White Nights

This edition of White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky includes:

• An original French translation by François Dante, literary and fluid
• A note on Dostoevsky and his work
• An original preface by François Dante
• A portrait of the author
• The complete, unabridged text
• A comprehensive summary of the work
• An in-depth analysis of the story’s major themes

Can four nights contain an entire lifetime?

In the St. Petersburg of the white nights, when, in the heart of summer, the light seems to refuse to disappear entirely, a lonely young man wanders through the streets of a city he knows better than he knows people.

He is one of those who have lived more fully in their dreams than in the world.

One night, he meets Nastenka.

She, too, is waiting for something. Or rather, for someone.

From this chance encounter, over the course of just a few nights, an unusual intimacy begins to grow. Two people who were complete strangers only hours earlier confide in one another, sharing their hopes, their wounds, and their loneliness. But as the dreamer finally discovers what he had always believed to be beyond his reach, the possibility of loving and being loved, he gradually comes to understand that Nastenka’s heart already belongs to someone else.

Published in 1848, White Nights is one of Dostoevsky’s most delicate works. Long before Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, or The Brothers Karamazov, it already raises one of the great questions that would come to define his writing: what becomes of a human being who lives more deeply in their inner world than in reality?

Dostoevsky explores loneliness, dreams, unrequited love, waiting, idealization, and the strange power a single moment of happiness can sometimes have to give meaning to entire years of solitude.

Short, accessible, and deeply melancholic, White Nights is both a love story and the portrait of a man who discovers, perhaps too late, that it is possible to dream one’s life so completely that one forgets to live it.

This edition accompanies the text with a detailed summary and a complete analysis, allowing readers to gain a deeper understanding of the work, its characters, its symbols, and the major ideas it explores.