37. Dostoevsky’s Russian Masterpiece: White Nights

Who was Fyodor Dostoevsky? Was White Nights his masterpiece? And, how did the world of 19th century Russia influence his writing? Join Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett as they delve into the fascinating story behind the writing of White Nights, and the world it was born of. Download the Klarna app to stay on top of your money, so you can think about, well, anything else. Klarna balance account required to receive cashback points. Limitations, terms, and conditions apply. Exclusions apply. Learn more at https://www.klarna.com/uk/buyer-protection-description/. For analysis, book recommendations and more, sign up to our newsletter, Book Club Notes, introduced weekly by Tabby or Dominic. Sign up at: https://www.thebookclubhq.com/ Email us: ⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ TikTok: ⁠⁠@thebookclubpodhq⁠⁠ X: ⁠⁠@bookclubpodhq⁠⁠ YouTube: ⁠⁠@TheBookClubPodHQ⁠⁠ Senior Producer: Nicole Maslen Assistant Producer: Alfie Norris Social Producer: Harry Balden Video Editor: Joe Pettit Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 2:05Speaker 00

  My heart was full. I wanted to say something but couldn't.

• 2:09Speaker 03

  Listen.

• 2:10Speaker 00

  She continued, taking me by the hand.

• 2:13Speaker 03

  Tell me, would you have acted like this? Would you have abandoned a girl who came to you on her own? Would you have thrown in her face a shameless jeer at her weak, foolish heart? Would you have looked after her? Would you have understood that she was all alone? That she didn't know how to take care of herself? That she didn't know how to protect herself from loving you? That it wasn't her fault? That finally, it wasn't her fault? That she had done nothing? Oh my God, my God.

• 2:38Speaker 00

  Nastinka, I cried out finally, unable to control my agitation. Nastinka, you are tearing me apart. You are breaking my heart. You're killing me, Nastinka. I cannot be silent. I must finally speak and tell you what has been welling up here in my heart. As I said this, I got up from the bench. She took me by the hand and looked at me in surprise.

• 3:02Speaker 03

  What is it? So hello, everybody. That was an almost tear-jerking moment from Fyodor Dostoevsky's short story, White Knights. It was first published in 1848 in the Russian periodical, Notes from the Fatherland, in English, as translated from Ronald Meyer. And Dominic, you've tried to get me to say that in the original Russian, but as you know, I saved my Russian for those who sign up to Book Club Notes, the Love and Newsletter. And also, I didn't want to deprive you of the opportunity to show off. So would you like to give us the original Russian?

• 3:36Speaker 00

  Are you not familiar, Tabby, with Otechestvinyazirbysky? The brilliant Russian periodical?

• 3:41Speaker 03

  Well, I'm not reading books for this show, I'm reading that.

• 3:44Speaker 00

  Surely.

• 3:45Speaker 03

  Surely. And it's the story of a sad, lonely young man, played there by Dominic, who has never known love, he's never had a girlfriend. He is walking in St Petersburg one day when he comes across a distraught teenage girl, and this is Nastinka. And over the course of four nights, they discuss their lives, their dreams, their disappointments, and they begin to develop a connection which is totally platonic on her side, we think, anyway, and romantic on his.

• 4:14Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Klarna.

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  When I finish the final chapter, I often find that I have more questions at the end than I started with.

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  What happens next? Why did the story end there? But you know, Tabby, it's hard to make time to ponder big questions like that, because I'm always getting bogged down in kind of boring day-to-day admin.

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• 5:15Speaker 03

  Until very recently, it's certainly not one of Dostoevsky's better-known works. It's nowhere near as popular as his later Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov. And it doesn't really touch on the same themes of good and evil. There's nothing here about crime or sin, a political morality. It does have some of his more popular, you know, alienation is something that I think he touches on quite a lot, but it's unusual, I would say, for his portfolio. It's much more psychological, and it's a story about love and loneliness and unrequited love especially, and reality and dreams. And because of all this, I think it's not surprising that he wrote it when he was 26,

• 5:58Speaker 03

  because it feels like a much, much younger man's book, written for readers of a similar age. You know, it has nothing of kind of the haunting existential sophistication of, for example, Crime and Punishment, to me, anyway.

• 6:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think that's the key to its extraordinary success. So as you rightly said, until recently, it wasn't terribly well-known. But it has come from nowhere to become this extraordinary kind of commercial success, which is why we've chosen it for the show. In 2015, Penguin Books started a series called Little Black Classics, which are these very cool kind of little novellas and stuff. And it was to mark Penguin's 80th birthday, and they're very short and they're very kind of affordable. And White Knights was the 118th in this range, and it came out in 2016. And it became a hit. It's been, well, it's become a hit in a way that Penguin could not possibly have anticipated. So in 2025, White Knights was the fourth most, biggest-selling translated book in Britain.

• 6:58Speaker 00

  As you said, it's translated by Ronald Meyer.

• 7:00Speaker 03

  It's extraordinary, it really is. It still slightly blows my mind.

• 7:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, when you think of how many brilliant translator books there are, that this is number four, and the reason is largely because of social media. So this book is massive on BookTok, on Bookstagram, and on Goodreads. So to give one example, there's a bloke called Jack Edwards, who's, the way I would describe him as a gushing bookfluencer, Tabby, I don't know if that's a technical term.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  And you say that affectionately, of course.

• 7:26Speaker 00

  I do, I say that with great admiration and respect. He brands himself as the internet's resident librarian.

• 7:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  And if you watch his clip, as I have, he says, White Knights is one of the most devastating books about love I've ever experienced. He says it broke his heart into teeny, tiny little pieces.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  Oh, Dominic, you're wiping away tears of sympathetic kinship there.

• 7:48Speaker 00

  I am.

• 7:49Speaker 03

  Lovely to see.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  And his posts about it on Instagram and TikTok have been viewed and liked hundreds of thousands, probably millions of times. Now, Tabby, you're not au fait with this kind of stuff, but I am, fortunately.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  I'm not really, no, because there's nothing you like more than internet's new thing.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  Completely, that's just so true.

• 8:07Speaker 03

  That's so true.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  Anyway, I have read the comments on this bloke's post, so that you don't have to.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:13Speaker 00

  So people say of his White Knights posts, "This is the single most devastating and beautiful story of all time. This is the story of my life. It broke my heart, I couldn't love this book more. This book broke me. And my favourite, reading this book made me feel more unhappy."

• 8:32Speaker 03

  So he's coming from a place of contentment.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  Exactly. Now, this isn't just a British thing, or indeed a Anglo-Saxon thing. So just last week, there was a piece in newspapers across the world run by the news agency AFP, and it was about the extraordinary global success of White Knights. So they focused on Brazil, and Brazil, sales of this book, this short story, basically, have gone up by 500% in a year. It's so popular that in Rio, they had, they've run out of copies and they've had to reprint. So obviously, there's something about it, after 180 years, that is really speaking to people, particularly younger readers. And the question is what? And well, the other question, I suppose, is this actually good? Now, Tabby, we don't want to give the game away completely.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  No.

• 9:17Speaker 00

  But had you read this before? And what's your first impression?

• 9:22Speaker 03

  I had not read it before. I read Crime and Punishment two years ago, and I have to say that it definitely stayed with me.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  Something of a slog for you, wasn't it? I seem to remember.

• 9:31Speaker 03

  You always say this, no, I mean, you're just traumatized because you were slogging your way through Phineas Finn at the time.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  Well, it's your recommendation, actually.

• 9:38Speaker 03

  I read, no, but I read it back-to-back with Money, so it was a really weird kind of contrast, anyway, by Martin Amis, which we're doing soon. So I came to this very open-minded. I was relieved to see that it wasn't the same length as Crime and Punishment, to be honest. And I'm obviously not going to give too much away, but I would say it instantly felt like Dostoevsky was writing this much, much younger than when he was writing those later books. It didn't have the sophistication of the prose for me yet.

• 10:08Speaker 00

  Didn't, did it break you? That's the question.

• 10:10Speaker 03

  Did it break me? You know, actually, shockingly, parts of it left me a little bit cold. But I'm only saying parts, but other parts of it, I actually thought were strangely tender, actually strangely modern in the depiction of unrequited love.

• 10:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:24Speaker 03

  What about you? How did you feel about it?

• 10:26Speaker 00

  I'm just thinking, if you were posting comments, you'd put, "Reading this book made me feel more, even more cold."

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Yes, even more cold. I now have no semblance of human feeling within me.

• 10:37Speaker 00

  What did I think? Well, I'd read Dostoevsky, I've read, I've read all the big ones, actually, Crime and Punishment, Brothers Karamazov, Demons.

• 10:44Speaker 03

  But you're not a big fan, are you?

• 10:46Speaker 00

  I've never, I've never, you know, some people love Dostoevsky and they're obsessed by him. In fact, they're, I mean, they're acolytes. And at this point, they'll be turning off this podcast, they'll say, well, this fool doesn't know what he's talking about. I'd never quite bought into the Dostoevsky mythos, and those big books did actually leave me a bit cold. However.

• 11:04Speaker 03

  Really?

• 11:04Speaker 00

  Because I'm, I'm very easily influenced, so when I watched that bloke, that gushing bookfluencer.

• 11:10Speaker 03

  Your brother from another mother.

• 11:11Speaker 00

  I thought to myself, well, if he thinks it's good, it must be good. So I was very confident opening this book, that I would be converted and I would be wiping it off. You know, I'm quite a sentimental reader.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  That's why I've been trying to sort of figure out what, why it is that Dostoevsky does nothing for you. I think maybe you do have a little bit possibly of impatience with.

• 11:30Speaker 03

  Kind of like long passages of emotional exploration.

• 11:34Speaker 00

  Me.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  The absence of dialogue, maybe, or something like that. Maybe that's why, maybe that's why he does nothing for you.

• 11:39Speaker 00

  God, am I too? It's like I'm going to a therapist or something. Do I? Do I? I mean, I've, I've never been conscious of that personally.

• 11:45Speaker 03

  Really?

• 11:46Speaker 00

  Well, we'll go, we're clearly, these are murky waters and we're going to have to get into these.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  Murky waters, indeed.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  In the second half.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  Uh, but before then, we should talk about the author because he is undoubtedly one of the literary giants, the literary greats. He's not everybody's cup of tea. I think he has a bit of a reputation for being heavy, angsty, overwrought. You know, I've slightly noticed he's one of those authors where with the big books, the most famous ones, people often say, oh, you should listen to him if you can't face, like sitting down and reading him. I actually think that's, I don't know, I, to me, he always seems to have this kind of strangely endearing, shambolic calm to him, maybe.

• 12:24Speaker 00

  Really?

• 12:24Speaker 03

  And I, I think, I actually do think he's oddly delighted by the kind of comedy of, of the human condition, how sort of, I don't know.

• 12:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:32Speaker 03

  Our emotional intricacies.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  I think there's a degree of truth in that, actually.

• 12:36Speaker 03

  That said, um, another writer that we've done on the show absolutely loathed him, and this is your hero, this is Nabokov. He said, he is a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar. He is less a prophet than a puffed up journalist and a slapdash comedian. Apparently he absolutely hated Sonia in Crime and Punishment because he said that she was a cliche, you know, she was a cliche of the golden hearted prostitute type.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  Really?

• 12:59Speaker 03

  I can slightly see that, maybe.

• 13:01Speaker 00

  There are loads of websites where you can look up, and they've done a sort of index of Nabokov's views of other writers, particularly Russian writers.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  They are so damning. Basically, there are so few that he likes and he'll generally just say of them, rubbish and dull, rubbish.

• 13:15Speaker 03

  That's like the way that all historians feel about other historians, isn't it?

• 13:18Speaker 00

  So true.

• 13:18Speaker 03

  Despite Nabokov's words, he is also regarded, I mean, obviously it's one of the greatest political and moral writers of all time. And as you say, he is very fashionable today for reasons we'll get on to after the break. And this is of course, and I can't tell you how hard I'm straining not to say this in the voice of David Brent. He is of course, Theodore Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.

• 13:40Speaker 00

  When does David Brent talk about Dostoevsky?

• 13:42Speaker 03

  Are you kidding? That's such an iconic scene in The Office. When he's showing off to that young guy, he says, yeah, all that stuff in a Siberia, you know, all that.

• 13:50Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then every single time.

• 13:53Speaker 00

  The guy who wins the quiz.

• 13:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. And every single time he runs out of, um, facts about Dostoevsky. He, he like, sort of, like with a pug face disappears. Anyway.

• 14:04Speaker 00

  So I look in the mirror.

• 14:05Speaker 03

  I digress. Yeah. It sounds a lot like me, actually. So he's born in Moscow in November, eighteen twenty one. And given that he wrote White Nights when he was only twenty six, will only concentrate on his life up to that point. And then when, you know, next year or whatever, when we do one of his.

• 14:20Speaker 00

  Big books.

• 14:21Speaker 03

  Bigger, longer books. Exactly. We'll, we'll give you the full biography. So that's something to look forward to.

• 14:26Speaker 00

  I'm trying to win back the Dostoevsky fans. So anyway, what's unusual about Dostoevsky? So a lot of the big Russian writers of the nineteenth century, like Tolstoy or Tchaikovsky, were from noble families, but he's not.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  But then I swear that according to the very strict social hierarchies of Tsarist Russia, he technically.

• 14:44Speaker 00

  Is.

• 14:44Speaker 03

  Was, yeah, a hereditary nobility, but just not elite, like very low down to his grandparents.

• 14:50Speaker 00

  So basically, the way that it works, um, you have a bit of Russian heritage, Tabi, you know, so you will know this.

• 14:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:55Speaker 00

  This will, this will speak to something in your soul.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:57Speaker 00

  Um, there was this kind of, uh, very, very intricate table of ranks, the kind of gradations, the hierarchy. And his family were not originally a noble family. Uh, his mother's family were merchants and his father's family, I think, tended to go into the church. And his father, Mikhail, was a military doctor who worked at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, which was on the edge of Moscow.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  So he's seeing a lot of tragedy kind of from quite a young age, I guess.

• 15:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, they lived in a house in the hospital grounds, actually. And Dostoevsky and his little boy, he used to see the patients basically sort of shambling around the gardens. Now, his father was elevated to the nobility, I think, as part of the sort of promotion, the sort of incredibly hierarchical Russian system. You would get these promotions and you would get onto the ladder, as it were. But because they didn't come from that world, he always said it made a big difference to how he wrote. So he said, basically, writers like Tolstoy, who came from an aristocratic background, wrote about this sort of fixed world of stability and beauty and tradition. Whereas he said himself, you know, I write about accidental families, the insulted and the humiliated.

• 16:01Speaker 03

  That's interesting.

• 16:02Speaker 00

  And I think that's, that's true because obviously, think about Crime and Punishment or so many of his books, he's often writing about people kind of on the margins, isn't he?

• 16:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely. Um, and he, like so many of the great authors we do on this show, is an enormous reader. His nanny introduces him to fairy tales, maybe when we do bonus episodes.

• 16:19Speaker 00

  You could take us to your favourite folktales.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, anyway.

• 16:22Speaker 00

  Go on.

• 16:22Speaker 03

  Then his mother uses the Bible to teach him how to write. Um, his parents are very bookish. They introduce him to everything from The Iliad and Odyssey, also very good to hear, to Don Quixote, Walter Scott, um, as well as Russian writers like Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol. The good news is that the family is on their way up because in eighteen twenty eight, when he turns seven, his father is elevated to the very minor nobility. And then in eighteen thirty one, he buys a country estate, which for having grown up in the environment that he did, this must have been blissful. And I think you can see this in Dostoevsky's writing, often when he talks about the contrast between the city and the countryside. Anyway. Um, so he and his eight siblings, they spend their summers there.

• 17:05Speaker 00

  That's a lot.

• 17:06Speaker 03

  That is a lot. The bad news is that in eighteen thirty three, when he's eleven, he's sent to a little boarding school in Moscow. His father has to borrow money to pay for it and Theodore feels miserable and lonely. He feels like an outsider in comparison to his aristocratic classmates. So he's the piggy, he's the Russian piggy of this, of this story.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, so true.

• 17:27Speaker 03

  More bad news. Um, in eighteen thirty seven, his mother dies of TB. Um, and then in eighteen thirty eight, when he's sixteen, he enters the Nikolayev Engineering Institute in Saint Peters, in Saint Petersburg, because his father wants him to be a military engineer. He does not, but he does as he's told.

• 17:46Speaker 00

  And he's not really one of life's military engineers, is he?

• 17:48Speaker 03

  God, no.

• 17:49Speaker 00

  There's a quote from his friend Konstantin Tchutovsky, who was a painter. And Tchutovsky said, there was no student in the entire institution with less of a military bearing than Dostoevsky. He moved clumsily and jerkily. His uniform hung awkwardly on him and his rucksack and rifle looked like a sort of fetter that he was being forced to wear, which hung heavily on him.

• 18:08Speaker 03

  You know, if we did like a, if we did like a literary, I don't know, fifteen, football fifteen or whatever.

• 18:14Speaker 00

  Tabi, you've massively given yourself in a very, in a very entertaining way.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  Wait, how many people in a football team?

• 18:20Speaker 00

  Oh my God. Okay, go on. When we do this rugby fifteen or football eleven, yeah.

• 18:27Speaker 03

  Who do you, like, who do you think would be the captain?

• 18:29Speaker 00

  The captain?

• 18:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  Shakespeare.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  No, because it's about physical prowess.

• 18:34Speaker 00

  Oh, okay. Uh, oh, somebody huge.

• 18:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  Sort of Nabokov, late period.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  Lampadusa got quite fat. Anyway, sorry, continue. What kind of a boy, what kind of a boy is he?

• 18:44Speaker 00

  Uh, he's pale, he's delicate, he's, um, he, he would not have been in the team because he's kind of a bit of a weed. He's a kind of introvert, he's a dreamer, he's romantic.

• 18:54Speaker 03

  It's the popular image of Dostoevsky there, isn't it?

• 18:57Speaker 00

  It is completely. To be fair to him, he's not bullied, he's not ostracized, he just keeps himself to himself and the other boys call him the monk. I mean, basically everyone knows somebody like that.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely. But then more tragedy strikes because in the summer of eighteen thirty nine, his father dies, probably of a stroke. But this intriguing me, there were rumours he'd been murdered by his serfs. This is probably untrue, but where did that come from? Was he, did he treat them badly?

• 19:21Speaker 00

  It was a neighbour or something put this around to try to get the property.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  Gosh, how Dickensian, wow.

• 19:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's very Dickensian.

• 19:27Speaker 03

  Um, even so, so Dostoevsky finishes his studies, he qualifies as an engineer cadet, and he moves into an apartment in Saint Petersburg with a friend. He's now in his early twenties. And one of his brother's friends said, he was usually pretty friendly and polite, but, and this is so Dostoevsky-esque.

• 19:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  When he wasn't in a good mood, he often looked at everything through dark glasses, became vexed, forgot his manner, and sometimes he completely forgot himself and got carried away to the point of being very abusive.

• 19:54Speaker 00

  His real passion is for books and he dreams of becoming a writer. And he starts by translating one of the French writer Balzac's novels into Russian. But he doesn't make much money from it and he needs cash because he, basically, he's actually got an extravagant lifestyle.

• 20:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:09Speaker 00

  He spends a fifty's income on rent, he spends the rest on going to ballets or to plays. He goes gambling at nights in Saint Petersburg, he goes betting on games of billiards, and he loses tons of money. And so he basically has to ask friends and relatives to help him out.

• 20:27Speaker 03

  Money's a problem throughout his life, isn't it?

• 20:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, very much. Um, so in eighteen forty four, he decides he's going to write a novel himself. And he says to his brother Mikhail, if this doesn't pay off my debts, I will hang myself.

• 20:40Speaker 03

  Well, at least he's got a measured approach to things.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  Such a Russian mid-century thing to say.

• 20:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:45Speaker 00

  And this book is his first novel called Poor Folk, published in eighteen forty-six, and it's basically letters between two cousins, two poor cousins, living in Saint Petersburg. So they're talking about their friendships and their love lives and how they're trying to make ends meet and all this.

• 20:59Speaker 03

  I like the sound of it.

• 21:00Speaker 00

  No, I think it looks quite dull, actually.

• 21:02Speaker 03

  Really?

• 21:03Speaker 00

  I found a copy and I was looking through it and I thought, no, it's not for me.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 21:06Speaker 00

  Maybe I'm wrong. I mean, I was wrong about A Court of Thorns and Roses.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  Wouldn't be the first time.

• 21:10Speaker 00

  So it's a big hit, Poor Folk. It's one of the great sort of sensations of the day. The top critic in Russia, Viseryan Belinsky, says Dostoevsky is a great star. He's going to be the new Nikolai Gogol. And some of the papers, actually in the newspapers, they say, wow, this young man's come from nowhere. And he is writing sort of Western-style social novels about poverty and the social question, and that's brilliant. But then, straight away, he follows it up a month later with this next book.

• 21:38Speaker 03

  A month later?

• 21:38Speaker 00

  So he must have written them sort of simultaneously, I guess.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:41Speaker 00

  And this is a book called The Double, and it's much less successful. And this is more psychological, much more Dostoevsky-like, actually. It's about a bloke who's going insane.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  It's much more Raskolnikov, isn't it?

• 21:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, and the critics don't like this at all. This meteor has shot up and now it's coming back down to earth.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, and in more ways than one, because by this point, his health is suffering. He's having these epileptic seizures, and in later life, they were terrifyingly regular, how often he would have these. He's also not massively well-liked in literary circles. He seems proud, vain, a bit irritable. But then in the next eighteen months, two big things happen. So the first thing, most importantly for our purposes, is he writes White Knights. We don't know exactly when, but it was approved for publication by the censors. So these were like government officials who reviewed everything before they got printed, to make sure they weren't, for instance, clever foreshadowing here, being negative about the Tsar. So that's approved at the end of October eighteen forty-eight. It's probably written

• 22:39Speaker 03

  a few months earlier. Then it's published a few weeks later in the twelfth issue of Notes from the Fatherland.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. What's it called again, Tabby, in Russian?

• 22:47Speaker 03

  You remind us. It's your time, it's your time to shine.

• 22:49Speaker 00

  Otechstvenie Zabizki.

• 22:51Speaker 03

  Beautiful, beautiful. Then the second thing, most important for Dostoevsky, he gets involved with a dissident literary discussion group called the Petrushewski Circle. These are, of course, the final years of Zarnikus the First, and he ruled for almost three decades. He is the personification of autocracy, orthodox, very conservative. He won't make any concessions to liberal reformers, but the Petrushewski Circle are keen to discuss utopian and socialist ideas. So the abolition of serfdom, very dangerous for the Tsar, reforming autocracy, you name it. Then in eighteen forty-eight to eighteen forty-nine, they come to the attention of the authorities, who are understandably very worried about revolutions in Europe. And then in April eighteen forty-nine, the

• 23:35Speaker 03

  group are rounded up and they're arrested. And this is the cue for the most famous moment in Dostoevsky's life. I mean, it's legendary. They're all condemned to death. They're taken to the square, to a square in Saint Petersburg on the twenty-third of December. They're lined up before a firing squad. Their hands are tied at this point, like, it seems certain that they are going to get executed. And then, the Damascene moment, a carriage rattles up very dramatically, and a man gets out with a message from the Tsar. They have been reprieved. So their sentence is commuted to exile in a prison camp in Siberia. And this is where Dostoevsky remains for the next four years. And it is a transformative

• 24:15Speaker 03

  period in his life. This whole incident changes everything for him, really, his perspective on life. He writes this brother, this letter to his brother, just before he goes to Siberia, saying, you know, I can't believe I haven't been appreciating life all this time, seize the day, et cetera, et cetera.

• 24:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, of course, it would be a massive thing for you. And actually, you can, you can read about this in, in his book, The Idiot.

• 24:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 24:38Speaker 00

  Prince Mishkin tells the story of a young man saying this happened, and this is basically Dostoevsky. This is, as you say, like a seismic moment for Dostoevsky. It's still another ten or twelve years before he writes the big books, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and so on. But those books are clearly much darker, more metaphysical, more introverted, more overwrought, more violent than the stuff that he was writing when he was a young man. And of course, that makes them very different from TikTok's beloved White Knights, which he wrote when he was young.

• 25:06Speaker 03

  No firing squads there.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  But the big books, the books that his admirers really point to today, aren't they? And he's, just a word on Dostoevsky before we get into White Knights. I think one reason for his sort of ubiquity, as it were, on book talk and things, he is very fashionable, as well as being fashionable with sort of quite overwrought youngsters, he's fashionable with a particular kind of very, very online readers. So often, I think, very conservative or libertarian, people who are scornful of kind of Western liberalism. And they see, they love Dostoevsky's existentialism.

• 25:38Speaker 03

  His kind of slight infatuation with his suffering as well, I guess.

• 25:41Speaker 00

  Yes, exactly. So three examples. Elon Musk, Elon Musk has tweeted about the Brothers Karamazov. He approved.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  He's definitely never read it, like the Odyssey, which he also had not read.

• 25:50Speaker 00

  So he approved of a tweeter who said, oh, you'll learn more about, from, about human psychology from the Brothers Karamazov, well, Karamazov, than with, you know, any number of kind of psychology books. Jordan Peterson, Jordan Peterson loves Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, they're two of his top three books. And Peter Thiel, the chairman of Palantir, he gave an interview to the Wall Street Journal in which he said, there was no better way to think about human irrationality than to read Dostoevsky. And you can see why they like him. They like him in part because of his rejection of kind of liberalism, because Dostoevsky went on this political journey in which he ultimately became a kind of Russian ultra-nationalist, super committed to Russian orthodoxy.

• 26:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  And he wrote of his deep personal revulsion from Western liberal values. So he unites two quite different constituencies, I think. So people who, who feel very sad, and people who, you know, looking forward to sort of, I don't know, the world in which the kind of, you know, the great tech giants rule everything and sort of weedy liberalism is completely obliterated.

• 26:55Speaker 03

  That seems to me a slight misreading, but.

• 26:58Speaker 00

  By me or by them?

• 26:59Speaker 03

  By them. Never you.

• 27:01Speaker 00

  Ah, thanks.

• 27:02Speaker 03

  What's worth stressing here, though, is that this is, this is not the Dostoevsky of White Knights, is it?

• 27:07Speaker 00

  No, no, no, not at all. Because the, I mean, if you've come to this book for great existential themes of, you know, good and evil, suffering and cruelty.

• 27:16Speaker 03

  What is man?

• 27:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, or of that, you're not going to get it in White Knights.

• 27:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:20Speaker 00

  But what are you going to get in White Knights, Tabby?

• 27:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, exactly. So let's get into the book. So remember, this is a book written by a young man in Dostoevsky, who's only twenty-six. He's short of money, he's socially awkward, he spends loads of time in his own head, he's something of a romantic dreamer and definitely indulges, I think, that side of himself. He doesn't really know where he fits in, and this is all true of the narrator of White Knights. The setting is Saint Petersburg, which is the capital of the Russian Empire at this time. It's never described in the book, but it's powerfully evoked. It's a mood rather than a place. It's kind of abandoned and a bit desolate. Canals, empty streets, this atmosphere of melancholy. It's not as dilapidated as the city in Crime and Punishment, bareer, I would say, emptier. And the White

• 28:04Speaker 03

  Knights, the title, I love this detail. I did not know this. They're an annual Saint Petersburg institution. It's a natural phenomenon where for about eighty days in June and early July, the sun never sets. So it's this perpetual gentle dusk or twilight that lasts all night, and it kind of lends it this dreamy, unreal feel. You've, you've seen this before, haven't you?

• 28:28Speaker 00

  I have. I saw it in, not in, well, I have been to Saint Petersburg, I didn't see it when I was there, but in, in northern Norway, Tabby. So the Lofoten Islands, which is very beautiful. You, you get there and it's sort of, yeah, it's so strange, the sun never sets. So, you know, the evening proceeds, and, you know, you get to that point where it's sort of seven o'clock or eight o'clock, and then it just sort of stops, and the light fades a little bit, and it becomes very soft. But all through the night, this, you've got this kind of soft twilight. I mean, it's lovely. It's a really remarkable thing. It's quite hard to sleep. I mean, that's the, that's the difficulty. But no, it's.

• 29:05Speaker 03

  Terribly romantic, yeah.

• 29:06Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  But the opening of the whole book definitely sets the tone. So, "It was a wonderful night, the kind of night, dear reader." By the way, I think this is really beautiful writing. "It was a wonderful night, the kind of night, dear reader, which is only possible when we are young. The sky was so starry. It was such a bright night that, looking at it, you could not help but ask yourself, is it really possible for bad-tempered and capricious people to live under such a sky? That is also a young person's question, dear reader, a very young person's question, but may the Lord ask it of your heart more often." I think that's lovely.

• 29:36Speaker 00

  You like that?

• 29:37Speaker 03

  I do, I do like that. And this all seems brilliant, but actually.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  This is as positive as the book really gets. This is, this is the.

• 29:46Speaker 00

  The last bit of joy in the book.

• 29:48Speaker 03

  Heights of optimism. Because the narrator then goes on to say that from early that morning, he's woken up with a terrible melancholy, and it's tormenting him. And he says, "It suddenly seemed that I, so alone, was being abandoned by everyone, that everyone was deserting me."

• 30:02Speaker 00

  Oh, poor fellow. So I think this is actually, reading this, I was struck by, I think it's quite retro in some ways. So in eighteen forty-eight, looking at the, what else was going on in literature. It's Wuthering Heights, it's Jane Eyre, so two books that we've done on the show. Thackeray was writing Vanity Fair, or had written Vanity Fair, I can't remember which. Dickens is just about to start, David Copperfield. So these are books that are overflowing with energy. And this is more sentimental, it's more melancholy, and it's quite, in that sense, I think it's quite backward looking. It's looking back to sort of 18th century books about sort of love-lorn sentimental narrators and things.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  Not that popular anymore by this point, this kind of heightened melodramatic language.

• 30:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think feels quite, I think, exactly, I think it feels quite, I think it feels quite retro. Anyway, the narrator, I mean, you, as you described him, I think rightly, he's the astonishing melancholy. I mean, he's basically melancholy in human form. He is, dare I say, if I was going to be harsh, is he a bit of a drip, Tabby?

• 31:03Speaker 03

  I think he is a little bit of a drip, but I think that is a tiny bit harsh. He definitely does that thing, which I think we, surely everyone knows someone who does this.

• 31:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  Where it's like, you are enamoured of the version of yourself that is miserable and a bit blue and a bit, you don't actually try to shake it off because it's, it's kind of artistically, artistic and romantic. It's kind of like the romantic, you know, paintings of Ophelia or something, you know?

• 31:26Speaker 00

  Everybody knows somebody like this. So yeah, this bloke, this narrator, he describes himself as a type at one point, when he's talking to the other main character, and he's dead right, he is a type. He's a bit eccentric, he's a dreamer, he spends all his time basically mooning around and brooding. So he's melancholy, he goes out to, out to the fields, doesn't he, like you?

• 31:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  Although the vibe is very different.

• 31:50Speaker 03

  He hasn't been drinking champagne.

• 31:52Speaker 00

  He feels that the burden needs to be lifted from his soul, which is, as is very common with Russian writing in the mid 19th century. You know, he thinks that the countryside is brilliant and nature and, you know, the sort of the real Russia. And he's leaving the city behind. His metaphor for the city actually foreshadows his main interest in the book. He says that St Petersburg is a, a weak and sickly girl, but when spring comes, she becomes inexplicably wonderfully beautiful. So you ask, what power caused these sad, thoughtful eyes to shine with such fire? What summoned the blood to these pale, sunken cheeks? What has suffused to these tender features of her face with passion? And this basically, this idea of this sort of very miserable person who is suddenly lit up by romantic passion.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  I mean, that's basically one of the themes of the book, isn't it?

• 32:40Speaker 03

  Definitely.

• 32:41Speaker 00

  He comes back from the countryside and he's walking along the canal and he sees this young woman crying. And she's wearing a lovely yellow hat and a sort of black mantier kind of shawl or something.

• 32:50Speaker 03

  Like in The Master and the Margarita.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  Do you know, I've never read that. I've never, it's our most requested book, The Master and Margarita. But I've never read it. I think we'll definitely do it next year.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  She has yellow flowers, so then I wondered when I read this, if that was kind of a nod to this, yeah.

• 33:05Speaker 00

  Well, this book is itself nodding to lots of previous books because he thinks to himself, I would call out to this woman who's crying, but for the fact that I knew, I would call to her madam, but for the fact that I knew that this exclamation had already been uttered a thousand times in all our Russian society novels. So in other words, he's a massive reader, he's very self-aware. And there's a sense, I think, that both he and the girl are playing, they've done a lot of reading and they're playing parts. They are, they are sort of playing parts that they've learned from reading a lot of sentimental romantic books. What part are you playing, Tabby, just out of interest?

• 33:41Speaker 03

  I feel like, maybe like the cynical aunt in an Oscar Wilde play, something like that.

• 33:47Speaker 00

  What was that character you played?

• 33:49Speaker 03

  No, I played the femme fatale, I played Mrs. Cheevly.

• 33:52Speaker 00

  Mrs. Cheevly, where you put on that upper class accent, so different from your own.

• 33:58Speaker 03

  Honestly, I had to go method, I really did.

• 34:00Speaker 00

  Brilliant to bring that back up on the show.

• 34:02Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 34:03Speaker 00

  So anyway, I'm playing full staff, just so we're clear.

• 34:07Speaker 03

  No, you're not. You're Lady Macbeth, if anything.

• 34:12Speaker 00

  I'll take it, I'll definitely take it.

• 34:13Speaker 03

  Fair enough.

• 34:14Speaker 00

  A drunken man on the other side of the road accosts this woman. And so our narrator rushes to her aid. And he rushes across the street and he says, take my hand. She takes his hand and she's trembling from nervousness and fright, he says. And he is struck by how pretty she is. And that is the point at which she says to him, why are you trembling too?

• 34:38Speaker 03

  Oh my God, that is so unbelievably exciting and romantic. Why is he trembling? What's he gonna say? Who is she? Why is she crying? Will they fall in love? Will she save him from his isolation like Natasha to Prince Andre? Will they end up together? Is white nights any good? Discover after the break.

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• 36:03Speaker 03

  Hi everyone, it is Tabby here.

• 36:05Speaker 00

  We love hearing all your opinions about the books that we've been doing on the show. And I know loads of you have sent thoughts and comments and reviews of your own. You've emailed us, you've left comments on under episodes on Spotify or on YouTube or whatever. And we love reading them, don't we, Tabby?

• 36:23Speaker 03

  We do. And we know that you've heard us do a lot of book reviews. But how would you like to hear us dissect your book reviews? Or answer some of the unanswered questions you may have about various authors, various books, the historical periods that they're born of, everything that we've covered on the show? Or explore new books, books that we haven't covered on the show, suggested by you, our beloved listeners.

• 36:48Speaker 00

  So we've had so many suggestions and so much feedback that we thought it was time to launch a bit of an interactive event. So we always like to give our listeners a little bit extra. So we have decided to put on, and I know Tabby, you're very excited about this, our first ever virtual book club. So this is basically a live online event. We are going to be live on YouTube at 6 o'clock British time, so that's 6 o'clock, on the 20th of October, which is a Tuesday. So on Tuesday, the 20th of October, 6 o'clock British time on YouTube, we'll be discussing your thoughts about the books that we have covered.

• 37:29Speaker 00

  We will be taking questions from listeners, we will be reacting to your bracing opinions live on air. So that is very exciting. You know what it's like, Tabby, it's like a book club. That's what it's like.

• 37:42Speaker 03

  It is a lot like a book club. So to get the link and join us at 6pm UK time on Tuesday, the 20th of October, all you have to do is sign up to our newsletter, Book Club Notes. I'm pretty sure that if you listen to the show, you've heard us bang on about it. And you can do this by going to thebookclubhq.com, that is thebookclubhq.com, to join us for our very first live stream on Tuesday, the 20th of October.

• 38:11Speaker 00

  We'll see you on Tuesday. Bye bye.

• 38:16Speaker 03

  Welcome back to the book club. Now, listener, are you lonely and sad? Would you like to read something every Saturday that takes you by the hand, gives you a real sense of personal connection and shines a ray of sunlight into your otherwise drab and totally meaningless life? If so, sign up to our amazing newsletter, Book Club Notes, at thebookclubhq.com. It's totally free, you get exciting reader feedback, you get advance warning of what's coming up. You might even get My Russian, My Russian on full display.

• 38:48Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 38:49Speaker 03

  If that doesn't tempt and tantalise you, I don't know what will. Now, back to the story.

• 38:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:54Speaker 03

  I cannot wait to see what happens next. We know that the girl with the yellow hat has asked this man, why are you trembling?

• 39:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 39:03Speaker 03

  What's the answer? Why is he trembling? What's going on?

• 39:06Speaker 00

  So he says to her, I'm timid, I'm nervous with women. I won't deny it, it's like a dream, but even in my dreams, I never guessed that I would ever talk with a woman. So this guy, he's a bit, well, he's basically a total incel, isn't he? I mean, that's literally what he is.

• 39:23Speaker 03

  No, he's not an incel.

• 39:24Speaker 00

  Tabby, he is.

• 39:25Speaker 03

  He doesn't hate women, he's just scared of them.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  He's a more benevolent incel, he's frightened of women.

• 39:30Speaker 03

  He's just shy and, and, and too romantic, I suppose. If you, if you have a very romantic idea of love, based on books, immense pressure.

• 39:40Speaker 00

  I mean, it's nice that you're so sympathetic towards him. So he's 26 years old, he says, I've never had a single woman acquaintance. All I dream of every day is that long last hour meets someone. Oh, if only you knew how many times I've fallen in love like that. Now, this is a bit odd, do you like, fallen in love? With whom? And this is what the girl says to him. And he says, why with nobody, with an ideal? I create entire love stories in my dreams. And this is obviously this big theme of the book. He says, I'm a dreamer. I have so little real life that I regard moments like this to be so rare that I repeat these moments in my dreams. And I, and then he says to this woman, I will dream of you all night for an entire week all year long.

• 40:25Speaker 00

  Now, some people, I'm interested in what you make of this, Tabby. My instinct is that that's a tiny bit creepy, but you're probably going to tell me that that is really touching and romantic.

• 40:35Speaker 03

  I think that's a bit cynical. I think it's a little bit sad, it's a tiny bit pathetic. I'm a big fan of The Long Game.

• 40:43Speaker 00

  Right.

• 40:43Speaker 03

  But, I mean, on principle, it's a lovely thing, like so much of, so many movies, popular culture is dedicated to the concept of love at first sight. So it's a nice concept. I curl my lip a tiny bit at how effusive he is and how he's so not playing hard to get.

• 41:01Speaker 00

  But it's definitely not.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  I feel a bit sympathetic towards him. And I'm pretty sure that if someone came up and said that to me, I'd be flattered. My vanity would be charmed. I'd be tickled.

• 41:09Speaker 00

  I'm gonna dream of you every night for a year.

• 41:11Speaker 03

  It's, well, I would still think, oh gosh, that's quite sweet.

• 41:16Speaker 00

  That's lovely.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  I can't, I feel like I can't be a hypocrite. I can't in one breath really love, you know, other instances where this occurs in other books, like in The Master and the Margarita again, where they, their eyes lock on the street and she has yellow flowers and then turn my nose up at this.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 41:32Speaker 03

  See what I mean?

• 41:33Speaker 00

  Fair enough. Well, anyway, he says, I'm gonna come tomorrow without fail to the same spot and I will be happy. Happy as I recall what happened yesterday, this place is really dear to me. And she actually, like you, she loves this. She's thrilled by it. She's touched by it.

• 41:47Speaker 03

  I see through her. I like her. I relate to her. But I see, I see through her.

• 41:52Speaker 00

  She's a monster of vanity.

• 41:56Speaker 00

  She says, I'll come and see you tomorrow. I'll come and meet you again, but on one condition, and this is important. She says, don't fall in love with me. I am prepared to be your friend, but falling in love, yeah, that's a bit cocky, but falling in love with me is impossible, I beg you. And he swears, he says, I won't fall in love with you. She says, great, I've got something to tell you and I'll confide in you tomorrow. You know, it seemed about what she's crying and stuff. And then she says, from the distance, it will look like a love story. So that's something to look forward to.

• 42:24Speaker 03

  Cool.

• 42:24Speaker 00

  And they part and they're going to meet again the same time tomorrow. So that's the first, the story is basically broken into these four nights.

• 42:30Speaker 03

  Four nights, yeah.

• 42:31Speaker 00

  So that is the first of the four nights. So Tabi, at this point in the book, is your attitude, um, this is all a bit weird? Or that this is a lovely romantic story, there's going to be some fun secrets and you feel a real sense of connection to both of these people?

• 42:45Speaker 03

  I think the combination of both those things, I do, I, I was already, he was starting to grate on me a little bit, but, but I was still intrigued. I wanted to know where she came from, what was going on. And I did think, oh, are they going to fall in love?

• 42:57Speaker 00

  Okay. So do you want to take us to night number two?

• 42:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, this brings us to the second night. So they meet, he's been waiting for her for two hours already. Bit keen, but then again, I always arrive to dates late, so who knows?

• 43:08Speaker 00

  Performatively.

• 43:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was.

• 43:10Speaker 00

  So.

• 43:12Speaker 03

  That's just good, that's just

• 43:14Speaker 00

  That's cheap.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  Good form. Anyway, she tells him her name and it is Nastenka. And he then gives her a long description of his life as a dreamer. He really likes the idea of himself as kind of romantically above the humdrum world below, you know, lost in fairyland. Um, he says he's kind of a sexless being.

• 43:36Speaker 00

  I feel like that's a bad, a bad thing to say.

• 43:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, if you're, if you're trying to woo, don't leave with that. And he says that when acquaintances come to visit, they never come again because they're shocked by his eccentric, oddball nature. Little bit creepier by this point, I would say, but can't knock him for his honesty. She asks why, but she also says, you talk as if you were reading from a book. So again, it's this sense that he's, he's copying a literary model. It's so self-consciously literary. And he now starts telling his story in the third person, so referring to himself as he him. So he says, the goddess of fantasy has spun him patterns of a fantastic, marvelous life, transporting him to the seventh crystal heaven from the excellent granite sidewalk on which he was walking home. When he breaks off some fantasy, it had grown dark in the room, his heart feels empty and forlorn.

• 44:20Speaker 03

  Basically, the kingdom of dreams have collapsed around him. He has to come back to reality and he doesn't like it there. Then he's back in the fantasy, his imagination is once again excited and suddenly a new world, a new enchanting life, with its glistening vistas flashes before him, a new dream is new happiness, a new dose of exquisite voluptuous poison. Oh, what does real life have to offer him? I like that. I think that's a gorgeous little passage. Um, and when he's daydreaming, whole sleepless nights pass by like a single instant in inexhaustible merriment and happiness. And when dawn breaks, he falls asleep, his tormented and overwhelmed spirit trembling with ecstasy, while his heart aches with a sweet agony. God, it is so overwrought though, isn't it?

• 45:00Speaker 00

  It's very overwrought. I mean, to be fair, you take refuge in your daydreams and your fantasies. And then you realise, you know, you return to the real world, you've got to put the bin out.

• 45:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. You don't actually get to exist in Middle Earth, you just have to talk about it.

• 45:13Speaker 00

  Exactly. This is my favourite section of the book.

• 45:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, me too.

• 45:17Speaker 00

  When he's talking about the dreams and it's the most evocative and it feels the most personal. This reminds me of the film Inception. So Leonardo DiCaprio and Marion Cotillard have created this dream world, haven't they? And they go and explore the dream and they spend longer and longer in the dream and reality loses its appeal to them. And the dreamer in, in White Nights describes how he and this imaginary lover, they spend years of their lives together, hand in hand, alone, just the two of them, having forsaken the world and each uniting their life, their world with the life of their friend. And he imagines them walking in these empty, cheerless, desolate gardens

• 45:56Speaker 00

  with paths overgrown with moss, secluded and gloomy, where they would so often walk together, where they loved, hoped, grieved, loved each other for such a long time, so long and tenderly. And that, I mean, there were scenes that are very like that, actually in Inception, where it's like Leonardo and Marion Cotillard have grown old together in this world that is just a dream. And then when they come back to reality.

• 46:20Speaker 03

  Well, she can't.

• 46:21Speaker 00

  She can't. Exactly, exactly. The one difference I would say is that in White Nights, I do think some of the dreamer's dreams feel a little bit like he's got a big book of romantic cliches and he's kind of dipping into it.

• 46:35Speaker 03

  I just kind of thought it was, you know, Dostoevsky grew up with fairy tales. I thought this sounded like fairy tales that I grew up with and I liked that.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  So there's a bit where he and this dream woman, they've been parted for so long and they're reunited in a palazzo in Rome, on a balcony, they're both wearing masks, some mask balls, she takes the mask off, they recognise each other. They throw each other into, you know, they throw themselves into each other's arms. They, cries of rapture, all this kind of thing. Now, to me, I have to say this bit, what it reminded me most was not Inception, it was the work of our old friend Sarah J. Maas.

• 47:09Speaker 03

  That is a mad comparison.

• 47:11Speaker 00

  The masks, Tabi, don't they all wear masks?

• 47:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's because that's based on a fairy tale as well.

• 47:16Speaker 00

  Well, there you go. There's, there's common reeds of, uh, two great works of literature. Anyway.

• 47:22Speaker 03

  Can't believe you just compared Dostoevsky to Sarah J. Maas.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  So, um, you can see, I think, why all this is so, strikes such a chord with readers today. Because of course, the opportunities to lose yourself in a fantasy world are greater than ever before. You can be playing video games, you can be, you know, watching videos, you can be talking to AI, you can be, you know, basically taking refuge in a virtual reality, rather than experiencing the humdrum disappointments of the real one. And actually, Dostoevsky anticipates all the, the modern criticisms of those things. So actually, his narrator at one point has a remark that does feel like it comes from Inception. He says, I, I feel like I cannot begin my life in real life because I've lost all touch. I've lost all instinct for the actual, the real.

• 48:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, that is, you know, in Inception, when, um, uh, they go down to that cellar in Mombasa or something, and there are all those people that live their lives perpetually in a state of dreaming.

• 48:17Speaker 00

  That's what our dreamer in this, in White Nights is in danger of doing. And the girl is shocked, isn't she? She thinks, how can you be living like this?

• 48:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, but he says, now I know more than ever that I've wasted all my best years for nothing. So he acknowledges it. He realises what real life is. And this is all, you know, awoken in him by this connection that he has with Nastenka, with meeting her. I can now say that I have lived at least two evenings in my life. To be fair, you know, I actually do think that there are parts of this book that strike me as incredibly modern or continually relatable. And there is something in that, you know, I, you know, when you really fall in love or something with someone. I remember I went off, I started going off, you know, romantic movies and stuff. I just didn't do anything for me anymore. So I, you can slightly see what he's saying.

• 49:05Speaker 00

  That's a nice confession.

• 49:06Speaker 03

  Well, exactly. Thank you. Hope I've been mocked for it and I was.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  You weren't, you haven't been mocked, Tabi. I said it was a nice confession.

• 49:12Speaker 03

  Oh, thanks. So he realises how cheerless and monotonously banal is the timorous fantasy, the slave of a shadow of an idea. He's going to grow old. Your fantastic world will grow pale, your dreams will wither, die and scatter like yellow leaves from the trees. So he realises that he's going to be left alone without even regret, because all that I have lost, all this, it was all nothing, a stupid round zero, it was merely a dream. I actually think this is the whole message of the novel. This is what Dostoevsky is kind of trying to say. It's not that to be a dreamer is fantastic and it's not romanticising that, it's saying, you know, the opposite, like you have to live in the real world.

• 49:51Speaker 00

  You have to live in the real world. This massively reminds me of a moment when, um, in my, in my brief academic career as a university lecturer, I once spent like about five days, we had like a bank holiday weekends. And as soon as I got back from work, I thought, brilliant, this is my chance to really get stuck into Football Manager.

• 50:11Speaker 03

  That is a sad confession.

• 50:12Speaker 00

  And I probably played it for like three days solid with occasional breaks for sleep or for like to order pizzas or something. And on day three, I was absolutely beside myself with joy. I'd taken, I don't know, Shrewsbury Town to the Champions League or something. I'd won it and I had to go and buy some milk and I remember going down like to the corner shop.

• 50:32Speaker 03

  Did you have like, did you have like crisps like stuck to your cheek?

• 50:36Speaker 00

  No, I was on cloud nine. I was delighted. I was so happy. And then I got into the corner shop and I was buying the milk and I had a sudden crushing moment of realisation that it wasn't real and that I, because I'd kind of wondered why people weren't looking at me with more respect.

• 50:51Speaker 03

  Like clapping you down the street.

• 50:53Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 50:54Speaker 03

  Oh my god.

• 50:55Speaker 00

  Oh my god, it's all for nothing. I could delete the save game now and it would disappear. It wasn't real.

• 50:59Speaker 03

  And, and no one would care.

• 51:01Speaker 00

  No one knows.

• 51:02Speaker 03

  There'd never be a headline.

• 51:03Speaker 00

  Exactly. So anyway, Nastenka is probably more clear sighted than I was because she says to this guy, well, at this point, she says, stop, stop, you know, moaning and groaning. Stop worrying about how you don't have a life because you have us. Our friendship now is unbreakable. Whatever happens to me, we will never part. I mean, to be fair, they've only been together like two nights.

• 51:23Speaker 03

  A lot of eagerness on both sides.

• 51:24Speaker 00

  Very much. And she actually now says, I'm going to tell you my story and I need your advice. And then the maddest line of the whole book, she says, I need your advice. You're a very sensible man.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  He's just exposed himself as a man of no sense whatsoever, who knows nothing of the world. Why would you ask him for adv- Of all people.

• 51:46Speaker 03

  She just wants comfort, you know, she's using him for just the sake that he's there, you know.

• 51:50Speaker 00

  I know.

• 51:51Speaker 03

  But then, but then, but then she starts telling her story. I actually like this bit, and this genuinely has the maddest detail of the whole book.

• 51:57Speaker 00

  Okay, go for it.

• 51:58Speaker 03

  So she's only seventeen, she lives with her very controlling grandmother who's blind and is so controlling and is so, you know, determined not to see Nastinka go off with another man, that she literally attaches herself to her granddaughter with a safety pin. She safety pins their dresses together.

• 52:15Speaker 00

  She does.

• 52:16Speaker 03

  That is mental. So another profound insight here. So the blindness of the grandmother anticipates Nastinka's blindness as to the narrator's feelings.

• 52:25Speaker 00

  That is a good insight. Where, where did you pick up that insight, just to be clear?

• 52:29Speaker 03

  It was all up here.

• 52:30Speaker 00

  You definitely didn't hear it from me.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  Original Syrett.

• 52:33Speaker 00

  Really?

• 52:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:34Speaker 00

  Fine.

• 52:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. So they then take in a lodger, who's a young man, and he reads French translations of Walter Scott and Alexander Pushkin. Nastinka's grandmother is worried about the books because she says they describe how young men lead well behaved girls astray under the pretence of wanting to marry them, et cetera, et cetera. You know, and this is, this is the fate that she is concerned will befall Nastinka. She says, I've read a lot of books like that and everything is so wonderfully described that you sit up all night quietly reading. So you, Nastinka, see that you don't read them.

• 53:04Speaker 00

  It's a long running fear, isn't it? That women will read novels and be corrupted by them.

• 53:07Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 53:07Speaker 00

  Goes back to the eighteenth century.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  It's self-conscious again, though, isn't it?

• 53:10Speaker 00

  Yes, it is, completely.

• 53:11Speaker 03

  So the lodger wants to take them out to see the Barbara of Seville and Nastinka is transported by it. She says, my heart was pounding, so I became slightly feverish. I think that's interesting because in a way, her experience of art and whatever, literature, whatever it may be, the theatre, it kind of brings her to life. It awakens her to the power of the real world, whereas it does the opposite for the dreamer. It puts him to sleep. Inevitably, the lodger and Nastinka fall in love and they make a deal. I think, I wondered though, actually, is how much of this love is born of her desire to escape? You know, is she kind of using him to escape? But so they make this deal that when he goes back to Moscow, he'll spend a year there studying. Then when he comes back, they'll meet after exactly a year at exactly ten PM at this spot. You know, again,

• 53:54Speaker 03

  that's self-consciously romantic. There's something in the fairy tales, whatever in that. So this all sounds lovely, but there's a shocking development, isn't there?

• 54:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. So she knows he's been back in St. Petersburg for three days, but he hasn't turned up. He hasn't written to her.

• 54:09Speaker 03

  He's ghosted her.

• 54:10Speaker 00

  He has ghosted her and Nastinka at this point starts sobbing and sobbing and sobbing.

• 54:14Speaker 03

  Oh, I felt for her.

• 54:16Speaker 00

  And so our narrator, our dreamer, he feels heartbroken to see her sobbing. And she then says to him, I wonder if you could write a letter for me. I can't do it. And he's like, well, yeah, I can see how that would work. I'd probably write this. And she says, brilliant, because actually I have written the letter.

• 54:32Speaker 03

  I know, you sneer at this, but I guess it's a bit like, you know, oh, shall I, shall I text that, that, that guy I had a really good date with, but he hasn't texted me. And then you, and then you say to your friend, like, I don't know, like, do you think I should text? Would that be like really weird? And then your friend's like, oh no, great idea. And then you're like, oh, that's fine. I've already done it, you know?

• 54:49Speaker 00

  I like how when you talk to your friend.

• 54:50Speaker 03

  You're covering your back.

• 54:51Speaker 00

  When you're ventriloquising how you talk to your friends, you've adopted a sort of.

• 54:54Speaker 03

  I know, I'm like Paris Hilton, weird.

• 54:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, sort of anglicised valley girl voice. Is that how you talk to, yeah?

• 55:00Speaker 03

  No, strange.

• 55:01Speaker 00

  I think, I think it is. I think this voice is just put on.

• 55:03Speaker 03

  So this brings us to the third night. So he's now looking back from the day after. And he is more depressed than ever. He says, today was a sad rainy day without a ray of hope, just like my future old age. So he's slightly ticking the every, our miserable box there.

• 55:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:20Speaker 03

  And this is him looking back on night three. So at first he was so happy. Some really lovely nine lines about falling in love. You want to pour out all your heart into another's heart. You want everything to be gay, laughter everywhere. And how infectious is this joy? I think that is so nicely observed. You know, it's that feeling when you get a text or something and you're like, the world is bright and shining. Then he reflects on how she flattered him, made his heart sing, et cetera. But how could I have been so blind? So blind to what? Oh dear, what's going on? And when they met that third night, she was giddy with excitement, laughing at everything. And there's this kind of tragically ironic moment. She says, do you know why I'm so happy? So happy

• 56:00Speaker 03

  to look at you? Why I love you so today? Gosh, she really is leading him on. And he says, well, I asked and my heart began to tremble. I love you because you didn't fall in love with me. Why? Someone else in your place would have started bothering me, pestering me, sighing, falling ill. But you're such a dear. I've never read such an obvious friend zone in my life.

• 56:23Speaker 00

  Friend zone? What, what's, I don't even know what that means.

• 56:26Speaker 03

  You've never heard of friend zoning?

• 56:27Speaker 00

  No.

• 56:28Speaker 03

  Oh my God. Crikey.

• 56:31Speaker 00

  What is it?

• 56:33Speaker 03

  Catch up, bro. You know, your friend fancies you.

• 56:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:37Speaker 03

  And then you just say things to them all the time, like, what would I do without you? You're such a good friend. And the friend is actually like dying inside because they're like, oh, actually, you know, I love you, you know?

• 56:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. It was a very standard, this is a very standard situation.

• 56:49Speaker 03

  In literature, unrequited love is this kind of romanticised, it's considered almost the, the highest form of love, isn't it?

• 56:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a, it's a theme of so many, so many great books.

• 57:00Speaker 03

  I, I, I actually felt very, very sorry for the narrator in that moment.

• 57:04Speaker 00

  Well, she is, she is torturing this guy.

• 57:06Speaker 03

  She is torturing him.

• 57:07Speaker 00

  She's saying to him, what a friend you are. You're so unselfish.

• 57:10Speaker 03

  It's because she doesn't want to be alone. She needs him and she, and he comforts her. And you know, she'd sort of rather have him than no one, I suppose.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  I, I wonder if she's almost willfully being blind here. Maybe I'm being too cynical.

• 57:22Speaker 03

  I think she is a little bit. I think she is a little bit. It's not like, you know, Natasha and Pierre or whatever, where it's like, genuinely, she doesn't have a clue and the reader doesn't really know. I think in this, it's, it's pretty clear.

• 57:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. She says to him, you love me so, when we're married, we'll be great friends. I will love you almost as much as I love him.

• 57:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:40Speaker 00

  And then the narrator, narrator is clearly desperate for her to stop talking, but she just keeps going, I want him to see that we love each other and all this. And he actually thinks how blind you are, Nastinka. He finds, he finds it unbearable. And he starts babbling to her. He starts wittering about how when he woke up, it was as though a musical melody, a familiar musical melody was coming back to him. It seemed to me that all my life it had been begging to be released from my soul. And obviously what he's doing here is he's slightly trying to, is he going to gear up to tell her the truth that he's fallen in love with her? And the stinker just says, I don't understand a word of what you're saying. And then to absolutely rub salt in the wounds,

• 58:24Speaker 00

  she says, she says to him, I'm a bit disappointed that you didn't fall in love with me.

• 58:29Speaker 03

  But you know, it's that thing of, of, you know, young people where it's like, the marrying of ego and love and stuff is never good. It results in great cruelty and she is being very, very cruel here.

• 58:40Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 58:40Speaker 03

  And then the bell tolls eleven and she can't understand why her lover hasn't come. And the narrator, rather sweetly, starts making excuses for him and she thanks him. She says, you're so kind. Do you know what just occurred to me? I was comparing the two of you. She says, why isn't he you? Why isn't he like you? He's not as good as you, even though I love him more than you. So brutal. And this must be unbelievably gutting for the narrator. Although, you know, come to think of it, maybe she just genuinely is very naive and she's young and she's been very sheltered and, you know, she doesn't have, she has never had a friend. So he's clearly not going to come today. She puts a brave face on it, says to the narrator, now we'll always be together, but will

• 59:21Speaker 03

  they? Yeah. Has she grown? Has, is it friends to lovers? Is the, you know, is it Colonel Brandon and Marianne, you know?

• 59:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 59:29Speaker 03

  Is it all going to come good? And this brings us to the, to the fourth night. He arrives at nine. She's already there for a change. There's been no letter and she's devastated, as you would be. And then there's another ironic moment. This is what we performed so beautifully in our introduction. She says.

• 59:44Speaker 00

  Do you think that introduction was quite capturing the?

• 59:46Speaker 03

  The tragedy of this moment? Possibly not?

• 59:49Speaker 00

  Now that we've got really into this, I feel like we were dialing it in. I don't think it was.

• 59:53Speaker 03

  I know. I'm, I'm sorry, listener. I'm so sorry. And she says, tell me, would you have acted like this? Would you have abandoned a girl who came to you on her own? Would you have looked after her? Oh my God, my God.

• 1:00:05Speaker 00

  Yeah. And this is the moment, the climax, he cracks. It's the moment we've been waiting for since the beginning of the story.

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  Tense with anticipation.

• 1:00:13Speaker 00

  This is when he says, now stink, Nastinka, you're tearing me apart. You're breaking my heart. You're killing me.

• 1:00:19Speaker 03

  Anakin. Anakin, you're breaking my heart. Mental.

• 1:00:25Speaker 00

  Your favourite film, literally your favourite film. I must finally speak and tell you what's been welling up here in my heart. And she says, well, what's going on? And then he says, it's impossible. I love you, Nastinka. That's what it is. Well, now everything has been said. And they're both in a massive state at this point.

• 1:00:42Speaker 03

  I, I actually found this quite moving.

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  Did you?

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. Both crying at each other's pain. It's sort of quite, sort of tender.

• 1:00:50Speaker 00

  She's sobbing because she was so blind. He's just an absolute mess. She says, actually, do you know what? Now that I think about it, maybe my love for the other bloke will pass.

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:00Speaker 00

  Maybe it was just a passing thing. Maybe you could take pity on me, take my hand. Maybe I'll try to, I'll try to love you. Yeah, I will actually try to love you and maybe we can make a go of this.

• 1:01:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:12Speaker 00

  Now, he at this point, he's played a blinder.

• 1:01:15Speaker 03

  He's so pleased.

• 1:01:17Speaker 00

  He's pink with glee. I mean, they're both pink with glee.

• 1:01:19Speaker 03

  Pink with glee, a glow with pleasure. And now a big spoiler for those who have not read the story.

• 1:01:24Speaker 00

  If you are, if you are hooked by this.

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:26Speaker 00

  And you are thinking, I've got to read this. I can't.

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

  Stop here.

• 1:01:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:29Speaker 03

  Go no further. So they're walking along. They're literally, it's such a romantic scene. They're looking at the clouds and the moon. It's the process of falling. Pierre and Natasha at last. And then Nastinka, she sees a young man who passes them. And this is a terrible moment, or a wonderful moment for team Nastinka, but a terrible moment for the narrator. His heart quivers and we know what's coming. Nastinka, I said in a hushed voice, who is that Nastinka? It's him. So it's her lover come for her at last. She ruthlessly runs to the other man. She embraces him, then runs back to the narrator, kisses him firmly, ardently, then runs back to

• 1:02:14Speaker 03

  the other man and goes off with him. And that's it. And it's a devastating moment. But I have to say, I think it doesn't come as a complete shock because I would say that we have both, we, we know this is coming pretty far back.

• 1:02:28Speaker 00

  We, you surely know this is coming.

• 1:02:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:30Speaker 00

  I mean, it's not going to be they walk off into the sunset and they set up, well, they're, they were chatting about how they'd set up a school or something, or he was going to write or.

• 1:02:37Speaker 03

  He's too fleshless, the narrator. He, he just, he's too limpid. I don't know. He, he couldn't be the heroic winner of any story, I think. So then we get to the final scene. It's morning. It's raining. Unsurprisingly, it's a dreadful day. The rain beat down on my windows cheerlessly. It was dark in the room. It was overcast outside. So the narrator being his usual jolly self.

• 1:03:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:00Speaker 03

  You would be gutted though, after a night like that, wouldn't you?

• 1:03:03Speaker 00

  It's a rollercoaster. There's no doubt about that.

• 1:03:05Speaker 03

  It's been an emotional rollercoaster. And the letter comes from Nastinka. She asks him to forgive her. So that's nice. He'll always be her friend and her brother. Oof. Painfully fraternal, that.

• 1:03:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:03:16Speaker 03

  But she's going to marry the other bloke next week. And she thanks him for loving her. Think that's quite sweet. She doesn't invite him to the wedding, though.

• 1:03:24Speaker 00

  No.

• 1:03:25Speaker 03

  She says, it is stamped on my memory like a sweet dream that you remember long after waking up because I will forever remember that moment. When you opened up your heart to me like a brother, not like a brother, and so generously accepted the gift of my shattered heart to protect, cherish and heal it. So that's quite sweet.

• 1:03:41Speaker 00

  But isn't that a nice touch that he's been talking all through the story about how he took refuge in dreams and he needed to kind of wake up and get back into the real world. And this was the one moment in his life when he was most real.

• 1:03:53Speaker 03

  When he, when he woke up.

• 1:03:55Speaker 00

  When he woke up and he wanted to have this human connection. And for Nastinka, it's just been a sweet dream. So for her, it's been the dream.

• 1:04:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, white nights. It's been in this, like this strange, ethereal twilight zone kind of thing.

• 1:04:09Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:10Speaker 03

  Whereas for him, it's the reality, you know, it, it, it's really, really sad. Actually, I think, I actually think it's a really like nice little passage.

• 1:04:19Speaker 00

  I totally agree with you, actually. I think it's very nicely observed. And I think it captures how matters of the heart like this. What's incredibly real and meaningful for one person can actually just be a passing fantasy.

• 1:04:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:33Speaker 00

  A fairy tale dream for somebody else. He's sobbing, isn't he? He's gutted by this news. He's a decent fellow, though. He doesn't want to ruin things for her. He doesn't want to begrudge her happy ending. He thinks of her and he thinks, may your sky be clear. May your sweet smile be bright and serene. May be blessed for the moment of bliss and happiness that you gave to another lonely, grateful heart.

• 1:04:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, he, he's generous. He doesn't begrudge. He's not angry. He's not bitter. Gotta respect that.

• 1:05:02Speaker 00

  And the final line, which people on TikTok can't get enough of, he says, my God, a whole minute of bliss. Is that really so little for the whole of a man's life? That's all I need. Just that one little fleeting moment of connection I had there when Nastinka, who never actually loved him, but Nastinka, they're not there.

• 1:05:19Speaker 03

  I think the point is Dostoevsky saying that actually isn't enough, that, you know, if she's holding up the two of them and she's saying, he's like saying like, Nastinka has proactively gone after a real life and kind of planting the seed of dreamland in reality. Whereas he has done the opposite and he just retreats into dreamland rather than using the spark of, you know, something that was real and, and, you know, exciting and pleasurable for that to propel him into the real world.

• 1:05:48Speaker 00

  Well, if you were being skeptical towards the narrator, you would say he has inflated a four night connection with somebody who didn't actually love him at all.

• 1:06:00Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:06:00Speaker 00

  He's inflated, he's describing it as a moment of bliss and a moment of, you know, ecstasy and all of this sort of thing. But that in itself is just a form of dreaming. He's deluding himself about what it actually meant when to her it was just a.

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:13Speaker 00

  You know, the way she, it's a passing, it's a nothing. It's a, you know, something that she probably barely even remember.

• 1:06:19Speaker 03

  I think the fact that it is so one sided, it's so fraternal for her. There isn't even, you know, the hint of, of a spark on her side.

• 1:06:28Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:06:28Speaker 03

  Means that there's, for me, throughout the book is a relationship totally absent of chemistry. It, it, it didn't excite me or really entice me at all. I wasn't even really rooting for him because he never, he never kind of grew a backbone. I think, I think he's, you know, you can be sympathetic towards him. You can feel sorry for him. You can be rather moved by the ardor of his love, given how little there was to inspire it. But I didn't really care whether or not they ended up together as a result.

• 1:07:00Speaker 00

  Well, I agree with you actually on that. And some of the sort of more TikTok friendly listeners may be horrified by this if they love this book, but to me, the characters are so thin, are so thin. What do we know of him? He is a dreamer. What do we, that's it. We don't have any more, you know, we don't know what he looks like. We don't know what he thinks about things. We don't know. Yeah, we just know that he's melancholy and he loves fantasy, his own fantasies. With her, we know that she is in love with the lodger. But do we know anything else about her at all? Is there anything that would allow you to recognize Nastinka in a room or?

• 1:07:39Speaker 03

  I don't know. I quite liked her. I think that she is clearly like, you know, quite feisty and quite, you know, she is desperate for connection.

• 1:07:51Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:07:52Speaker 03

  And so she goes out after it at any cost. You know, she leaves her grandmother. She makes her move on, on the lodger. She reads those books and she falls in love with them. She selfishly forges a friendship that she probably knows deep down.

• 1:08:06Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:08:06Speaker 03

  Is full of romance on his side in order to find comfort there. She really goes after what she wants.

• 1:08:13Speaker 00

  Okay. Well, I, I thought, I thought she was thin, frankly. I, I found them both quite thin. I felt.

• 1:08:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean.

• 1:08:19Speaker 00

  I mean, just like you, I, I wasn't really invested in their relationship. I, and I have to say, I really do like books. I love books about unrequited love.

• 1:08:28Speaker 03

  Me too, me too.

• 1:08:30Speaker 00

  I mean, they're a real staple of kind of the sort of classic canon. The problem for me was I didn't see them as real people. I just saw them as frankly, a little bit cliched.

• 1:08:40Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:08:41Speaker 00

  You know, sort of mooning melancholy, you know, Russian mid-century types. The cultural thing that I was thinking about while reading this, and I know I'm not the first person to make this comparison. Have you seen the film Before Sunrise?

• 1:08:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a great film.

• 1:08:54Speaker 00

  Ethan Hawke and Julie Delby. They're like backpackers and they meet one night in Vienna and they have this.

• 1:09:00Speaker 03

  They have a connection.

• 1:09:01Speaker 00

  They have an amazing connection.

• 1:09:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, they do. They have great chemistry.

• 1:09:04Speaker 00

  They have fantastic chemistry and you were saying, you know, book lover first sight or whatever. I think when you watch that film, especially if you watch it when you're relatively young, you totally invest in those characters and their connection. It feels so bittersweet. They're not just for one night, but they have, they are soulmates and they have, you know, they have this most wonderful relationship that's not just kind of sexual. They really speak to something in each other's souls. I mean, that sounds so sort of pretentious, but you know.

• 1:09:31Speaker 03

  No, no, but I, I, I know what you mean. One thing he certainly, I think, does do quite well is the way that he forges an atmosphere of dreaminess, almost magical realism. The sense that you, you don't, you, you walk the line between what's really happening and what's in their heads quite well. And he, that malleability is, is well constructed, I think.

• 1:09:51Speaker 00

  That point you made about, about the sense of them being a mood rather than, you know, it's not a realist book or whatever. It's just, but you absolutely feel the mood of kind of Russia in there. Or some, you know, what the canals and the sort of people drifting along the canals in a miserable way and all that. Um, the other thing I was going to say was comparing it again with the Ethan Hawke film. In that film, the characters have a massive connection and they really understand each other. In this, they don't understand each other at all. And, and actually.

• 1:10:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:10:18Speaker 00

  A lot of the conversation is they're not understanding each other. She, her just being baffled by his dreams.

• 1:10:24Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:10:24Speaker 00

  And him not really getting how much she loves this lodger. You know, he's, he's made a dream figure of her that's not the reality of her. And I think it's, it's telling when you look at the construction of the book. They both talk in these long monologues and tell each other stories. I mean, he tells her a story about himself in the third person.

• 1:10:40Speaker 03

  Sexy.

• 1:10:41Speaker 00

  But actually, when they're talking in sort of, in dialogue, in actual conversation, they're often just talking at cross purposes and not really getting each other. Or he's disguising his true feelings or she's saying, I don't understand what you mean. And that for me says, these are not soulmates separated by fate. These are two people who actually don't get each other at all.

• 1:11:02Speaker 03

  Because they just don't listen to each other really, do they? They kind of talk over and around each other. But given all this, why then do you think this book has struck such a chord? Why is this, you know, the enormous unprecedented hit that it has been?

• 1:11:15Speaker 00

  Well, I'd be interested to know what you think. I think it's short. I mean, that sounds so banal.

• 1:11:21Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:11:22Speaker 00

  But I think it's very short and we're in an A. I mean, reading up about it, I'm not the first person to have made this point. There are lots of people who like to do kind of reading challenges and things and to, you know, to have knocked it off of Dostoevsky.

• 1:11:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, good for them.

• 1:11:36Speaker 00

  It's something that people want to do and it's short. I think it speaks to a couple of things. Um, you know, in a world in which more people live alone than ever before, people are struggling to find, you know, twenty something settle down much later, if at all.

• 1:11:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. And also I suppose, you know, the, um, the disappointed romantic ideals.

• 1:12:00Speaker 03

  Resulting from dating apps, maybe something like that, you know, you're not going to just meet someone in a pub and be like, wow, we belong together.

• 1:12:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Speaker 03

  You can swipe through many, many different options, I suppose, is an element of that. I think also, I mean, the fact that it took off at the height of the pandemic, kind of during COVID.

• 1:12:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's such a good point.

• 1:12:20Speaker 03

  A time of intense dislocation and aimlessness and loneliness. And so I think it's, I think it's not actually the romance of it necessarily that has resulted in its popularity so much as the, the idea of like the loneliness and the fantasy world, I think.

• 1:12:35Speaker 00

  The dreaming, that's the bit that I will remember from it actually is.

• 1:12:38Speaker 03

  Me too.

• 1:12:39Speaker 00

  I think it's a good indication of what it's like to be a bit lonely and to live your life, to, to almost look forward to, to returning to your daydreaming.

• 1:12:47Speaker 03

  To melancholy, listening to sad music, whatever. I mean, I do get it, like, I, I find that I'm often kind of drawn to sad things. There is something very romantic and poignant about it, you know, it's the, it's the Lizzie Siddle pre-Raphaelite.

• 1:12:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:13:00Speaker 03

  A thelia in the, in the river.

• 1:13:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I think that, I think that has a higher cultural premium now than it did, let's say, 30 years ago.

• 1:13:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:13:08Speaker 00

  So in, let's say, the 1990s, was it cool to be incredibly sad and to talk about your suffering and to talk about how lonely you were and to be reading Dostoevsky, sort of very ostentatiously read Dostoevsky? I would say, no, it wasn't. People didn't really privilege such things. It wasn't seen, you know, it was seen as a bit odd and it wasn't seen as a cool thing in any way. I think now, doing a sort of TikTok video or whatever, where you're quite weepy and you say, gosh, this book really speaks to me and how sad and miserable I am, clearly has a kind of higher cultural premium than it would have done 30 years ago.

• 1:13:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's the Tumblr aesthetic, isn't it?

• 1:13:44Speaker 00

  I'm not super favourite Tumblr, to be honest. Do people do that on Tumblr?

• 1:13:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, Tumblr's kind of, it's like sad girl aesthetic, you know?

• 1:13:51Speaker 00

  Right, yeah.

• 1:13:53Speaker 03

  I mean, you could say, you could not say that, well, maybe people were feeling that back then, but they just, you know, didn't have the space to talk about it, whatever. But regardless, it wasn't lauded, I suppose.

• 1:14:04Speaker 00

  No, and I think this, clearly there are always melancholy people, there are always lonely people, but I think there are particular moments, there are kind of cultural moments when that feels particular, that strikes a chord with the mass audience. And then there are cultural moments where it doesn't because people are bored of it. I know, the romantics or something, obviously that's a point, or the fantasyeckle or whatever. I think this is, we are in one of those moments right now and that's why this book.

• 1:14:30Speaker 03

  Spins and roundabouts.

• 1:14:32Speaker 00

  Exactly. So the question is, is it, is it, is it a good book? So I think you should, you should mark it first, Abby, you can go first.

• 1:14:39Speaker 03

  What, what should we write in it? What should we mark it in?

• 1:14:41Speaker 00

  I'm going to suggest rain, sodden Russian love letters, but if you have a better.

• 1:14:45Speaker 03

  No, I think that's brilliant.

• 1:14:46Speaker 00

  Because there's actually very little in the book, there are few objects.

• 1:14:49Speaker 03

  This is what I mean about the strange, hazy divide between dreamland and the real world.

• 1:14:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:56Speaker 03

  It's all like misty and grey, I can't picture anything from the book, really. It's so immaterial.

• 1:15:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is.

• 1:15:03Speaker 03

  It's conversations and emotion and.

• 1:15:06Speaker 00

  Agreed.

• 1:15:06Speaker 03

  So, I mean, I hate to say this because I know it was, it must mean a lot to a lot of people. It just left me so cold, it just didn't really move me, I found lots of it quite boring. That said, I still think the writing is often beautiful, I like that, I like the prose in this, I, I like the way that he, some, you know, his descriptions of his dreaming. And I felt sorry for him at times and the unrequited love of it all. I didn't mind, Nas Tinka. And, and I also do think there was a strangely recognised but romantic dynamic in it which still holds weight today. But it's just, I think I'm going to have to give it a six.

• 1:15:43Speaker 00

  Six. So the good news for you is that people on social media will definitely not be coming for you, they'll be coming for me.

• 1:15:52Speaker 03

  Oh, this is brilliant.

• 1:15:55Speaker 00

  Because I.

• 1:15:56Speaker 03

  Get him, get him.

• 1:15:58Speaker 00

  That guy, Jack Edwards, who's always like sobbing on TikTok.

• 1:16:01Speaker 03

  Oh, he's coming for you.

• 1:16:02Speaker 00

  He's coming around with a meat cleaver. He, he's going to be shocked by this. I think this is so, I think it's really thin. I think it, I found it, you know, I've done my best because it's a podcast, but I found this really slight and ultimately forgettable.

• 1:16:16Speaker 03

  Yes, it's forgettable, totally. I haven't thought about it once since I've finished it.

• 1:16:19Speaker 00

  Same with me, same with me. I sort of strove hard to make the inception parallel.

• 1:16:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, sweating, sweating to squeeze that out.

• 1:16:28Speaker 00

  Racking my brains. But I found the situation, yes, you know, I do like books about unrequited love, but this felt, and there are ways, and there are moments where it's well observed, psychologically well observed, but ultimately it is quite a hackneyed situation. I mean, all the people who said, gosh, this is the best thing about love I've ever read. I thought, what, better than Madame Bovary? Better than Anna Karenina?

• 1:16:49Speaker 03

  Anna Karenina.

• 1:16:50Speaker 00

  Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, better than Thomas Hardy? I mean, that, that's just from the 19th century. You know, there are so many great books about love in the 19th century alone, that I don't think this is remotely in the same league. I think it's acquired an extraordinary level of popularity for different reasons, the kind of political cult of Dostoevsky, the sort of social media side of things, all that, and the fact that it's short. And so I'm going to give it a very limp and rain sodden four.

• 1:17:23Speaker 03

  Is that your lowest mark ever?

• 1:17:25Speaker 00

  I think East of Eden was down there, wasn't it?

• 1:17:27Speaker 03

  Did you, my god, your two lowest marks ever are Steinbeck, Steinbeck and Dostoevsky.

• 1:17:32Speaker 00

  Two overrated writers.

• 1:17:33Speaker 03

  You know what, you know what? I respect it.

• 1:17:36Speaker 00

  There's no point doing the show if you're not going to be honest.

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

  It's true.

• 1:17:39Speaker 00

  I bitterly resented East of Eden halfway through that book because it was so long.

• 1:17:44Speaker 03

  What have we got coming up? We've got The Shining by Stephen King.

• 1:17:48Speaker 00

  That's a more accurate portrait of a relationship, I think.

• 1:17:52Speaker 03

  Well, it's that classic trope, you know, it's actually, it's the reversal of enemies to lovers, it's lovers to enemies.

• 1:17:57Speaker 00

  But also, Tabby, this is what happens when you marry a writer.

• 1:18:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's true. I'm doomed. And then there is The Catcher in the Rye by J D Salinger, Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brien, also very romantic, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Money by Martin Amis, Tinker Tailor Soldiers By by John O'Carroll, Test of the Durbervilles by Thomas Hardy.

• 1:18:20Speaker 00

  Now we're talking, now we're talking.

• 1:18:22Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then Dune by Frank Herbert, big line up.

• 1:18:25Speaker 00

  Big line up. All right, see you everybody, bye bye.

• 1:18:27Speaker 03

  Bye.

• 1:18:38Speaker 02

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• 1:19:07Speaker 04

  From the studio that brought you WandaVision.

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