White Nights

White Nights is a novella Dostoevsky completed in 1848, when he was twenty-seven—one of the few works from his early period with a bright, lyrical, and poetic tone. The story unfolds in summertime St. Petersburg, where the white nights are as bright as day and darkness never truly falls. A lonely young intellectual who lives by his fantasies—the “dreamer” of the story—meets a girl, Nastenka, on the embankment. Orphaned young and raised by her grandmother, she fell in love a year earlier with a young lodger, and the two agreed to meet on the same bridge one year hence. But on the appointed day, he does not appear. The kindhearted dreamer spends four consecutive evenings with her by the river, listening to the story of her life and, for the first time, confiding his own lonely secrets. From strangers they become intimates, and affection even begins to stir—yet at the very moment Nastenka resolves to walk forward hand in hand with the dreamer, the man she has waited for all year appears. The novella consists almost entirely of dialogue and monologue; its psychological portraiture is exquisitely fine-grained, conveying the loneliness, dreams, and gentle self-sacrifice of ordinary people, and showing how “a whole minute of bliss” can illuminate an entire life. This edition is the hardcover “Classics in Translation” volume from Shanghai Translation Publishing House, translated by Rong Rude. At just over one hundred pages, it is an easy and inviting gateway into Dostoevsky’s world.