Dostoevsky Says You Need to Get Out More
White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky
A few weeks ago, I was walking to Sunday dinner in what can only be described as a slurry of wintery mix and thinking about how if I were a different person, or rather myself, but in a different, near forgotten state of mind, I might be irritated. I might refuse to walk, hop in a cab. Instead I had wished for this horrible weather, asked for it, said it would be so. When it was, I could be nothing but delighted.
I was, of course, on my way to meet my lover, as is our custom on Sunday nights and some friends too—more of them than usual, it being a long weekend. None of us had to work the next day. I would drink more beers than one should on a Sunday, which I do every Sunday anyway because the number of beers you should drink on a Sunday is probably zero. I would eat a chicken pot pie. To be irritated by weather that would only serve to make this whole scene that much more intimate and rare would be frankly preposterous.
It followed that as I walked, I thought of all the people who were out and about cursing the weather, and then too of all the people who decided not to go out in it at all, and I thought, how could they? How could they not be delighted like me. How could they not realize how wonderful the world is that it would rain/sleet/snow on the Sunday night of a long weekend?
And then I though, Eve, how horrible of you. To be happy—to be able to make yourself happy in weather like this, with very little effort at all, and then to look down on those who are unhappy and unable to make themselves happy is not at all the thing to do. Instead thank God. And so I did, and I thought that I might write something about my wish that everyone could feel what I feel and my wish that everyone should have reason to thank God.
The wind blew against my face and lightning cracked the sky open purple with thunder sounding a moment later. This felt like a miracle on top of a miracle because really, how often does lightning crack the sky open when it’s snowing (slushy-ing, wintery-mixing)? I’m addicted to calling things miracles. Addicted to calling things what they are.
I arrived and ordered a Yuengling and sat down to wait for my beloved. I opened White Nights by Dostoevsky1, and was immediately confronted by this quote:
“It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader. The sky was so starry, so bright that, looking at it, one could not help asking oneself whether ill-humored and capricious people could live under such a sky. That is a youthful question too, dear reader, very youthful, but may the Lord put it more frequently into your heart!”
I started at the page totally dumbfounded. Now, this really was a miracle—my own thoughts ripped out of my brain and put to paper by Dostoevsky almost 200 years ago. There is nothing quite like the feeling of seeing your own self reflected back—in the mirror behind the bar, in the eyes of someone who knows you, in the words of one of the greatest novelists of all time—and knowing that you really do exist.
That, I think, is the appeal of White Nights. We are introduced to our narrator, a young, unnamed man living in St. Petersburg. He is a solitary figure, without friends or close confidants. He is a dreamer, living for the most part in his own head, imagining that the houses he walks by in the city are his friends and fantasizing about a great love. Whether he is solitary because he dreams or dreams because he’s solitary is hard to say for sure.
One evening out walking, he meets a young woman named Nastekna. She does not ridicule him or flee form him when he admits that he’s never spoken to a woman like her and doesn’t know how to act. Rather, she seems charmed by him and agrees to be his friend—on the condition that he not fall in love with her. He swears he won’t.
Of course he does. Even as he tries to help her reunite with the man she loves, he falls further and further. I won’t spoil the ending, but even without it, both Nastenka and our unnamed narrator display behaviors that are all too recognizable today. At the root of it? Neither of them spends enough time around other people.
Our narrator isolates himself. The only person he really sees or talks to is the maid at his rented apartment. Even out on the street, when he’s passing the same people day after day, he doesn’t greet any of the familiar faces—he only “almost” strikes up friendships. For him, every interaction has become loaded and overly important. He tells Nastenka a story about being interrupted in his daydreaming one evening by a friend stopping by his apartment. He behaved so strangely and rigidly that the friend left. The narrator still replays the moment in his head, agonizing over each moment and all that he could have done differently.
Nastekna, on the other hand, is naive and lacks awareness of how her actions affect those around her, a different manifestation of the same problem: not enough socialization. She’s been sheltered by her overprotective blind grandmother. So afraid is this guardian that she literally keeps Nastenka pinned to her skirt, as its the only way she can ensure that her ward doesn’t sneak away. Much like our narrator, Nastenka falls in love with the first young man she knows with any degree of intimacy (a very small one). In her dealings with the narrator, she fails to understand her effect on him, which makes her seem selfish and careless.
It is no surprise that young readers across the internet see themselves reflected in these characters.2 They are sheltered from the real world like Nastenka so spend their days dreaming of a fantasy world like our narrator—only now, through social media, the fantasy world masquerades itself as the real world, and the sheltering is often self-imposed.
According to the Financial Times, in both Europe and the US, the amount of time that young people (between 18 and 24) are spending together has declined precipitously. The average 20 year old spends roughly six hours alone everyday. One in four young Europeans don’t socialize with friends even once a week! With young men being the hardest hit demographic, spending just under 60% of their time alone as of 2022, our narrator would fit right in.
Derek Thompson’s recent piece in The Atlantic, titled “The Anti-Social Century” expands on the theme: “Young people are less likely than in previous decades to get their driver’s license, or to go on a date, or to have more than one close friend, or even to hang out with their friends at all. The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50 percent since the early 1990s, with the sharpest downturn occurring in the 2010s.”
What are they doing then? Spending 30% of their waking hours on their phones. It is not uncommon to hear that 2010 marked widespread adoption of the iPhone, so a downturn in the amount of time kids spend with each other around that time tracks pretty well.
This is all pretty depressing, and it’s not very difficult to catastrophize about the whole thing (for me at least). The young people3 are addicted to their phones because the phones are designed to make them addicted. They spend less time interacting with their peers in the real world, first just because they don’t need to when they can text instead, but then increasingly because the anxiety the phone addiction has given them makes the real world overwhelming and scary. They’ve forgotten how to interact in person, the younger ones may never learn. To avoid discomfort, they stay in and scroll on their phones. It all gets worse.
So what is the solution? Where is the hope?! How can people who feel isolated and lonely escape their prisons.4 I think Dostoevsky (if he could wrap his head around what a phone is) would say that the remedy lies in one simple thing: risking embarrassment, pain and heartbreak. It is worth it, even if it all falls apart, even if it ends horribly. Talk to the stranger on your walk, tell someone who you are, or even who you think you are, say that you won’t fall in love but then do anyway.
On that Sunday night, people started arriving for dinner, and I closed my book. By the end of the night we had squeezed twelve people around a table in the back. Many of them were strangers to each other—at first. When we left, the slush had turned to real snow. A layer blanketed the ground and the cars and the trash, and it was still coming down. The streets were quiet and empty, everyone was delighted, and we all walked home.
I’ve become aware, as mentioned in le pod, that White Nights is something of a viral sensation. At least according to The Guardian.
For the record, I’m not pointing the finger or looking down my nose here. I am one of the young people who’s addicted to her phone. Okay…young-ish.
Aside from hurling their phones off an overpass onto a 6 lane highway down below, come on guys, please? If we all do it, it would be FUN.
Love the discursive footnotes!!
as a fellow catastrophizer about young people and our ability to be people, yes to this whole post!! yes to "the remedy lies in one simple thing: risking embarrassment, pain and heartbreak."!! also great reminder to re read white nights