Is This My Classics Era? A First Encounter with Dostoevsky 

I’ve never been a fan of the classics. At least, not until recently.

Sure, I’ve picked up a Jane Austen here, a Virginia Woolf there—mostly because everyone else was reading them. But I never truly gave them a fair shot. I skimmed, read half-heartedly, and rarely paused to take in the writing or what it was really trying to say.

But here I am now, late to the party but finally showing up. I’ve started wondering—could I love the classics the same way I love thrillers and romance? Is it too early to say I’m entering my “classics era”? Maybe. But even if I’ve only read two short works so far, I’ve already been thinking about them for days. And what better place to put these reeling thoughts than right here?

Why Dostoevsky?

I started with Dostoevsky. Not exactly the easiest introduction to classic literature, I know—but I figured, go big or go home.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, the Russian literary titan behind Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, is one of those authors whose name carries a certain weight. You expect long sentences, existential dread, suffering, and philosophical monologues. He doesn’t just write stories—he digs through the wreckage of the human soul, trying to find meaning amid all the contradictions.

Initially, I meant to read The Brothers Karamazov. But one fine sunny morning, I stumbled across The Meek One, a short story of his, and decided to use it as a warm-up. I thought I’d dip my toes in.

Instead, I was pulled into the deep end.

The Meek One: A Spiral

I wasn’t prepared for how disturbing this story would be. It’s told entirely from the perspective of a man whose wife has just died by suicide. The monologue begins shortly after her death, and we stay trapped inside his head for the entirety of the story.

The narration mirrors the chaos of grief and guilt. Thoughts swirl. Emotions loop. The structure is fragmented, restless. It felt claustrophobic to read—like I was sitting inside someone’s mind as it unraveled, unable to get out. And that’s the brilliance of it. Dostoevsky doesn’t just tell you the character is spiraling. He makes you spiral with him.

At first, I thought I might feel sympathy for this man. But as the story unfolded, that sympathy dissolved.

His perception of marriage was unsettling—he seemed to treat his wife less as a partner and more as a project. The way he spoke about “winning her over,” his insistence on being the “stern” one in the relationship, his condescending views of her intelligence—it all made me increasingly uncomfortable. Especially the moment when she falls ill, and he subtly blames her suffering on her own past rebellion, as if her pain were a form of penance.

The revolver scene—a moment where she holds a gun to his head—is particularly haunting. Rather than understanding this as a cry for help or desperation, he folds it into his narrative of superiority and control. She was defeated, he claims. But not forgiven. And maybe that’s what finally broke her.

The man spirals, but not just from grief. I think he spirals because he can no longer lie to himself—though he tries. There’s a moment at the end, when he sits beside her coffin and wonders aloud what will become of him now. It’s haunting. Grief mixed with self-pity, desperation laced with delusion.

What I find especially tragic is that we never hear her side. Was she really so silent throughout their marriage? Or was he simply deaf to her voice? Did he choose to omit the parts where she spoke, resisted, questioned? She clearly wasn’t meek—not in the end. Her act of defiance proves that. And yet, we come to know her only through his fractured, unreliable memory.

And that’s what unsettles me most.

The title The Meek One becomes ironic. Was she meek? Or did he need her to be, so he could maintain control? This story doesn’t just explore the unraveling of one man—it exposes a larger pattern that still echoes today: the way women’s stories are too often told through the men who hurt them. Their truths, filtered. Their voices, minimized. Their legacies, buried under someone else’s narrative.

Even today, literature (and life) often records women’s stories through the men who hurt them. Their truths are told secondhand, stripped of agency and nuance. Maybe that’s why The Meek One unsettled me so deeply—it mirrors how history remembers women: not as individuals, but as reflections in someone else’s monologue.

That’s why this story stays with me. Not just because it’s tragic—but because it’s tragically familiar.

White Nights: The Dreamer and the Delusion

After A Meek One, I needed something lighter. So I picked up White Nights. It’s softer, more romantic, and yet, still deeply reflective. Another first-person narration—but this time, the voice belongs to a lonely dreamer wandering the streets of St. Petersburg.

He meets a girl, Nastenka, and for four nights, they talk. They connect. He falls in love. She doesn’t.

This story is less about what happens and more about what it feels like. The dreamer is someone who has been invisible for so long that the smallest amount of attention feels like salvation. It reminded me of that intense joy we sometimes experience when we’ve been alone for too long—how any affection can become overwhelming, and intoxicating.

Dostoevsky captures that beautifully. The way the protagonist overanalyzes, doubts, clings—he knows he’s being too much, but he can’t help it. The emotional hunger is too great. The loneliness too deep.

There’s a line where he reflects on how a world so beautiful—stars above, rivers flowing—can still contain evil. How can such ugliness exist in a world that looks so perfect? It’s a question Dostoevsky returns to often: how contradiction is woven into the fabric of life. Beauty and pain coexisting. Joy tainted by sorrow. Love that doesn’t last. 

I loved this quote at the very beginning of the story. It says, “ The sky was so starry, it was such a bright sky that looking at it you could not help, but ask yourself: is it really possible for bad-tempered and capricious people to live under such a sky?” 

Nastenka is a complex character in her own right. She’s also lonely, stuck with her blind, overprotective grandmother. Her life is quiet, restricted, even stifling. Her attraction to the protagonist isn’t romantic—it’s a moment of escape. She sees him as a friend, a listener. Someone who doesn’t judge. But when her original love interest returns, she leaves—gratefully, and perhaps a little guiltily.

And this is where it gets interesting.

She wasn’t malicious. She didn’t mean to break his heart. But she did. Because that’s what humans do sometimes—we make choices for ourselves, and others get hurt. It’s not evil. It’s just messy. That’s what makes the story feel so modern. It reads like a situationship from today. Misread signals. Mixed intentions. Emotional intimacy without a shared destination.

What really stuck with me was the dreamer’s final reflection: how fleeting, how beautiful, and how real those four nights were. Even if they were brief. Even if they hurt. 

A Shared Thread: The Women They Didn’t See

What ties both stories together—The Meek One and White Nights—is the idea of women who are not fully seen. In one, the wife is misinterpreted, silenced, and overshadowed by her husband’s ego. In the other, the girl is idealized, placed on a pedestal by a man who barely knows her.

In both cases, the male narrators are unreliable—not because they’re lying, but because they’re too wrapped up in their own emotional needs to see the full picture.

It’s this theme of selective perception that lingers with me. And it’s not just a literary theme—it’s a human one.

What I’m Learning from the Classics

I used to think classics were stuffy, outdated, out of touch. But reading Dostoevsky has changed something in me. His stories aren’t distant relics. They’re mirrors. They reflect the way we think, feel, misunderstand, and hurt each other.

I’m learning that it’s important to be at peace with solitude. Because when we’re not, we bring intense, often unrealistic expectations into new relationships. That’s what happened in White Nights. The dreamer wasn’t at peace with himself, so when connection came, he clung too tightly. And in The Meek One, the husband’s need to dominate and be understood blinded him to the real person in front of him—until it was too late.

So no, I might not be fully in my classics era yet. But I’m getting there. And if this is what classics have to offer—truths wrapped in beautiful, painful prose—then maybe I’ve been missing out all along.