White Nights (Annotated Edition)
She asked him for one promise: do not fall in love with her.
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View cart & checkout →He knows the streets of St Petersburg almost as intimately as he knows his own thoughts. He recognises the faces of strangers, invents conversations with houses, and spends his evenings in the company of people who do not know him at all.
Then, during one of the city's luminous summer nights, he meets a young woman crying beside a canal.
Her name is Nastenka. She is willing to talk. She may even agree to see him again. But she asks for one promise, and it is precisely the promise a lonely Dreamer might find hardest to keep.
In White Nights, Fyodor Dostoevsky turns a chance encounter into a tender, restless story about loneliness, intimacy and the dangerous ease with which hope becomes a whole imagined future. The Dreamer has spent years rehearsing life inside his head. Nastenka's presence asks him to face something less manageable than fantasy: another person's heart.
The novella moves through the peculiar twilight of St Petersburg's white nights, when the sky never grows quite dark and the difference between an ending and a beginning can feel uncertain. Its emotional force comes not from a grand adventure, but from the extraordinary weight of a few evenings spent with someone who listens.
Dostoevsky called it A Sentimental Novel: From the Recollections of a Dreamer. It remains an unusually intimate introduction to his fiction for readers curious about Russian literature, as well as a story that rewards those returning to it years later.
## About this Vael Classics edition
This annotated digital edition introduces readers to the Petersburg of 1848 before the story begins. Brief, linked notes clarify references that may be unfamiliar today, while additional pages identify literary and historical allusions, echoes within the writing, the epigraph and the novella's publication history.
The reading aids are optional. They are intended to help a reader who wants context without interrupting a reader who would rather remain with the story.
Textual basis: Constance Garnett’s public-domain English translation, selectively revised and accompanied by P.K. Vael’s original editorial material.
Inside this edition: the complete novella; Enter 1848; nine linked contextual notes; literary and historical references; textual echoes; an epigraph note; and a note on publication history.
- Digital ISBN
- 978-93-345-3847-2
- Format
- EPUB eBook