Uncle's Dream -- 3/5
Where ‘comme il faut’ is concerned, she has no rivals among the ladies of Mordasov. She knows, for example, how to slay.” (p.123)
"I involuntarily wrote that little thing of dove-like mildness." Dostoevsky's own words on Uncle's Dream, not mine. The 'involuntary' part presumably references the fact that after being released from prison after 10ish years of incarceration, he was pretty broke.

I have a budding theory that writing projects with the least amount of care put into them might possibly offer the most insight into their authors. It's like the lack of interest in the project allows them to write with their id or something. It's the reason I think so much of what many consider 'bad' or at least non-literary fiction has so many internal inconsistencies or questionable messaging that appears with just a broad stroke of literary analysis.

Dostoevsky, obviously, is a very good writer, and so 'Uncle's Dream' is really well written (would that we could all write as well on our best day as Dostoevsky does at his most throwaway), but I do think that 'Uncle's Dream' says a lot about him that we already kind of gleaned in 'White Nights'. And being that 'Uncle's Dream' is a not so soft reboot of 'White Nights' it's unsurprising that this should be the case.

I don't know what happened to him, who hurt him, I don't know anything about his personal life, but something clearly led this man to have (at least at this point in his life) a deep and unsettling repugnance for women because piggy-backing off of 'White Nights' all of the women in 'Uncle's Dream' are horrible people, specifically in the ways in which they manipulate the men in their lives.

Now, granted, unlike in 'White Nights' (a story written with a painful lack of self-awareness), 'Uncle's Dream' does attempt introspection at a few points, but then manages to undermine itself again.

Much like in 'White Nights' the crux of the plot revolves around a cursed love triangle (or a box, as it turns out) involving a cold but beautiful girlie named Zina, an earnest but supercilious young man named Pavel Aleksandrovich Mozglyakov (Mozglyakov for our purposes), and a dottery and supercilious old man called Prince K.

Zina's mother (and the best and worst character in the story), Mariya Aleksandrovna Moskaleva, wants to marry her daughter off to Prince K on the assumption that he will die the next time caught out in a cold breeze, leaving Zina to inherit his money and lands (from which her mother will obviously also benefit greatly). Zina is not really into this plan and thinks it's morally repulsive to trick a senile old man into marrying her, but ultimately agrees to give it a go after her mother wears her down.

The other plot going on is this very painful 'not-even-friendzone' situation between Zina and Mozglyakov. He has apparently been attempting to woo her for some time at the point at which 'Uncle's Dream' opens, though she pretty openly despises him.

Partway through the novella, he confronts her when her betrothal to Prince K is leaked, and accuses her of leading him on. Much like in 'White Nights' she denies this (in a really good, very girlboss-y speech I might add), but this is later totally undermined when she admits that yes, she did lead him on, and was just trying to gaslight him. Wow, we're really just recycling that directly from 'White Nights'...

The true villain of the story, however, is Mariya Aleksandrovna Moskaleva (Mariya) who is so obsessed with social climbing that she will do whatever it takes to gain social clout. And she's proven pretty successful up until this point. I would have enjoyed her really campy and often unnecessary schemes were it not for the fact that Dostoevsky drops in an incredibly graphic and uncomfortable domestic violence plot point about how Mariya regularly beats her husband both physically and psychologically. And for what? He's just living his life and putting together outfits to go with his tie -- leave him alone!?

The prince is very funny, and his senility lends itself to a few good punchlines including this, my favorite: 'hydrotherapy is a useful thing and has brought me a power of benefit so that if I hadn't ended up falling ill, I do assure you that there'd have been absolutely nothing wrong with me." (p.147)

The tone of 'Uncle's Dream' is very breezy, much more in line with your Jane Austens or your Oscar Wildes what with its quippy dialogue and making fun of rich people, but it has a mean-streak on its underbelly that somewhat takes the fun out of the shenanigans of what would otherwise have been fairly lighthearted (certainly for Dostoevsky) aside from the consumption arc where Zina's ex-boyfriend gets consumption on purpose because she asked him to wait to marry her until he was more financially stable. That sounds ridiculous, and it is, but it was honestly the closest we got to a humanizing moment for the girlies or a moment of self-awareness for the lads, and I did like that part.

Dostoevsky clearly had an understanding of the inherent pathetic nature of incels because he wrote about it twice in a row. And twice in a row gave the girlie a speech to point out how and why that's a pathetic way to go through life only to (twice in a row) undermine that speech by having the girlie admit she did do the thing (and for what?), thus justifying the incel in each case's feelings that women are duplicitous bitches -- the pretty ones especially. Someone needs to Delorian back to show him the 'I'm Just Ken' music video or something.

In 'Uncle's Dream' this message is muddier than in 'White Nights', which is good given that 10 years separate the publication of those respective works, so maybe in 'Uncle's Dream' he was finally able to get out whatever his thing with this subject matter was, because I will be quite bored if I have to read it again.
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White Nights -- 2.5/5

'White Nights' has arguably some of Dostoevsky's best writing from the early part of his body of work, but it also has the dishonor of being the least introspective and therefore, least interesting.

The title of 'White Nights' ought to have been 'Nice Guys Finish Last.'

Our unnamed protagonist is a poor young man who begins the narrative by lamenting that he is twenty-six years old, but never yet had 'a woman of his own.' The story follows this guy (we can consider him 'not-Dostoevsky.') around St. Petersburg while he laments his loneliness.

While out wandering, he intervenes when a young woman is made to feel uncomfortable by an older man who is seemingly harassing her.

From there, our protagonist strikes up a friendship with this young woman, Nastenka, who tells him about her own romance woes; her beloved left a year ago, promising to come back and marry her when he had enough money, but a year has passed, and she's starting to worry that he isn't coming back for her.

The protagonist spends 4 days trying to help her reconnect with her lover, all the while harboring his own secret love for her. In the end, Nastenka, heartbroken by the fact that her lover has failed to make contact, paints him as not a very nice person and our protagonist finally admits that he loves her and would do better as her partner than the man she's been searching for.

Nasktenka reveals that she knew he loved her, and tells him she will shift her affections on to him, and they make plans for him to move in to the empty room in the apartment she shares with her grandmother. But just as it seems like our protagonist will be rewarded for his kindness, they run into Nastenka's old flame, who she immediately returns to. And then this happens:

"Hardly had she given him her hand, hardly had she rushed into his embrace, then she suddenly turned to me again, materialized beside me like the wind, like lightning, and, before I had time to think, she threw both her arms around my neck and gave me a violent, passionate kiss. Then, without saying a word to me she rushed back to him, took him by the hands, and drew him off after her." (119)

Unrequited love, especially coming from Dostoevsky's pen, could have been so interesting, and he could have taken it in any number of novel directions, but...he didn't. Instead of critiquing the mindset that a man is owed a woman's affections because he's been nice to her, he leans into it by having Nastenka admit outright that she was leading the protagonist on somewhat.

How very trite: the nice guy is jilted by a duplicitous woman for a man who isn't as deserving. Blah blah blah.

With 'White Nights' I can see why some might consider liking Dostoevsky to be a red flag. It's easy to imagine a lonely young man reading this story, seeing himself in the protagonist, and projecting his own failings in love onto it, and then having the satisfaction of being told by such an authority: 'it's not you, it's her.' But not only that, Dostoevsky creates a story in which that feeling of frustration is justified. The protagonist learns nothing, changes not at all, and ends up just as lonely and pathetic as when he started. More so, perhaps, because he fell for the trap this woman laid for him.

Nastenka says when they first meet that she is romantically unavailable. She makes this very clear: "You mustn't fall in love with me ... This is out of the question, I assure you. I'm ready to be your friend, here is my hand...But no falling in love if you please." (80)

He falls in love with her anyway, which in and of itself isn't the problem; that's not the kind of thing that's controllable.

Throughout their friendship, she is very open with him emotionally, and she's physically affectionate. All of which could be totally platonic. Which, indeed, was where I thought this was going. I thought the 'twist' would be that the mixed signals he thought he was getting were in his own mind. That he was misinterpreting platonic affection for something more.

But to have it be that she really was leading him on, that she really did know how he felt about her and acted that way towards him anyway is a lazy and harmful re-enforcement of the myth that men and women can't be friends, and moreover, that men should be incentivised to be kind to women based on the assumption that their reward is her romantic attention.

Because in reality it's incredibly toxic and disingenuous to be nice to someone only because you expect something in return that you aren't up front about, and then get angry when you're denied what you weren't promised in the first place. That mindset, I have to say, means you aren't actually a 'nice guy.'

Thank you, but no thank you, Fyodor.

Next.