Quick Summary

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky is a short story about a lonely man, a dreamer in his own words, who one summer night meets a crying young woman. After saving her from a drunk man, the two strike up a friendship than turns romantic for our hero very quickly.

White Nights Book Review

This little book (or short story, rather) took the world by a storm last year. Or at the very least, it took the social media world by a storm when one of my favorite YouTubers, Jack Edwards, recommended it as one of the most beautiful books about love. Bookstores ran out of stock of White Nights almost immediately. 

I can’t remember why I didn’t read it at the time, but it’s been on my TBR since, and so I decided to give it a go as a nice, short read for the New Year. However, I was sorely disappointed. 

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky is, as I mentioned, hailed as a tender tale of unrequited love, but I didn’t find much romance in its pages. Instead, it’s a story about two lonely and desperate people grasping for connection in a fleeting moment of shared vulnerability. While that premise sounds promising, the execution left me cold.

The narrator — whose name we never learn — spends much of the story delivering long, rambling monologues about his loneliness and social awkwardness. It’s clear he’s isolated, living more in his imagination than in the real world, but these speeches feel repetitive and heavy-handed. His infatuation with Nastenka, the young woman he meets, is immediate and overwhelming, despite her clear warnings not to fall in love with her. I struggled to view their relationship as anything more than an ill-fated friendship born out of mutual need rather than genuine connection.

This isn’t a love story, as some might suggest. It’s a story about longing — longing for love, companionship, and escape from solitude. The narrator’s feelings, though intense, are more about his idealized vision of Nastenka than the real person standing before him. Similarly, Nastenka’s openness with him is less about affection and more about her own loneliness. She latches onto him as a safe confidant while she waits for someone else.

For me, this lack of authenticity in their bond made the story feel hollow. Perhaps if I were younger or lonelier, I would have found more meaning in their shared desperation. But normally, I don’t need to relate to a story to connect with it. For example, I deeply resonated with A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, even though I’m not a gay man in the 60s, grieving a lover. Now, it’s one of my favorite books ever. Dostoevsky’s characters, however, failed to move me.

On a broader level, the story reflects some of Dostoevsky’s recurring themes — alienation, yearning, and the gap between reality and fantasy. The narrator’s tendency to lose himself in dreams mirrors a larger commentary on how people often create illusions to cope with the harshness of life. Nastenka’s situation, meanwhile, represents a different kind of longing: one rooted in practicality and survival within a patriarchal society. These themes are rich and worthy of exploration, but for me, they were bogged down by the prose and the narrator’s self-indulgence.

I’ve come to realize that Russian classic writers aren’t for me. Dostoevsky doesn’t resonate, though I’ll admit a soft spot for Chekov or Bulgakov. And at thirty, I no longer feel the need to pretend to enjoy something I don’t. That said, White Nights is a short story, and if you’re curious, it won’t take you long to read it (just maybe borrow it from a library or read a sample in a bookstore before buying a full copy). 

And if you, like me, disliked White Nights, just know that this isn’t the only classic book out there. I have a list of easy to read classics here (and all of them worked great for me). And even if you end up liking none of them, don’t worry about it. What is considered a classic is wildly arbitrary and whether you like these books or not is not a mark against you (no matter what the current social media discourse wants to tell you). 

Most importantly — reading is a hobby and hobbies are meant to be enjoyed! Happy reading!