White Nights: Fjodor Dostoyevsky (Penguin Little Black Classics)

Classic Dostoyevsky - great first read if you’ve never read him before.

I first read this story thirty years ago in an earlier Penguin Classics translation. At the time I was having a Dostoyevsky splurge, reading every bit of the great writer I could find, including A Writer’s Diary, which I discovered somewhere. Since then I have tried to broaden my reading, conscious of the fact that the literary texts of dead white men are not as “universal” as I was led to believe when I did an English Literature degree in the early eighties. However, I keep coming back to Dostoyevsky, and I have to confess that alongside Franz Kafka, he is my favourite writer of all time……OK, you can dismiss him as conservative, anti-Semitic and anti-Polish, and none of that sits well with me as a wannabe socialist/humanist/internationalist. But Dostoyevsky is so hard to pin down, so complex, that non-platforming him for this or that is not just unfair, it cuts you off from one of the greatest writers who ever lived. Take for example Yuval Noah Harari in Homo Deus who describes Dostoyevsky as “a fanatical god hater”, while dear old Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, desperately tries to claim the great man as one of the elect.Anyway, here we are with White Nights and Bobok, two short stories that typify Dostoyevsky’s complexity. In White Nights we have as narrator a lonely man who thinks he is going to win the hand of a young woman he meets by chance because she appears vulnerable and in need of his manly wisdom and understanding, only to find that she’s in love with another man. What a shock that is for the narrator. And it’s an even bigger shock when the man she loves reappears and off she goes, leaving the narrator to contemplate a life of utter loneliness and despair. So what? You might ask. But this story was written in 1848 when Dostoyevsky was just 27. It was written at a time when men were supposed to go out into the world, thrusting their way, making something of themselves with their womenfolk trailing obediently behind them. In the Victorian era real men were not supposed to be lonely, isolated, timid, shy, and acting as though their whole reason for being was dependent on the whims of a young woman. Cracking stuff.And in Bobok we have voices from the grave and there’s not much to look forward to! According to Dostoyevsky the after life is going to be as full of hypocrisy and petty jealousies and resentments and spite as this life. Again, it’s a great read. Totally modern despite having been written in 1873.If you think Dostoyevsky isn’t worth reading because of his race and gender, give this selection a try. You will be surprised. I guarantee it.

White Nights isn’t the most romantic novel I’ve ever read but it does do an extremely impressive job of expressing all of the moments you experience during love in such a short number of pages! Its ability to make you feel the joys, the turbulence and the heartbreak of love all in around 90 pages is very impressive. The writing is top-tier and at times can require quite a high level of concentration to stay immersed but it all equates to a book that manages to depict emotions you wouldn’t necessarily know how else to articulate in so few words. White Nights is short and sweet but it’s special.

A truly good book, a sad story with unexpected plot twists but so worth the read, really recommend it.

This book has to be one of my favourites! It’s an easy and quick read!

Dudeee. This is such a good book.It takes like 30 pages to actually get into it, but it’s sooo good. Only 90 pages so perf for a journey or something. In terms of classics, it’s pretty easy to read tbh. Considering it’s Russian literature it doesn’t have all of the confusing names. Some sentences I think it’s really good to analyse properly because they have so much meaning, but it’s a prettyyyy easy read (for a classic, not in general).I loveeeeeee how loneliness and somewhat unwarranted attachment were portrayed in this book. It’s not reallyyyy a love story as much as it is. Great book, would definitely recommend. Maybe not as a first classic because it’s hard to get into, but ong give it like 40 pages of your time.

Such a beautiful story- was my first classic book! Dostoyevsky's way of writing is unlike any others, and is truly endearing in its ways of depicting the human condition and solitude, even amongst a crowd. I'd recommend it to anyone getting into the classics.

I appreciate that Dostoyevsky is a reputed literary master and that I do not have either the intellect or the credentials to criticise his work. However, on the most simple level, I really struggled to connect with the characters in White Nights in any meaningful way, and I actually found them to be really quite irritating. This is a very short book (less than 100 pages) & yet I still found I had to force myself to finish it. It would appear that I am alone in my feelings on this, as many, many others feel very differently about it. The good news is that it is short enough to read and decide for yourself.