The dreamer of White Nights was not born out of nowhere, nor is he an exclusively Russian invention. He is a type that crosses national borders: the young man who lives more in the ideal than in reality, and who appears, with the same face under different names, in various points of European Romanticism.
Jacopo Ortis, the Italian brother
Decades before Dostoevsky, the Italian Ugo Foscolo had already given form to this figure in Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis). Jacopo is a young exile, persecuted by the political circumstances of his time, who falls in love with Teresa, a woman already promised to another man. It is not a love that is resolved in the real world: it is a love that feeds on distance and impossibility, very close to what Dostoevsky's dreamer feels for Nástienka. The two characters love the concrete person less than the idea they built of them, and they both pay a high price for living more in their imagination than in life.
Leopardi and the weight of expectation
Giacomo Leopardi walks through another door in the same house. In his Idylls, written during a period of crisis and isolation in Recanati, Leopardi explores how desire and expectation are often worth more, and hurt more, than the reality that follows them. It's a theme that resonates right through the structure of White Nights: four nights of waiting and illusion, followed by a morning that dissolves everything that seemed possible. Where the Russian dreamer idealizes a woman, the Italian poet idealizes his own future, but the psychological mechanism is the same: living in anticipation is, at the same time, the most intense and the most fragile way of living.
The echoes that the class itself points out
The Nous class on White Nights already points to this broader horizon, placing the young Dostoevsky of 1848 surrounded by French ideas, under the influence of Balzac and Victor Hugo, and in the late echoes of European sentimentalism that still circulated in Russia at that time. Foscolo and Leopardi enter this same map, a little earlier, in a different corner of the continent.
A type, not a nationality
What unites Jacopo Ortis, the young man from Leopardi's Idylls, and Dostoevsky's nameless dreamer is neither language nor passport. It's the same wound: that of someone who feels too deeply for a world that they feel too little, and who therefore builds, in silence, a second world of their own. Reading White Nights alongside these two Italian authors does not diminish Dostoevsky's originality. It shows, on the contrary, that he touched on something that the entire Romanticism, from Italy to Saint Petersburg, had already been trying to say.
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See recommended readingsFrequently asked questions
Is Dostoevsky's dreamer an exclusively Russian creation?
No. It is a variation of a type that runs through European Romanticism: the young man who lives more in the ideal than in reality, also present in Italy and France.
Which Italian author created a figure similar to the dreamer in White Nights?
Ugo Foscolo, in Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis (Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis), with a protagonist consumed by an impossible and idealized love, and Giacomo Leopardi, with the theme of expectation.
What other influences mark White Nights besides Italian tradition?
The original class itself cites French ideas, the influence of Balzac and Victor Hugo, and the late echoes of European sentimentalism that arrived in Russia in 1848.
Continue: The White Nights Dreamer · Dostoevsky in 1848, before the tortured genius · Idealized love, loving the idea of the person · What is hasty generalization?
Source class (YouTube): Noites Brancas, de Fiódor Dostoiévski (NousCast)