White Nights

Four nights. One bridge. The white light of a St Petersburg summer that never quite becomes dark. A lonely young man who has spent his evenings walking the city’s streets and dreaming of a life he cannot reach encounters Nastenka — a young woman waiting for someone who may not come — and the four conversations that follow are the most intense of his life. Dostoevsky wrote White Nights at twenty-six, before his arrest and imprisonment, and it is the most delicate thing he ever produced.

This Penguin Modern Classics edition presents the complete novella with an introduction that situates it in Dostoevsky’s early development and in the tradition of the St Petersburg tale. The city itself is almost a character: its canals and bridges, its uncanny summer luminosity, its quality of unreality that makes the most improbable encounters feel inevitable.

One of literature’s most precise and most heartbreaking accounts of romantic longing — small enough to read in a single sitting, resonant enough to stay with you for a very long time. Published by Penguin Modern Classics.