White Nights

### A Sentimental Story from the Diary of a Dreamer

**By Fyodor Dostoyevsky**

**Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

**What This Story Explores:** The exquisite ache of unrequited love, the strange intimacy between two lonely people who meet at exactly the wrong moment, and the question of whether a single night of genuine happiness can justify a lifetime of solitude.

**Who This Book Is For:** Anyone who has ever loved someone who loved someone else, anyone who has walked city streets talking to themselves because there was no one else to listen, and anyone who suspects that the most vivid life they have ever lived took place entirely inside their own head.

There is a particular kind of loneliness that flourishes best in cities. It is not the loneliness of empty places, of deserts or frozen tundras where solitude feels natural and expected. It is the loneliness of crowded streets, of buildings packed with strangers, of knowing that thousands of lives are unfolding within arm's reach and none of them include you. This is the loneliness that Fyodor Dostoyevsky captures in *White Nights*, and he captures it with such precision that the story has never stopped feeling contemporary, even though it was first published in 1848, when Dostoyevsky was twenty-seven years old and still years away from the prison sentence that would transform him into the novelist we now remember. The story is short, barely more than a novella, and its plot can be summarized in a paragraph. A lonely young man in Saint Petersburg meets a crying girl on a bridge. They talk. They meet again the next night, and the next, and the next. She tells him her story. He falls in love with her. She almost loves him back. Then the man she actually loves returns, and she leaves. The young man goes back to his solitary life, grateful for the brief happiness she gave him and devastated by its loss. But the plot is not what makes *White Nights* endure. What makes it endure is the voice of its narrator, a man Dostoyevsky calls simply the Dreamer, whose inner life is so rich and so painfully self-aware that we cannot help but recognize ourselves in him. He is a man who has spent eight years in Petersburg without making a single friend, who knows the city's buildings and bridges better than he knows any human being, who has fallen into the habit of living so thoroughly inside his own imagination that the real world has begun to feel like an interruption. When he finally meets someone who seems to see him, who listens to him, who calls him kind and good, the experience is so overwhelming that…