White Nights and its portrayal pf Petersberg

[samnason]

It seems that Petersberg is portrayed as a sort of artificial city in White Nights at least when we see it from the dreamers point of view. eg. when he talks to the houses and his comparison of the spring in Petersberg to the excitemnt of a young girl. There are also parallels between the weather each night and the events that happen for the dreamer as he is temporarily creating a relationship with Natsenka. Can anyone expand on these ideas? And add to them on the idea of this artificial city?

[lerik]

I cannot remember much about white nights but I think in almost every Dostoevsky's novel, Petersburg is portrayed as the 'city of evil', especially in Crime and Punishment and the Idiot. I guess it just helps to emphasise the suffering and theclash of the emotions in the protagonists of Dostoevsky's works

[Autolycus]

I took his passages about the city as foreshadowing to his "relationship" with Nastenka.

"She reminds me somehow rather forcibly of that girl, ailing and faded, upon whom you sometimes look with pity or with a certain compassionate affection, or whom you simply do not notice at all, but who in the twinkling of an eye and only for one fleeting moment becomes by some magic freak of chance indescribably fair and beautiful...And you feel sorry that the beauty, so momentarily evoked, should have faded so quickly and so irrevocably, that she should have burst upon your sight so deceptively and to so little purpose-that she should not have given you time even to fall in love with her..."

Sound familar?