White Nights

A nameless young dreamer, wandering the canals of St. Petersburg at night, strikes up an unlikely friendship with Nastenka, a young woman waiting for the return of a man she loves. Over four white nights — the pale, sleepless nights of the northern summer — he falls for her completely, even as she confides in him about someone else entirely. Written in 1848, before the darker novels that would make Dostoevsky famous, White Nights is his tenderest and most aching work: a short, luminous study of hope, self-deception, and the particular loneliness of imagining a life that never quite arrives.