Fyodor Dostoyevsky. White Nights. 1848. [Included in the following]
———. Notes from Underground. Trans. Andrew R. MacAndrew. 1864; New York: Signet, 1961. Print.

Three of the greatest novels ever written were written by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. White Nights and Notes from Underground were earlier works and reveal something of the young writer. Neither is especially extraordinary, but the main character of both is an unnamed young loner who does not engage socially. In other words, precursors to Raskolnikov of Crime and Punishment.

White Nights is a short story of about fifty pages. The best way to describe it is a tender, bittersweet love tale. We see the cute, perhaps awkward, beginning of a relationship. Our narrator is out walking on a summer night as he is accustomed to doing. He does not really relate to anyone else; he just observes the people on the street and keeps to himself. He sees a girl or young woman trying to get away from a man who is harassing her. He is able to rescue her, and they sit on a bench and begin to talk.

The nights are white in St. Petersburg in the summer. It is barely dark at midnight, so the night is twilit, “white,” not dark. It also suggest the purity of the nights. The story’s romantic conclusion reminds us of Tennyson’s “’Tis better to have loved and lost/Than never to have loved at all.” (In Memoriam 27.15-16) Even though our unnamed narrator loses the girl, he is assured that she is happy, and he is happy to have gotten to know her.

Notes from Underground is a short novel. It was published in 1864, two years before Crime and Punishment, but it appears to have had a much earlier provenance. I confess that I almost gave up on it because the first few chapters nothing happens. The narrator mostly rants about how he is “underground” living by himself in a “mousehole” where he observes others, but no one notices him. He does challenge the reader to reconsider his beliefs, especially if he believes that things are getting better or that a utopia is possible. Perhaps someone like Raskolnikov is his audience.

Unlike the unnamed narrator in White Nights, we perhaps can understand why this twenty-four year old narrator (critics call him Underground Man) does not get along socially. He is terribly self-conscious, thinking a lot more about himself and worried what others think of him, though it is unlikely anyone does. He really does not like most people. He befriends a young professional woman but then insults and criticizes her so much, that she leaves him for good. He might be called what a “judgmental” person might say to Crime and Punishment‘s Sonia.

He did not like any of his classmates where he went to school, but he gets himself invited to one of his former classmates’ going away party. He gets himself obnoxiously drunk at the party, so that everyone else leaves and he is left behind. He thinks he knows which cathouse they are going to, but by the time he gets there they have disappeared.

There is little sympathy for this guy. At least Raskolnikov has some beliefs and in some way is a man of character. Our Underground Man is simply a loser. Indeed, as I got into the story, I could not help but think of Holden Caulfield, another misanthropic loser who gawks at everyone in the city but hates them and has his own experience with a prostitute. The narrator of Notes never actually called his former classmates or his co-workers “phonies,” but that may just have been the translation. If you want Catcher in the Rye in a nineteenth century Russian St. Petersburg setting, Notes from Underground may be just what you are looking for. It is almost miraculous that a mere two years after this juvenilia was published, Dostoyevsky broke the mold with Crime and Punishment.