One lonely summer night in St. Petersburg, two strangers meet along a deserted riverwalk-one a "dreamer," forever out of sync with the world; the other, a young woman desperate to leave the predictable confines of her childhood home. Their connection is immediate. What starts as a single encounter becomes four sleepless nights together, sharing their deepest secrets, fears, and hopes under the protective cover of moonlight. But when day breaks, they must finally ask-how long can a moment of real happiness last?

Fyodor Dostoevsky's White Nights may have been written nearly 200 years ago, but this story of a total introvert struggling to find love in an impatient city could have been written yesterday. It's a tale of urban longing, loneliness, love, bad timing, and-ultimately-understanding. As relatable now as it was when it was first published, White Nights leads us through a waking dream of humid summer nights, instant friendship, and fleeting love. A great first-introduction to Dostoevsky's vast catalogue, and a lasting favorite for his fans.

Autorentext

Fyodor Dostoevsky (born in Russia, in 1821) is one of the world's most influential authors, but he lived nearly as many lives as he created on the page. He was a trained military engineer. A civil servant with a side hustle translating manuscripts. A political prisoner and death row inmate serving time in a Siberian prison camp. A reluctant soldier. A journalist. A husband. A gambler on a constant cold streak. It's this lived experience that brings such unmatched depth to his writing-from exile to acclaim, success to suffering, imagination to dark self-destruction. Like his greatest protagonists, the author himself was occasionally detestable and frequently brilliant, and it was through this hard wrought lens that he explored some of life's most urgent themes: faith and free will, self-interest and moral duty, individual responsibility, loneliness, and love. During the lean years, Dostoevsky searched for life's meaning with the same ferocity he chased a lucky break, and his most famous books-Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, and Notes from Underground-established him as one of the first existentialists. These works went on to inspire an entire movement, and great minds from Nietzsche to Virginia Woolf to Murakami. When Dostoevsky died at the age of 59, at the height of his literary fame, he had created more than a dozen novels, novellas, and countless short works. Nearly 200 years later, these stories are just as relevant and relatable-in our TikTok feeds and neighborhood book clubs-as they were in the boisterous taverns and literary circles of Imperial Russia. And as the world gets more chaotic and clamoring each year, Dostoevsky's voice becomes clearer.