The story-teller recalls his first meeting with Nastenka, and the man who brought them together.
‘White Nights’ (1848) is set in St Petersburg during those enchanted June nights when the sun barely dips below the horizon. It was on such a night that the unnamed narrator of Dostoevsky’s tale caught his first glimpse of the woman he came to know as Nastenka, and he was far too highly strung to resist the spell.
Dostoevsky had to break it to Moscow’s students that ordinary Russians found their brand of politics patronising.
On April 3rd, 1878, a group of students was beaten up by the locals during a Moscow demonstration. Fyodor Dostoevsky, responding to their plea for sympathy, replied as nicely as he could that the public just didn’t see students as their friends. They saw them as foreign agents, the tools of pro-Western elites who didn’t understand the people — and worse, didn’t respect them.
Fyodor Dostoevsky listened with growing bewilderment to the celebrity peace activists gathered in Geneva.
On September 9th-12th, 1867, some of the noisiest political activists of the day, including Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx, Victor Hugo and Guiseppi Garibaldi, gathered in Geneva for the inaugural Congress of the League of Peace and Freedom. In a letter to his niece, Sofia Alexandrovna, Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky complained that they had a peculiar notion of peace.
A loving parent doesn’t want her son to be a success; she wants him to be a fine human being.
In February 1878, Fyodor Dostoevsky received a letter from an anxious mother asking him how to bring up a child. Dostoevsky was taken aback, and told her plainly that she was requiring more wisdom than he was fit to give. In particular, her question “What is good, and what is not good?” left him almost speechless; fortunately for us, that left just enough speech to impart this touching counsel.
One author was a long way ahead at the top of Dostoevsky’s reading list.
In one letter, Nikolai Osmidov asked novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky whether he should believe in God; in another, he asked him what he should give his daughter to read. Dostoevsky found none of Osmidov’s questions easy to answer, but he was sure about one thing: the girl absolutely must read the novels of Sir Walter Scott.