Ceaseless Desire, Fleeting Bliss

A book review of White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky

White Nights is a tale of an isolated man’s incessant desire to capture the bliss of intimacy. The narrator attempts to seize it through dreaming, the girl through another person. In varying degrees, everyone can relate to this struggle but when I read this, it’s like Dostoevsky held up a mirror to my face and started writing. (It astounded me. I almost wanted to laugh.)

I’ve always found solace in dreaming. I can conjure any reality in my mind. I can create a world in my exact expectations. There, I can let my emotions run free. I can live a thousand lives; I can achieve a thousand dreams. And I have. Such power, right? But it isn’t enough for me nor the man in this story.

While connection can be drawn from art, nature, the universe, and our own selves, it is still different to look another person in the eye and know you are understood. It’s that damned human nature. Because all we have is each other—us and our consciousness that we are here, right now, heart beating and all, on this earth.

Even once we achieve this intimacy in a relationship, a moment, a second, the heart asks in perpetuity. There is no eternal satisfaction; There is only wanting more.

White Nights is the first work of Dostoevsky I’ve ever read, and it’s quite a suitable introduction to his work. While I believe Notes from Underground to be the perfect first book (a blueprint of his later writings), if you want to start with something much tamer (I mean, less insane), White Nights is the one for you.

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Further reading:

• The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa - A collection of vignettes, musings, poetry, diary entries, and stories on solitude magnified by dreaming and absolute inaction.

• Diaries, 1910-1923 by Franz Kafka - In Kafka’s diaries, one can witness the life, the loneliness, the dreams, and reflections of an outcast.

If you want to read more Dostoevsky, I recommend picking these up next:

• The Dream of a Ridiculous Man by Fyodor Dostoevsky - a short story of *drumroll please* a ridiculous man (!) grappling with the discovery that there is no value to life (aka nihilism)

• Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky - this novella is a confession from a man underground (yet another outcast) on human consciousness, affection, rationality vs desire, the “right way” to live, and the endless contradictions of humanity.

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Thanks for reading! Here’s a dedicated playlist for the story.