Even after more than twenty years, I still have clear memories of lying in my bed, in the basement of the house I lived in during college, reading “White Nights” by Fyodor Dostoevsky. It was late at night, and I should have been either reading my class work, or sleeping, but instead I let Dostoevsky lay open my soul.
“White Nights” was not my first taste of great Russian Literature, having already read War and Peace and Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, and at least Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov also by Dostoevsky by this time. Yet there was something about this short story that moved me even more than these great (read that as longer) works. Somehow Dostoevsky made a lonely college boy feel that someone was writing his story, even though it had been put on paper 150 years before.
For those unfamiliar with the story, a quick synopsis is that the story revolves around an unnamed narrator who quickly falls in love with a beautiful young woman who is in love with someone else. In the end he sacrifices his love in hopes of making her happy. This plot is hardly unique to this story, but the power and passion that are contained in those few pages seemed to have been ripped from my heart. This was the passion that I wanted, even if it would end in the same tragedy.
Years have passed, and now I have the stable love of a women even more beautiful than the narrators Nastenka. I have three children, a good job and a home. Yet when I reread this story earlier this week, it ripped open the scars of those old wounds on my heart. I read a lot, but even after all these years, and all of those pages since I last read this story, few things have moved me as much. I think it is one of the greatest stories that has ever been written.
