Kobunsha Classics Byakuya / Okashina Ningen no Yume (White Nights / The Dream of a Ridiculous Man)

For many readers, the name Dostoyevsky likely evokes works of fiction that are dark, heavy, and harsh. The short stories selected for this collection, however, are slightly different: while these stories are sad, they also contain a certain brightness.
 
“White Nights” was written very early in the author’s career, but the other three stories come from A Writer’s Diary, the lengthy collection of work he completed over a period of almost ten years at the end of his life.
 
“White Nights” is the story of a love triangle between a young dreamer, a seventeen-year-old girl, and another man. The love of the main character—the dreamer—is entirely free of egotism, and at times the reader may perceive him as a clownish figure. Yet he considers this brief moment of love, this pitiful fantasy, an instant of bliss which brings completeness to his life. This briefest of interludes is to him as perfect as an entire lifetime.
Although each of the three short stories from A Writer’s Diary has its own distinct appeal, if I were forced to choose a favorite, it would be “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man.” In this story, the reader encounters so many of the themes, motifs, and character traits from the author’s other works that Mikhail Bakhtin called it “an almost perfect encyclopedia of Dostoyevsky’s major themes.” Among them are echoes of Crime and Punishment’s Raskolnikov, who believes he alone is a wise man privy to the great truths of the world, and The Devil’s Kirillov, who is driven by an overwhelming nihilistic sense that everything is meaningless and makes up his mind to kill himself.
 
However, the “ridiculous man” survives suicide through an unexpected turn of events, experiencing existence after suicide through a dream. We might think of this as Kirillov’s post-suicide experience. In his dream, the “ridiculous man” travels to a distant planet very much like Earth, where he finds a paradise: the Golden Age utopia Dostoyevsky had been dreaming of since he was a young man. In this paradise, people unsullied by the fall of man live in perfect harmony with all of creation.
 
Dostoyevsky also writes about this type of utopia in “A notebook fragment of 1864.” This is a short text, composed as he sat before the corpse of his first wife Mariya immediately after her death, but I have included it in this collection of translations because it brings the reader into contact with Dostoyevsky’s essential ideology. “It is not possible to love another as yourself, as Christ teaches. On this earth, the I becomes an obstacle,” he writes in this work. Yet he also writes that “the ultimate, highest development of the personality (lichnost’, личность) is the condition of offering up the I completely to all people, precisely as it is.” “Lichnost,” which I have translated as “personality,” is different from the modern Western “individual,” who stands independent from the whole; rather, “lichnost” is a concept of self in which a complete life can be achieved only within the whole. “A notebook fragment of 1864” presents this state as attainable only at the end of the world, but in “The Dream of a Ridiculous Man” it has already been attained, if only in a dream.
 
Each story in this collection depicts a momentary experience of other-worldly bliss, and in doing so, offers a glimpse of the eternal.
 

(Written by Haruko Yasuoka, Professor, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences / 2018)