The night I read A Nasty Business for the first time, I was drunk—spinning slightly, wine-warm, stickers still on my forehead I’d forgotten to take off, existentially drunk. I’d just come back from an over-indulgent dinner with my girlfriends, one of those beautifully chaotic nights where you leave feeling adored, overstimulated, and maybe a little unhinged. I was too tired to go out but too awake to fall asleep, so naturally, I spiralled. That post-social affection high always sends me inward—romantic grief, emotional bruises, everything pleasant and lovely.

I laid in bed, processed every wound I’ve sustained since, and then decided to reconnect with the part of me that still believes in romance—who, frankly, had been shot and left for dead. So I reached for my little Penguin Classics edition of White Nights, expecting to fall into the arms of that sweet, pathetic dreamer who cries under a lamplight. My plan: reread White Nights and start writing an essay about it.

But I was so drunk that instead of finding my soft, sentimental older man in the moonlight, I found a rich bureaucrat crashing a peasant’s wedding. I didn’t realise I’d opened A Nasty Business—a story I’d never read—until about fifty pages in. And honestly, in my inebriated state, I felt spiritually aligned.

Because Ivan is delusional. And so am I.

A Nasty Business is Dostoyevsky’s unhinged fever dream of what happens when a high-ranking imperial bureaucrat with a saviour complex decides—mid-identity crisis—to crash a poor man’s wedding.

There’s a moment—ten pages long—where Ivan morally hallucinates into convincing himself that his arrival will grandiosely elevate the event. He believes the povos making ten rubles a month will fall to their knees and sob with gratitude at his holy presence. In his mind, he is the generous noble descending from his carriage (which, by the way, his driver has already ditched). He literally tells himself: “I will descend among the peasants. They will adore me. I am a man of the people… but also better than them.”

I read that and whispered: “Same.”

Sometimes, without realising it, your vulnerability becomes less about the person you’re offering it to and more about affirming your own sense of moral depth—an ego dressed up as emotional generosity. This starts to resemble a performance—not for praise, exactly, but for the silent reward of being the one who feels more, gives more, or sacrifices more.

Because there’s a specific kind of delusion—feminine, romantic, semi-dramatic—that convinces you your presence somewhere, anywhere, is a meaningful event. That when you show up at someone’s emotional doorstep, they’ll understand. That affection makes sense just because it exists. That if you care for someone or even just feel something sharply enough, they’ll see you. And maybe thank you for it. Maybe fall in love with the gesture. Maybe realise something.

But they don’t. In Ivan’s case, they’re uncomfortable—mostly just scared to get fired. Or worse, they don’t even notice he showed up.

Ivan spirals. I spiral. Both of us have performed humility just to be praised for it. Both trying to feel morally superior while still being condescending, like our delusion is an act of charity, not ego. 

Ivan’s delusion is not just comic—it’s tragic. He believes in the nobility of his gesture, in the transformative power of presence. He imagines that descending into a world beneath his own will not only uplift others but redeem him. His performance of humility is laced with arrogance; his desire to connect is undermined by condescension. And his entire fantasy collapses the moment he steps through the door and realises no one asked him to come.

And this is where I begin to feel less amused and more implicated. Because beneath my sarcasm, beneath my fondness for emotional satire, I recognise the same mechanism in myself: the belief that I can mean something to someone simply by showing up with the right nuance of feeling and performance. That if I’m sincere enough, emotionally vulnerable enough, romantic enough in my intentions, I can override the indifference of the world—or the emotional inaccessibility of a person. That I can earn a response, a connection, maybe even love, by giving a part of myself freely, as if that gift obligates something in return.

It’s not malicious. It’s not even conscious. It’s just… delusion. Beautiful, painful, deeply human delusion.

Dostoyevsky has always understood this space—the grey area between self-perception and social failure, between romantic intention and humiliating reality. Ivan is not a villain. He is a man alone, desperate to feel moral, meaningful, admired. His tragedy is that he cannot separate his ego from his virtue. Mine is that I sometimes confuse emotional vulnerability with emotional intimacy—as if offering someone your inner world is enough to make them want to live in it.

So there I was: tipsy, wrapped in my duvet at 2 am, thinking I was re-reading a sentimental tale of nocturnal love—and instead, I got a nasty rude awakening. I came for romantic renewal and was handed a satire about ego and self-inflicted humiliation. But perhaps that, too, is romantic in its own way. After all, there’s something quietly redemptive about misreading the moment—about stumbling into the wrong story and realising that perhaps it was the one you needed all along.

Dostoyevsky watches from the corner, smirking, as Ivan executes a slow-motion crash out of self-deception and repressed monologues that smell like vodka and spiritual rot. It’s hysterical. It’s devastating. It’s also under 90 pages, so it’s the perfect bedtime story if you like to fall asleep thinking about social decay and how embarrassing it is to be alive.