White Nights

White Nights is one of those books that gets misread constantly. Most people call it a beautiful love story. I don't think that's what it is. It is a story about longing — specifically, what happens to a person when longing stops being a feeling and starts being a personality.

The story follows an unnamed narrator, known only as the Dreamer, across four nights and one morning in St. Petersburg. He is 26, deeply isolated, and has built an entire inner world out of fantasy so complete that real life feels like an intrusion. On the first night he meets Nastenka, a 17-year-old girl with her own complicated history, and over the following nights something develops between them that feels, at least for a while, like it might become something real.

What makes the book interesting is that Dostoyevsky is not asking you to romanticize the MC. The Dreamer is someone who recognizes every single thing that is wrong with him and still does nothing to change it. He calls himself a dreamer but is really a fantasizer — someone who mistakes imagining a life for actually living one. That distinction matters. And the book keeps pushing on it, quietly, all the way to the end.

Nastenka is the more compelling character of the two. Her backstory is genuinely sad, and for most of the book you find yourself rooting for her. She is sharp, emotionally present, and unlike the MC she has actual stakes. The dynamic between them is where the book earns its reputation — there are moments that feel very real and very tender. But Dostoyevsky is not writing a fairy tale, and he doesn't let you forget that.

The ending will make you feel a specific way. I won't say more than that — but that feeling is the entire point of the book. Dostoyevsky called this a sentimental novel, and he was not being kind when he said it. He was diagnosing something about human nature that is as relevant now as it was in 1848.

At around 85 pages it is a very quick read, but it stays with you longer than most longer books do. I'd recommend it to anyone who has ever confused longing for love — or anyone who wants a short book that hits harder than it has any right to.

The bookmark I used was a Corazon card from One Piece — a man who couldn't speak but loved anyway. I chose it randomly. Somehow it was the most fitting thing I could have picked.