White Nights
Narrated by Elizabeth Grace
White Nights is Fyodor Dostoevsky's short, dreamlike story of a lonely young man who falls for a woman he meets by chance on a canal in St. Petersburg.
He calls himself a dreamer, a young man with no real friends, who spends his nights walking the city alone and making up stories about the strangers he passes. One evening, under the pale glow of a St. Petersburg summer night, he meets Nastenka, a girl in tears by the canal, waiting for a man who once promised to come back for her. Over four nights the two of them talk and walk together, and the dreamer lets himself hope that Nastenka might choose him instead of the man she's waiting for.
The story is named for these "white nights," the long, glowing evenings of a Russian summer when the sun barely sets. It moves slowly and gently, more mood and feeling than plot, and it never strays far from the two people at its center. It's a quiet, melancholy story about loneliness, first love, and the ache of hoping for something that may not come. Fans of Russian literature, gentle romances, and coming-of-age stories about first heartbreak will find plenty to sit with here.
It's a short book, and it doesn't need to be more. Elizabeth Grace reads soft and unhurried, matching the story's own hushed, moonlit pace — let the dreamer's long walks along the canal carry you off, and slip into sleep somewhere among the white nights.
