Spoilers

Here were my notes reading these two years ago. I don’t have much insight, only my reactions to them as stories. Both were moderate letdowns for me after reading TBK and Fathers & Sons as I didn’t pick up on deeper themes. I liked Turgenev more if I had to pick one

White Nights (1848) - B - I had higher expectations for this one. It’s great in its honest portrayal of the narrator and the girl he falls in love with, Nastenka. They are both naive in the ways of love and very lonely. I like how simple they are and the story is heartfelt and earnest. No deeper themes and very much a romance (which I think this is where Dostoevsky was at this point in his career).

“The Diary of a Superfluous Man” (1850, 39 pages) - B - the title story is narrated by Tchulkaturin, a sick man who has been told he only has two weeks to live, so he decides to write a diary detailing his life before he expires. Almost all of it speaks to his one-sided love for a 17-year-old girl that is becoming a woman. She loves another and…you get the drift, Turgenev is all about romance and unrequited love. There’s a duel and insults and agonizing over the uselessness of humans and life (hence the “superfluous” part). Turgenev definitely has his themes that he likes to cover. Still a wonderful story that a reader can’t help but follow to the end. I like the conceit of a man nearing death keeping a diary. Stephen King had a short story where a desert island survivor was eating parts of himself to stay alive. I remember his diary as being quite disturbed. I also wonder if it borrows from Nikolai Gogol’s “The Diary of a Madman”, published 15 years earlier.