tuesday the 20th of October. We'll see you on Tuesday. Bye-bye.

39:51Welcome back to The Book Club. Now, listener, are you lonely and sad? Would you like to read something every Saturday that takes you by the hand, gives you a real sense of personal connection and shines a ray of sunlight into your otherwise drab and totally meaningless life? If so, sign up to our amazing newsletter, book club notes at the book club hq.com it's totally free you get exciting reader feedback uh you get advanced warning of what's coming up you might even get my russian my russian on full display wow if that doesn't tempt and tantalize you i don't know what will now back to the story yeah i cannot wait to see what happens next we know that uh the girl with the yellow hat has

40:34Dominic Sandbrook: asked this man why are you trembling yeah what's the answer why is he trembling what's going on So he says to her, I'm timid. I'm nervous with women. I won't deny it. It's like a dream. But even in my dreams, I never guessed that I would ever talk with a woman. So this guy, he's basically a total incel, isn't he? I mean, that's literally what he is. No, he's not an incel. Tell me he is. He doesn't hate women. He's just scared of them. He's a more benevolent incel. He's frightened of women. He's just shy and too romantic, I suppose. if you if you have a very romantic idea of love based on books the immense pressure i mean it's nice that you're so um sympathetic towards him so he's 26 years old he says i've never had a single woman acquaintance all i dream of every day is that long last i will meet someone oh if only you knew how many times i've fallen in love like that now this is a bit odd you're like falling in love with whom and this is what the girl says to him and he says why with nobody with an ideal.

41:37Dominic Sandbrook: I create entire love stories in my dreams. And this is obviously this big theme of the book. He says, I'm a dreamer. I have so little real life that I regard moments like this to be so rare that I repeat these moments in my dreams. And then he says to this woman, I will dream of you all night for an entire week, all year long. Now, some people, I'm interested in what you make of this Tabby my instinct is that that's a tiny bit creepy but you're probably going to tell me that that is really touching and romantic I think that's a bit cynical I think it's a little bit sad it's a tiny bit pathetic I'm a big fan of the long game but I mean on principle it's a lovely thing so many movies popular culture is dedicated to the concept of love at first sight so it's a nice concept I curl my lip a tiny bit at how effusive he is and how he's so not playing hard to get.

42:36But I feel a bit sympathetic towards him. And I'm pretty sure that if someone came up and said that to me, I'd be flattered. My vanity would be charmed. Genuinely, if someone said, I'm going to dream of you every night for a year. Kids. Well, I would still think, oh, gosh, that's quite sweet. That's lovely. And also, I feel like I can't be a hypocrite. I can't in one breath really love other instances where this occurs in other books, like in The Master of the Margarita again, where their eyes lock on the street and she has yellow flowers and then turn my nose up at this. Okay. See what I mean?

43:08Dominic Sandbrook: Fair enough. Well, anyway, he says, I'm going to come tomorrow without fail to the same spot and I will be happy as I recall what happened yesterday. This place is really dear to me. And she actually, like you, she loves this. She's thrilled by it. She's touched by it. I see through her. I like her. I relate to her. Okay. I see through her. she's a monster of vanity she says i'll come and see you tomorrow i'll come and meet you again but on one condition and this is important she says don't fall in love with me i am prepared to be your friend but falling in love yeah it's a bit cocky but falling in love with me is impossible i beg you and he swears he says i won't fall in love with you she says great i've got something to tell you and i'll confide in you tomorrow you know presumably about what she's crying and stuff and then she says from the distance it will look like a love story so that's something to look forward to oh and they part and they're going to meet again the same time tomorrow so that's the first the story is basically broken into these four nights four nights yeah so that is the first of the four nights so tabby at this point in the book is your attitude um this is all a bit weird or that this is a lovely romantic story there's going to be some fun secrets and you feel a real sense of connection to both of these people i think the combination of both those things i do I was already, he was starting to grate on me a little bit, but I was still intrigued.

44:27I wanted to know where she came from, what was going on. And I did think, oh, are they going to fall in love?

44:32Dominic Sandbrook: Okay. So do you want to take us to night number two? Yeah, this brings us to the second night. So they meet. He's been waiting for her for two hours already. Bit keen. But then again, I always arrive to dates late. So who knows? Performatively. Yeah, always. So cheap. That's just good. That's just good form. Right. Anyway, she tells him her name and it is Nastenka. And he then gives her a long description of his life as a dreamer. He really likes the idea of himself as kind of romantically above the humdrum world below, you know, lost in fairyland. He says he's kind of a sexless being. I feel like that's a bad thing to say.

45:14Yeah, if you're trying to woo, don't leave with that. and he says that when acquaintances come to visit they never come again because they're shocked by his eccentric oddball nature a little bit creepier by this point i would say but can't knock him for his honesty she asks why but she also says you talk as if you were reading from a book so again it's this sense that he's he's copying a literary model it's so self-consciously literary and he now starts telling his story in the third person so referring to himself as he him so he says the goddess of fantasy has spun him patterns of a fantastic marvellous life transporting him to the seventh crystal heaven from the excellent granite sidewalk on which he was walking home when he breaks off some fantasy it had grown dark in the room his heart feels empty and forlorn basically the kingdom of dreams have collapsed around him he has to come back to reality and he doesn't like it there then he's back in the fantasy his imagination is once again excited and suddenly a new world a new enchanting life with its glistening vistas flashes before him A new dream is new happiness, a new dose of exquisite, voluptuous poison.

46:14Oh, what does real life have to offer him? I like that. I think that's a gorgeous little passage. And when he's daydreaming, whole sleepless nights pass by like a single instant, in inexhaustible merriment and happiness. And when dawn breaks, he falls asleep, his tormented and overwhelmed spirit trembling with ecstasy, while his heart aches with a sweet agony. God, it is so overwrought though, isn't it?

46:35Dominic Sandbrook: It's very overwrought. I mean, to be fair, you take refuge in your daydreams and your fantasies, and then you realise, you know, you return to the real world, you've got to put the bin out. Yeah, exactly. You don't actually get to exist in Middle Earth, you just have to talk about it. Exactly. This is my favourite section of the book. Yeah, me too. When he's talking about the dreams, and it's the most evocative and it feels the most personal. This reminds me of the film Inception. So, Leonardo DiCaprio and Marianne Cotillard have created this dream world, haven't they? And they go and explore the dream and they spend longer and longer in the dream and reality loses its appeal to them.

47:11Dominic Sandbrook: And the dreamer in White Nights describes how he and this imaginary lover, they spend years of their lives together, hand in hand, alone, just the two of them having forsaken the world and each uniting their life, their world with the life of their friend. And he imagines them walking in these empty, cheerless, desolate gardens with paths overgrown with moss, secluded and gloomy, where they would so often walk together, where they loved, hoped, grieved, loved each other for such a long time, so long and tenderly. And that, I mean, there are scenes that are very like that, actually, in Inception, where it's like Leonardo and Marion Cotillard have grown old together in this world, that it's just a dream.

47:52and then when they come back to reality well she can't she can't exactly exactly the one difference

47:58Dominic Sandbrook: i would say is that in white knights i do think some of the dreamers dreams feel a little bit like he's got a big book of romantic cliches and he's got a dipping into it i just kind of thought it was you know dostoevsky grew up with fairy tales i thought this sounded like fairy tales i grew up with and i liked that so there's a bit where he and this dream woman they've been parted for so long and they're reunited in a palazzo in rome on a balcony they're both wearing masks some arse balls she takes the mask off they recognize each other they throw each other into you know they throw themselves into each other's arms they cries of rapture all this kind of thing now to me i have to say this bit what it reminded me most was not inception it was the work of our old friend sarah j mass that is a mad comparison the masks tabby don't they wear masks because That's because that's based on a fairy tale as well.

48:51Dominic Sandbrook: Well, there you go. There's common roots of two great works of literature. Anyway. Can't believe you just compared Dostoevsky to Sarah G. Maas. So you can see, I think, why all this strikes such a chord with readers today. Because, of course, the opportunities to lose yourself in a fantasy world are greater than ever before. You can be playing video games. You can be watching videos. You can be talking to AI. you can be basically taking refuge in a virtual reality rather than experiencing the humdrum disappointments of the real one. And actually Dostoevsky anticipates all the modern criticisms of those things.

49:31Dominic Sandbrook: So actually his narrator at one point has a remark that does feel like it comes from Inception. He says, I feel like I cannot begin my life in real life because I've lost all touch. I've lost all instinct for the actual, the real. Yeah, that is, you know, Inception when they go down to that cellar in Mombasa or something. And there are all those people that live their lives perpetually in a state of dreaming. That's what our dreamer in White Nights is in danger of doing. And the girl is shocked, isn't she? She thinks, how can you be living like this? Yeah. But, he says, now I know more than ever that I've wasted all my best years for nothing.

50:05So he acknowledges it. He realises what real life is. And this is all awoken in him by this connection that he has with Nastenka, with meeting her, I can now say that I have lived at least two evenings in my life. To be fair, you know, I actually do think that there are parts of this book that strike me as incredibly modern or continually relatable. And there is something in that, you know, when you really fall in love or something with someone. I remember I went off, I started going off, you know, romantic movies and stuff. I just didn't do anything for me anymore. So you can certainly see what he's saying.

50:39Dominic Sandbrook: Oh, that's a nice confession. Oh, exactly. Thank you. course I'd be mocked for it and I was you weren't you having me mocked happy I said it was a nice confession oh thanks so he realizes how cheerless and monotonously banal is the timorous fantasy the slave of a shadow of an idea he's going to grow old your fantastic world will grow pale your dreams will wither die and scatter like yellow leaves from the trees so he realizes that he's going to be left alone without even regret because all that I have lost all this it was all nothing a stupid round zero it was merely a dream i actually think this is the whole message of the novel this is what dostoevsky is kind of trying to say it's not that to be a dreamer is fantastic and it's not romanticizing that it's saying you know the opposite like you have to live in the real world you have to live in the real world this massively reminds me of a moment when um in my in my brief academic career as a university lecturer i once spent like about five days we had like a bank holiday weekend and as soon as i got back from work i thought brilliant this is my chance to really get stuck into football manager that is a sad confession and i probably played it for like three days solid with occasional breaks for sleep or for like to order pizzas or something and on day three i was absolutely beside myself with joy i'd taken i don't know shrewsbury town to the champions league or something oh i'd won it and i had to go out and buy some milk and i remember going down like to the corner shop did you have like did you have like crisps like stuck to your cheek no i was on cloud nine i was delighted i was so happy and then i got into the corner shop and i was buying the milk and i had a sudden crushing moment of realization that it wasn't real and that i because i'd kind of wondered why people weren't looking at me with more respect like clapping you down the street exactly oh and then i was like oh my god it's all for nothing i could delete the saved game now and it would disappear it wasn't real and And no one would care.

52:36Dominic Sandbrook: No one knows. There'd never be a headline. Exactly. So anyway, Nastenka is probably more clear-sighted than I was because she says to this guy, well, at this point, she says, stop moaning and groaning. Stop worrying about how you don't have a life because you have us. Our friendship now is unbreakable. Whatever happens to me, we will never part. I mean, to be fair, they've only been together like two months. I was going to say, a lot of eagerness on both sides. Very much. And she actually now says, I'm going to tell you my story and I need your advice. And then the maddest line of the whole book, she says, I need your advice.

53:08Dominic Sandbrook: You're a very sensible man. He's just exposed himself. Yeah. As a man of no sense whatsoever, who knows nothing of the world, why would you ask him for advice of all people? She just wants comfort, you know. She's using him for just the sake that he's there. You know what I mean? I know. But then she starts telling her story. I actually like this bit. And this genuinely has the maddest detail of the whole book. Okay, go for it. So she's only 17. She lives with her very controlling grandmother who's blind and is so controlling and is so, you know, determined not to see Nastinka go off with another man that she literally attaches herself to her granddaughter with a safety pin.

53:48She safety pins their dresses together. She does. That is mental. So another profound insight here. So the blindness of the grandmother anticipates Nastinka's blindness as to the narrator's feelings.

54:00Dominic Sandbrook: That is a good insight. Where did you pick up that insight, just to be clear? It was all up here. You definitely didn't hear it from me. Original siret. Really? Yeah. Fine. Yeah. So they then take in a lodger, who's a young man, and he reads French translations of Walter Scott and Alexander Pushkin. Nastenka's grandmother is worried about the books because she says they describe how young men lead well-behaved girls astray under the pretense of wanting to marry them, et cetera, et cetera. You know, and this is the fate that she is concerned will befall Nastenka. She says, I've read a lot of books like that and everything is so wonderfully described that you sit up all night quietly reading.

54:36So you, Nastenka, see that you don't read them.

54:39Dominic Sandbrook: It's a long running fear, isn't it? That women will read novels and be corrupted by them. Totally. It goes back to the 18th century. It's self-conscious again, though, isn't it? Yes, it is. Yeah. So the lodger wants to take them out to see the Barber of Seville. And Nastenka is transported by it. She says, my heart was pounding so that I became slightly feverish. I think that's interesting because in a way, her experience of art and whatever, literature or whatever it may be, the theatre, it kind of brings her to life. It awakens her to the power of the real world, whereas it does the opposite for the dreamer.

55:08It puts him to sleep. Inevitably, the lodger and Astenka fall in love and they make a deal. I wondered though, actually, is how much of this love is born of her desire to escape. You know, she kind of using him to escape. But so they make this deal that when he goes back to Moscow, he'll spend a year there studying. then when he comes back they'll meet after exactly a year at exactly 10 p.m at this spot you know again that's um self-consciously romantic there's something in the fairy tales whatever in that so this all sounds lovely but there's a shock and development isn't there yeah so she knows he's

55:39Dominic Sandbrook: been back in St. Beetsblood for three days but he hasn't turned up he hasn't written to her he's ghosted her he has ghosted her and Nastenka at this point starts sobbing and sobbing and sobbing oh i felt for her and so our narrator our dreamer he feels heartbroken to see her sobbing and she then says to him i wonder if you could write a letter for me i can't do it and he's like well yeah i can see how that would work i'd probably write this and she says brilliant because actually i have written the letter i know you sneer at this but i guess it's a bit like you know oh should i should i text that that guy i had a really good date with but he hasn't texted me and then and then you say to your friend like i don't know like do you think i should text or would that be like really weird and then your friend's like oh no great idea and then you're like oh that's fine i've already done it you know i like how when you talk to your back when you're ventriloquizing how you talk to your friends you've adopted a sort of i know i'm like paris hilton weird yeah sort of anglicized valley girl voice is that how you talk to yeah no strange i think i think it is i think this voice is just put on so this brings us to the third night okay he's now looking back from the day after and he is more depressed than ever he says today was a sad rainy day without a ray of hope just like my future old age so he's slightly ticking the every i'm miserable box there yeah um and this is him looking back on night three so at first he was so happy some really lovely nine lines about falling in love you want to pour out all your heart into another's heart you want everything to be gay laughter everywhere and how infectious is this joy i think that is so nicely observed you know it's like a feeling when you get a text or something you're like the world is bright and shining um and then he reflects on how she flattered him made his heart sing etc but how could i have been so blind so blind to what oh dear what's going on and when they met that third night she was giddy with excitement laughing everything and there's this kind of tragically ironic moment she says do you know why i'm so happy so happy to look at you why i love you so today gosh she really is leading him on um and he says well i asked and my heart began to tremble i love you because you didn't fall in love with me why someone else in your place would have started bothering me pestering me sighing falling ill but you're such a dear i've never read such an obvious friend zone in my life friend zone what what's i don't even know what that means you've never heard of friend zoning no oh my god crikey what is it catch up bro um you know your friend fancies you yeah and then you just say things to them all the time like what would i do without you you're such a good friend and the friend is actually like dying inside because i love you you know yeah exactly exactly it was a very standard this is a very standard situation in literature unrequited love is this kind of romanticized it's considered almost the the highest form of love isn't it yeah it's a it's a theme of so many so many great books i i actually felt very very sorry for the narrator in that moment but she is she is torturing this guy she's saying to him what a friend you are you're so unselfish it's because she doesn't want to be alone she needs him and she and he comforts her and you know she's sort of rather have him than no one i suppose i wonder if she's almost willfully being blind here maybe i'm being too cynical i think she is a little bit i think she is a little it's not like you know natasha and pierre or whatever where it's like genuinely she doesn't have a clue and the reader doesn't really know i think in this it's it's pretty clear yeah she says to him you love me so when we're married we'll be great friends i will love you almost as much as i love him yeah and then the narrator narrator is clearly desperate for her to stop talking but she just keeps going i want him to see that we love each other and all this and he actually thinks how blind you are Nastenka he finds it um unbearable and he starts babbling to her he starts wittering about um how when he woke up it was as though a musical melody the familiar musical melody was coming back to him it seemed to me that all my life it had been begging to be released from my soul and obviously what he's doing here is he's slightly trying to is he going to gear up to tell her the truth that he's fallen in love with her and Nastenka just says i don't understand a word of what you're saying and then to absolutely rub salt in the wounds she says she says to him i'm a bit disappointed that you didn't fall in love with me but you know it's that thing of you know young people where it's like the marrying of ego and love and stuff is never good it results in great cruelty and she is being very very cruel here exactly um and then the bell tolls 11 and she can't understand why her lover hasn't come and the narrator rather sweetly starts making excuses for him and she thanks him she says you're so kind do you know what just occurred to me i was comparing the two of you she says why isn't he you why isn't he like you he's not as good as you even though i love him more than you so brutal um and this must be unbelievably gutting for the narrator although you know come to think of it maybe she just genuinely is very naive and she's young and she's being very sheltered and you know she doesn't have she's never had a friend um so he's clearly not going to come today she puts a brave face on it says the narrator now we'll always be together but will they yeah has she grown has is it friends to lovers is the you know is it colonel brandon and marianne you know yeah is it all gonna come good and this brings us to the to the fourth night he arrives at nine she's already there for a change there's been no letter and she's devastated as you would be and then there's another ironic moment this is what we performed so beautifully in our introduction she says that introduction was quite capturing the uh the tragedy of this moment possibly not now that we've got really into this i feel like we were dialing it in i don't think yeah i know i'm sorry listener i'm so sorry um and she says tell me would you have acted like this would you have abandoned a girl who came to you on her own would you have looked after her oh my god my god yeah and this is the moment the climax he cracks it's the moment we've been waiting for since the beginning of the story tense with anticipation this is when he says now stinker now stinker you're tearing me apart you're breaking my heart you're kidding me anakin you're breaking my heart mental your favorite film literally your favorite film i must finally speak and tell you what's been welling up here in my heart and she says well what's going on and then he says it's impossible i love you na stinker that's what it is well now everything has been said and they're both in a massive state at this point i i actually found this quite moving did you yeah both crying at each other's pain it's sort of quite sort of um tender she's sobbing because she was so blind he's just an absolute mess she says actually do you know what now that i think about it maybe my love for the other bloke will pass yeah maybe it was just a passing thing maybe you could take pity on me take my hand maybe i'll try to i'll try to love you uh yeah i will actually try to love you and maybe we can make a go of this yeah now he at this point he's played a blinder he's so pleased he's pink with gleed i mean they're both pink with glee pink with glee a glow with pleasure um and now a big spoiler for those who have not read the story if you are if you are hooked by this yeah and you are thinking I've got to read this.

1:03:03Dominic Sandbrook: I can't. Stop here. Go no further. So they're walking along. They're literally, it's such a romantic scene. They're looking at the clouds and the moon. It's the process of falling. Pierre and Natasha at last. And then Nastinka, she sees a young man who passes them. And this is a terrible moment or a wonderful moment for Team Nastinka, but a terrible moment for the narrator. His heart quivers and we know what's coming. Nastinka, I said in a hushed voice. Who is that Nastinka? It's him. So it's her lover. Come for her at last. She ruthlessly runs to the other man. She embraces him, then runs back to the narrator, kisses him firmly, ardently, then runs back to the other man and goes off with him.

1:03:51And that's it. And it's a devastating moment. But I have to say, I think it doesn't come as a complete shock because I would say that we know this is coming pretty far back.

1:04:03Dominic Sandbrook: You surely know this is coming. Yeah. I mean, it's not going to be they walk off into the sunset and they set up, well, they were chatting about how they set up a school or something or he was going to write. He's too fleshless, the narrator. He just, he's too limpid. I don't know. He couldn't be the heroic winner of any story, I think. So then we get to the final scene. It's morning. It's raining. Unsurprisingly, it's a dreadful day. The rain beat down on my windows. cheerlessly it was dark in the room it was overcast outside so the narrator being his usual jolly self yeah you would be gutted though after a night like that wouldn't you there's been a roller coaster there's no doubt about that it's been an emotional roller coaster and the letter comes from nesting she asks him to forgive her so that's nice he'll always be her friend and her brother painfully fraternal that yeah but she's going to marry the other bloke next week and she thanks him for loving her i think that's quite sweet she doesn't invite him to the wedding though no she says it is stamped on my memory like a sweet dream that you remember long after waking up because i will forever remember that moment when you opened up your heart to me like a brother not like a brother and so generously accepted the gift of my shattered heart to protect cherish and heal it so that's quite sweet but isn't that a nice touch that he's been talking all through the story about how he took refuge in dreams and he needed to kind of wake up and get back into the real world and this was the one moment in his life when he was most real when he when he woke up when he woke up and he wanted to have this human connection and for Nastenka it's just been a sweet dream so for her it's been the dream yeah white knight it's been in this like this strange um ethereal twilight zone kind of thing yeah um whereas for him it's the reality you know it's really really sad actually i think i actually think it's a really like nice little um passage i totally agree with you actually i think it's very nicely observed um and i think it captures how in matters of the heart like this what's incredibly real and meaningful for one person can actually just be a passing fancy yeah a fairy tale dream for somebody else he's sobbing isn't he's gutted uh by this news he's um a decent fellow though he doesn't want to ruin things for her he doesn't want to begrudge her happy ending he thinks of her and he thinks may your sky be clear may your sweet smile be bright and serene may be blessed for the moment of bliss and happiness that you gave to another lonely grateful heart yeah he's generous he doesn't begrudge he's not angry he's not bitter gotta respect that and the final line which people on tiktok can't get enough of he says my god a whole minute of bliss is that really so little for the whole of a man's life.

1:06:47Dominic Sandbrook: That's all I need. Just that one little fleeting moment of connection I had there when Nastenka, who never actually loved him, but that's neither there nor there. I think the point is Dostoevsky saying that actually isn't enough. That, you know, she's holding up the two of them and she's saying, he's like saying like, Nastenka has proactively gone after a real life and kind of planting the seed of dreamland in reality. Whereas he has done the opposite and he just retreats into dreamland rather than using the spark of something that was real and exciting and pleasurable for that to propel him into the real world.

1:07:23Dominic Sandbrook: Well, if you were being sceptical towards the narrator, you would say he has inflated a four-night connection with somebody who didn't actually love him at all. No. He's describing it as a moment of bliss and a moment of ecstasy and all of this sort of thing. but that in itself is just a form of dreaming he's deluding himself about what it actually meant when to her it was just a yeah the way she it's a passing it's a nothing it's a you know something that she probably won't barely even remember i think the fact that it is so one-sided it's so fraternal for her there isn't even you know the hint of of a spark on her side means that there's for me throughout the book is a relationship totally absent of chemistry it didn't excite me or really entice me at all I wasn't even really rooting for him because he never he never kind of grew a backbone I think I think he's you know you can be sympathetic towards him you can feel sorry for him you can be rather moved by the ardor of his love given how little there was to inspire it but I didn't really care whether or not they ended up together as a result.

1:08:35Dominic Sandbrook: Well, I agree with you actually on that. And some of the sort of more TikTok friendly listeners may be horrified about this if they love this book. But to me, the characters are so thin, are so thin. What do we know of him? He is a dreamer. That's it. We don't have any more, you know, we don't know what he looks like. We don't know what he thinks about things. We don't know. Yeah, we just know that he's melancholy and he loves fantasy. It's his own fantasies. with her we know that she is in love with the lodger but do we know anything else about her at all is there anything that would allow you to recognize nesta in a room i don't know i quite liked her i think that she is clearly like quite you know quite feisty and quite you know she is desperate for connection and so she goes out after it at any cost you know she leaves her grandmother she makes her move on on the lodger she reads those books and she falls in love with him she selfishly forges a friendship that she probably knows deep down is full of romance on his side in order to find comfort there she really goes after what she wants okay well i i thought i thought she was thin frankly i i found them both quite thin i felt yeah i mean i mean like you i I wasn't really invested in their relationship.

1:09:58Dominic Sandbrook: No. And I have to say, I really do like books. I love books about unrequited love. Me too. I mean, they're a real staple of kind of the sort of classic canon. The problem for me was I didn't see them as real people. I just saw them as, frankly, a little bit cliched, you know, sort of mooning, melancholy, you know, Russian mid-century types. The cultural thing that I was thinking about while reading this, and I know I'm not the first person to make this comparison, Have you seen the film Before Sunrise? Yeah, it's a great film. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. They're like backpackers and they meet one night in Vienna and they have this...

1:10:35They have a connection.

1:10:36Dominic Sandbrook: They have an amazing connection. Yeah, they do. They have great chemistry. They have fantastic chemistry. And you were saying, you know, love at first sight or whatever. I think when you watch that film, especially if you watch it when you're relatively young, you totally invest in those characters and their connection. It feels so bittersweet. They're not just for one night, but they are soulmates. and they have this most wonderful relationship that's not just kind of sexual. They really speak to something in each other's souls. I mean, that sounds so sort of pretentious. No, no, but I know what you mean.

1:11:08One thing that he certainly, I think, does do quite well is the way that he forges an atmosphere of dreaminess, almost magical realism. The sense that you walk the line between what's really happening and what's in their heads quite well. And that malleability is well-constructed, I think.

1:11:25Dominic Sandbrook: That point you made about the sense of it being a mood rather than, you know, it's not a realist book or whatever. But you absolutely feel the mood of kind of Russia in the canals and the sort of people drifting along the canals in a miserable way and all that. The other thing I was going to say was comparing it again with the Ethan Hawke film. In that film, the characters have a massive connection and they really understand each other. In this, they don't understand each other at all. And actually, a lot of the conversation is they're not understanding each other. Her just being baffled by his dreams and him not really getting how much she loves this lodger.

1:12:03Dominic Sandbrook: He's made a dream figure of her that's not the reality of her. And I think it's telling when you look at the construction of the book. They both talk in these long monologues and tell each other stories. I mean, he tells her a story about himself in the third person. Sexy. But actually, when they're talking in dialogue, in actual conversation, they're often just talking at cross purposes and not really getting each other, or he's disguising his true feelings, or she's saying, I don't understand what you mean. And that for me says, these are not soulmates separated by fate. These are two people who actually don't get each other at all.

1:12:37Because they just don't listen to each other really, do they? They kind of talk over and around each other. But given all this, why then do you think this book has struck such a chord? Why is this, you know, the enormous, unprecedented hit that it has been? well i'd be interested to know what you think i think it's short i mean that sounds so banal

1:12:56Dominic Sandbrook: wow but i think it's very short and we're in a i mean reading up about it there i'm not the first person to make this point there are lots of people who like to do kind of reading challenges and things and to you know to have knocked it off for dostoevsky yeah well good for them it is something that people want to do and it's short i think it speaks to a couple of things um you know in a world in which more people live alone than ever before people are struggling to fight you know 20 something settle down much later if at all yeah and also i suppose you know that um the disappointed romantic ideals resulting from dating apps maybe something like that you know you're not going to just meet someone in a pub and be like wow we belong together you know you can swipe through many many different options i suppose there's an element of that i think also i mean the fact that it took off at the height of the pandemic kind of during covid yeah that's such a good time of intense dislocation and aimlessness and loneliness and so i think it's i think it's not actually the romance of it necessarily that has resulted in its popularity so much is the the idea of like the loneliness and the fantasy world i think the dreaming that's the bit that i will remember from it actually is me too i think it's a good invocation of what it's like to be a bit lonely and to live your life, to almost look forward to returning to your daydreaming fantasy world.

1:14:22To melancholy, listening to sad music or whatever. I mean, I do get it. I find that I'm often kind of drawn to sad things. There is something very romantic and poignant about it. You know, it's the Lizzie Siddle pre-Raphaelite, Ophelia in the river.

1:14:37Dominic Sandbrook: Yeah. And I think that has a higher cultural premium now than it did, let's say, 30 years ago. Yes. So in, let's say, the 1990s, was it cool to be incredibly sad and to talk about your suffering and to talk about how lonely you were and to be reading Dostoevsky, sort of very ostentatiously read Dostoevsky? I would say, no, it wasn't. People didn't really privilege such things. It was seen as a bit odd and it wasn't seen as a cool thing in any way. I think now doing a sort of TikTok video or whatever where you're quite weepy and you say gosh this book really speaks to me and how sad and miserable I am clearly has a kind of higher cultural premium than it would have done 30 years ago.

1:15:17Yeah it's the Tumblr aesthetic isn't it?

1:15:19Dominic Sandbrook: I'm not a super favorite Tumblr to be honest. Do people do that on Tumblr? Yeah Tumblr's kind of it's like sad girl aesthetic. Right yeah. I mean, you could say that, well, maybe people were feeling that back then, but they just didn't have the space to talk about it or whatever. But regardless, it wasn't lauded, I suppose. No, and I think clearly there are always melancholy people. There are always lonely people. But I think there are particular moments, there are kind of cultural moments when that strikes a chord with the mass audience. And then there are cultural moments where it doesn't because people are bored of it.

1:15:55Dominic Sandbrook: The romantics or something. obviously that's a point or the fin de siècle or whatever i think this is what we are in one of those moments right now and that's why this book spins in roundabouts exactly so the question is is it is it is it a good book so i think you should you should mark it first abby you can go first uh what should we write in it what should we mark it in i am going to suggest rain sodden russian love letters but if you have a better no i think that's brilliant because it's actually very little in the book there are a few objects this is what i mean about the strange hazy divide between dreamlands and the real world yeah it's all like misty and gray i can't picture anything from the book really it's so immaterial yeah it is it's conversations and emotion and agreed so i mean i hate to say this because i know it was it must mean a lot to a lot of people it just left me so cold it just didn't really move me i found lots of it quite boring that said I still think the writing is often beautiful I like that I like the prose in this I like the way that he some you know his descriptions of his dreaming um I felt sorry for him at times and the unrequited love of it all uh I didn't mind Nastenka and I also do think there was a strangely recognized but romantic dynamic in it which still holds weight today but it's just i think i'm gonna have to give it a six six so the good news for you is that people on social media will definitely not be coming for you they'll be coming for me oh this is brilliant because i get him get him that guy jack edwards who's always like sobbing on tiktok he's coming he's gonna he's coming around with a meat cleaver he he's gonna be shot by this i think this is so i think it's really thin i think it i found it you know i've done my best because it's a podcast but i found this really slight and ultimately forgettable yes it's forgettable totally i haven't thought about it once no same with me same with me i sort of strove hard to make the inception parallel um yeah sweating sweating to squeeze racking my brains but i found the situation yes you know i do like books about unrequited love but this felt and there are ways and there are moments where it's well observed psychologically well observed but ultimately it is quite a hackneyed situation i mean all the people who said gosh this is the best thing about love i've ever read i thought what better than madame bovary better than anna karenina anna karenina jane eyre or weathering heights better than thomas hardy i mean that that's just from the 19th century you know there are so many great books about love in the 19th century alone that i don't think this is remotely in the same league i think it's acquired an extraordinary level of popularity for different reasons the kind of political uh cult of dostoevsky the sort of social media side of things um all that and the fact that it's short and so i'm going to give it a very limp and rain sodden four is that your lowest mark ever I think East of Eden was down there, wasn't it?

1:19:02Did you? My God. You're two lowest marks ever as Steinbeck and Dostoevsky.

1:19:07Dominic Sandbrook: Two overrated writers. You know what? What can I say? I respect it. There's no point doing the show if you're not going to be honest. It's true. I bitterly resented East of Eden halfway through that book because it was so long. What have we got coming up? We've got The Shining by Stephen King. That's a more accurate portrait of a relationship, I think. Well, it's that classic trope. You know, it's actually, it's the reversal of enemies to lovers. It's lovers to enemies. But also, Tabi, this is what happens when you marry a writer. Yeah, it's true. I'm doomed. And then there is The Capture in the Rye by J.D.

1:19:42Salinger. Master and Commander by Patrick O 'Brien. Also very romantic. Tickle and Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Money by Martin Amis. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John O 'Carri. Tess of the Durbervilles by Thomas Hardy. Now we're talking. So looking forward to that.

1:19:56Dominic Sandbrook: Now we're talking. Yeah. and then Dune by Frank Herbert. Big line-up. Big line-up. All right. See you, everybody. Bye-bye. Bye.

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