White nights, and other stories
White Nights is narrated by a nameless young dreamer in Petersburg, a lonely man who knows the city's houses and strangers better than any real friend. One night by the canal he meets Nastenka, a girl weeping at the railing. Over four consecutive nights the two share their stories and grow close: he confesses his isolated life of fantasy, while she confides that she is waiting for a lodger who promised to return and marry her. The narrator falls in love, daring to hope she might be his — until the awaited man reappears and Nastenka runs to him, leaving the dreamer alone again with only a single moment of happiness to treasure.
The story is the great portrait of Dostoyevsky's "dreamer," the sensitive soul who substitutes imagination for life and pays for it in loneliness. It explores longing, self-sacrifice, and the bittersweet generosity of loving someone who cannot love you back. Tender and melancholy, it remains his most lyrical work.
How it begins
It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young, dear reader. The sky was so starry, so bright that, looking at it, one could not help asking oneself whether ill-humoured and capricious people could live under such a sky. That is a youthful question too, dear reader, very youthful, but may the Lord put it more frequently into your heart!... Speaking of capricious and ill-humoured people, I cannot help recalling my moral condition all that day. From early morning I had been oppressed by a strange despondency. It suddenly seemed to me that I was lonely, that every one was forsaking me and going away from me. Of course, any one is entitled to ask who "every one" was. For though I had been living almost eight years in Petersburg I had hardly an acquaintance. But what did I want with acquaintances? I was acquainted with all Petersburg as it was; that was why I felt as though they were all deserting me when all Petersburg packed up and went to its summer villa. I felt afraid of being left alone, and for three whole days I wandered about the town in profound dejection, not knowing what to do with myself.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain.