White Nights

For four nights, a young man has walked St Petersburg’s streets and dreamed of a woman he has never met. Then he meets her — on a bridge, in the white night, in the uncanny luminous darkness of the Russian summer — and the four nights that follow are the most intense of his life. Her name is Nastenka. She is waiting for someone else. And everything she tells him should make it impossible for him to love her.

Dostoevsky’s White Nights — written when he was twenty-six, before the arrest and imprisonment that would transform him — is the purest and most delicate of his works: a novella about the particular tenderness and particular sadness of loving someone who cannot love you back. It is also a portrait of St Petersburg that captures the city’s quality of unreality during the short summer nights when darkness never quite arrives.

This Penguin Little Black Classic offers the complete novella in a beautiful pocket edition — one of literature’s most precise accounts of romantic longing in fewer than a hundred pages. Published by Penguin.