White Nights by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Publish date: First published January 1, 1848
Genre: Classic, Romance
Content warnings: Emotional Loneliness & Isolation
Short description:
White Nights is a short story about a lonely man who spends his nights wandering the streets of St. Petersburg, lost in dreams and disconnected from the world. One evening, he meets a young woman named Nastenka, and over the course of a few nights, they share stories, secrets, and a kind of closeness that neither of them expected. It’s a story about hope, longing, and how even brief moments of connection can feel life-changing especially when you’ve spent too long alone.

I’ve always been drawn to sad and lonely characters, not for the drama (okay, konti), but for the quiet truth in them. I came into White Nights expecting that kind of depth. And while I deeply appreciate the message, I found myself a little bit disappointed in how that message was carried.

Even the briefest connection can change us, yes. The story is emotionally sincere, yes. The dreamer’s loneliness is raw, yes. But everything often spirals into self-indulgence rather than growth. Or maybe that’s the point? His hope feels more like desperation, and while that may be intentional, I didn’t feel like I was watching a person unravel. I felt like I was watching someone already unraveled, narrating the pieces over and over and over and over and over splendidly when I am silently wishing him to tell it less splendidly. (Yes, Nastenka, thanks for giving me an idea for a meme.)

Still, I won’t say it lacks value. The contrast between the dreamer and Nastenka, adds something to the emotional balance. My stars are for that.

I usually find comfort and clarity in sad characters. There’s something deeply human in stories that don’t rush to solve loneliness, but simply sit with it. I love to cry, you know. To feel. So when I picked up White Nights, I was hoping to dive into a story that will reflect those sadness and let me burst into tears. And in some ways, I did. But in many others, the story left me feeling more disconnected than moved.

Maybe I just expected “sadness” because it is a book about “loneliness”. Whenever I review, good or bad books, I always try to think and feel inwards. I don’t even know if that makes sense or if it is the right term. Lol. Many people loved this story, so I’m not sure why I did not appreciate it that much. So maybe it’s just me. Or my shortened copy of the book.

White Nights follows an unnamed narrator but we call him here “the dreamer”. He’s a man so isolated he begins to live more fully in his imagination than in the real world. One night, he meets Nastenka, a young woman with her own quiet grief, and over four nights, they share their lives, their longings, and their hopes. It’s sentimental, soft, and written with the kind of sincerity you expect from Dostoyevsky’s work.

And yet, despite the emotional weight it tries to carry, I couldn’t fully connect to it.

The message about the power of brief connections and the heartbreak of unspoken longing is one I deeply respect. But the way it’s delivered felt… shallow (sorry for the term, but it is to me). The dreamer’s pain is real, but it often borders on self-indulgent. His version of loneliness isn’t evolving. It’s a constant emotional spiral, circling the same thoughts, the same needs, without ever reaching something new. It’s not that I don’t believe people like him exist. But I wanted more emotional depth than poetic repetition. But who am I to complain on a four-day story, right?

“Not being able to see makes everything scarier.”

Rea Frey, When She's Gone

View my vlog when I read for 24 "hours"! LOL

characters

atmosphere

writing

plot

intrigue

logic

enjoyment

I am using the CAWPILE rating system, though please remember a reader’s taste may change from time to time, so I’m not sure if you can trust me here unless this was a recent read. Leaving my ratings anyways because this was totally how I felt the time I read this book. *winks*

I thought I’d finish my current reads in just a few days, but somehow it turned into a 24-day journey 😅 In this vlog, I take you along as I slowly make my way through my TBR including Strange Houses by Uketsu, a quiet horror that left me feeling unsettled in all the right ways. If you’ve ever underestimated how long “just a few books” can take, this one’s for you.

Here are other reads if you liked or interested with White Nights:

Click the book covers to go to Goodreads.

More Dostoyevsky feels
Becoming invisible
Isolate yourself

Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Dostoevsky’s most revolutionary novel, Notes from Underground marks the dividing line between nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction, and between the visions of self each century embodied. One of the most remarkable characters in literature, the unnamed narrator is a former official who has defiantly withdrawn into an underground existence. In complete retreat from society, he scrawls a passionate, obsessive, self-contradictory narrative that serves as a devastating attack on social utopianism and an assertion of man’s essentially irrational nature.

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, whose Dostoevsky translations have become the standard, give us a brilliantly faithful edition of this classic novel, conveying all the tragedy and tormented comedy of the original.

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo

A fierce international bestseller that launched Korea’s new feminist movement, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 follows one woman’s psychic deterioration in the face of rigid misogyny.

Truly, flawlessly, completely, she became that person.

In a small, tidy apartment on the outskirts of the frenzied metropolis of Seoul lives Kim Jiyoung. A thirtysomething-year-old “millennial everywoman,” she has recently left her white-collar desk job—in order to care for her newborn daughter full-time—as so many Korean women are expected to do. But she quickly begins to exhibit strange symptoms that alarm her husband, parents, and in-laws: Jiyoung impersonates the voices of other women—alive and even dead, both known and unknown to her. As she plunges deeper into this psychosis, her discomfited husband sends her to a male psychiatrist.

In a chilling, eerily truncated third-person voice, Jiyoung’s entire life is recounted to the psychiatrist—a narrative infused with disparate elements of frustration, perseverance, and submission. Born in 1982 and given the most common name for Korean baby girls, Jiyoung quickly becomes the unfavored sister to her princeling little brother. Always, her behavior is policed by the male figures around her—from the elementary school teachers who enforce strict uniforms for girls, to the coworkers who install a hidden camera in the women’s restroom and post their photos online. In her father’s eyes, it is Jiyoung’s fault that men harass her late at night; in her husband’s eyes, it is Jiyoung’s duty to forsake her career to take care of him and their child—to put them first.

Jiyoung’s painfully common life is juxtaposed against a backdrop of an advancing Korea, as it abandons “family planning” birth control policies and passes new legislation against gender discrimination. But can her doctor flawlessly, completely cure her, or even discover what truly ails her?

Rendered in minimalist yet lacerating prose, Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 sits at the center of our global #MeToo movement and announces the arrival of writer of international significance

My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh

From one of our boldest, most celebrated new literary voices, a novel about a young woman’s efforts to duck the ills of the world by embarking on an extended hibernation with the help of one of the worst psychiatrists in the annals of literature and the battery of medicines she prescribes.

Our narrator should be happy, shouldn’t she? She’s young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, works an easy job at a hip art gallery, lives in an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for, like the rest of her needs, by her inheritance. But there is a dark and vacuous hole in her heart, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents, or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her, or her sadomasochistic relationship with her best friend, Reva. It’s the year 2000 in a city aglitter with wealth and possibility; what could be so terribly wrong?

My Year of Rest and Relaxation is a powerful answer to that question. Through the story of a year spent under the influence of a truly mad combination of drugs designed to heal our heroine from her alienation from this world, Moshfegh shows us how reasonable, even necessary, alienation can be. Both tender and blackly funny, merciless and compassionate, it is a showcase for the gifts of one of our major writers working at the height of her powers.