The most intimate thoughts of a young dreamer, a girl and St. Petersburg, described in a beautiful way, as a framework. It’s here that the book White Nights, written by Fëdor Dostoevskij, stems from. A book written at an early age, yet so fully aware of a life characterized by loneliness and monotony. It tells the story of this young dreamer and of his chance encounter with a young woman who “was wearing a very charming yellow hat and a jaunty little black mantle”, but actually it is an autobiography. The author looks inward and tells everything about himself, with all his frustration and visions that shut him down completely. An intense and heartbreaking book, written in a simple and straightforward way, that shows how, sometimes, dreams can be lighthouses in the darkness of everyday life.
White Nights: when the dreams replace reality
A dreamer’s life gravitates between anguish, loneliness and reconciliation with oneself. Anguish, in particular, due to the inability to reach a decent level of serenity and joy in life, but also for an existence and a love, dreamed for a long time, that have never been achieved. Loneliness, for the young dreamer of “White Nights“, is a characteristic expressed from the beginning of the book. His fantastic world, tailor made for his quiet living, leads him to be unable to share moments with other people. He shuts out the world.
Reconciliation with oneself is the special moment, both in the young dreamer’s life and in the book, and it binds indissolubly to the concept of dream, to its beauty and the emotions that it can give us. The dream in this case is the discovery of Love with a capital L. The real one. And the name of this Love is Nasten’ka.
A feeling originally restrained and hidden, for fear and mistrust, that finally emerges when the young girl believes she has fallen in love with the young dreamer. An happiness that will last only a moment or little more. Because sometimes the fantastic world we imagine fades away in a while. And our dreams start to crumble and bring us back to our normal everyday life, with its coldness. But living a dream, even for a moment, is an unspeakable emotion, A trip that deserves to be lived, second by second.
