Dostoevskii’s “White Nights”: The Dreamer Goes Abroad

This chapter explores four versions of Dostoevskii’s 1848 story “White Nights,” whose nameless protagonist, referred to as the Dreamer, inspired many directors to transpose this early Dostoevskian short work into film. The focus is on four directors: Luchino Visconti, Robert Bresson, Sanjay Bhansali, and José Luis Guerín. As is argued in the chapter, each director takes a different approach to recontextualizing the first-person narrative in various locations, times, and cinematic traditions, ranging from Italian neo-realism and post-1968 Paris to Bollywood and Strasbourg. The author argues that the contemporary directors, Bhansali and Guerín take not only Dostoevskii’s story, but also, respectively, the earlier adaptations by Visconti and Bresson as their subtexts, thus forming a complex chain of intertextual connections.