White Nights (Full Version)

Set in St. Petersburg during the city’s ethereal white nights, White Nights follows an unnamed “dreamer,” a gentle, socially isolated young man who lives more vividly in imagination than in daily life. One late evening he meets Nastenka, a spirited young woman in distress, and their nightly conversations open a rare space where two lonely souls can speak with startling honesty.

Across a handful of summer nights, Dostoyevsky explores the sweetness and danger of yearning: the way fantasy can both protect and imprison, and the way love can arrive as salvation—or as a quiet catastrophe. With its tender humor, confessional intensity, and piercing psychological insight, this short classic captures the fragile moment when life seems about to begin, and the heartbreak when it refuses to follow the script our hearts have written.

• Listeners who love emotionally intimate classics about loneliness, hope, and first love.
• Fans of Dostoyevsky seeking a shorter, gentler work that still carries his psychological depth.
• Anyone drawn to atmospheric city literature and stories told in a confessional, diary-like voice.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian novelist whose works reshaped psychological fiction and moral philosophy in literature. After early success, he was arrested for political activity, sentenced to death, and reprieved at the last moment before years of Siberian imprisonment—experiences that profoundly marked his writing. Dostoyevsky’s major novels include Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. His fiction is renowned for its intense interiority, spiritual questioning, and compassionate attention to society’s outsiders.