Федор Достоевский - White nights / Белые ночи

“Forgive me, remember and love your

“Nastenka.”

I read that letter over and over again for a long time; tears gushed to my eyes. At last it fell from my hands and I hid my face.

“Dearie! I say, dearie – —” Matrona began.

“What is it, Matrona?”

“I have taken all the cobwebs off the ceiling; you can have a wedding or give a party.”

I looked at Matrona. She was still a hearty, youngish, old woman, but I don’t know why all at once I suddenly pictured her with lustreless eyes, a wrinkled face, bent, decrepit … I don’t know why I suddenly pictured my room grown old like Matrona. The walls and the floors looked discoloured, everything seemed dingy; the spiders’ webs were thicker than ever. I don’t know why, but when I looked out of the window it seemed to me that the house opposite had grown old and dingy too, that the stucco on the columns was peeling off and crumbling, that the cornices were cracked and blackened, and that the walls, of a vivid deep yellow, were patchy.

Either the sunbeams suddenly peeping out from the clouds for a moment were hidden again behind a veil of rain, and everything had grown dingy again before my eyes; or perhaps the whole vista of my future flashed before me so sad and forbidding, and I saw myself just as I was now, fifteen years hence, older, in the same room, just as solitary, with the same Matrona grown no cleverer for those fifteen years.

But to imagine that I should bear you a grudge, Nastenka! That I should cast a dark cloud over your serene, untroubled happiness; that by my bitter reproaches I should cause distress to your heart, should poison it with secret remorse and should force it to throb with anguish at the moment of bliss; that I should crush a single one of those tender blossoms which you have twined in your dark tresses when you go with him to the altar … Oh never, never! May your sky be clear, may your sweet smile be bright and untroubled, and may you be blessed for that moment of blissful happiness which you gave to another, lonely and grateful heart!

My God, a whole moment of happiness! Is that too little for the whole of a man’s life?

gay– cheerful, happy, full of fun

Fontanka– a river in Petersburg

Kamenny and Aptekarsky Islands or of the Peterhof Road– formerly the places of summer vacations of St. Petersburg citizens, now part of the city

Pargolovo– a resort not far from St. Petersburg

Zhukovsky– a famous Russian poet of the 19th century

Diana Vernon– the main female character of W. Scott’s Rob Roy

Ivan Vassilyevitch– Ivan the Terrible (1530– 1584)

Clara Mowbray– the main female character of W. Scott’s Saint-Ronan’s Well (1823)

Effie Deans– the main character of W. Scott’s novel The Heart of Midlothian

Huss– John Huss (1369–1415), Czech religious reformer and martyr

Robert the Devil – an opera of Giacomo Meyerbeer (1791–1864), German composer

Minna and Brenda– characters of W. Scott’s The Pirate

Danton– Georges Jacques (1759–1794), leader in the French Revolution

e i suoi amanti – and her lovers

so long and so fondly– a phrase from a poem by Lermontov (1814–1841), a Russian poet and novelist

Pavlovsk– a town not far from Petersburg

Ivanhoe– a novel by W. Scott

The Barber of Seville – an opera by Rossini, based on a French play by Beaumarchais

dénouement – ( French ) the outcome or resolution of a doubtful series of occurrences; end of a story when everything is explained

Rosina– the main characters of the novel remember the personage of the opera The Barber of Seville