Dostoevsky's Warning to Lovers | White Nights

Dostoevsky is one of the greatest writers in history. And one of his earliest stories is White Nights. Often framed as a romance novel I think it is a deeply insightful warning to the lovers inside all of us. It follows a protagonist who becomes lost in his own dreams of romance, and as a result becomes a broken man when he is rejected by his love interest, despite the fact they had only met a few days beforehand.

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Article I found that expands on some of my ideas here in a better way than I do: https://www.jstor.org/stable/306699

00:00 White Nights
01:42 The Danger of Narrative
05:08 Great (but false) Expectations
08:14 The Dangers of Imagination
12:02 Ego, Romance, and Suffering
15:21 The Over-focus on Romantic Love

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