White Nights

Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote White Nights in 1848: a short, dreamlike story of a lonely young man and the girl he meets on a St. Petersburg canal.

The narrator never gives his name. He has lived eight years in Petersburg and knows no one, and he spends his evenings walking, making up whole lives for the strangers he passes and the houses he passes them in. One night he finds a girl crying on the embankment. Her name is Nastenka. She lives with her blind grandmother, who for two years has kept her close by pinning the girl's dress to her own, and she is waiting for a lodger who promised, a year ago, to come back for her.

Over four nights they meet at the same spot and talk. He tells her what a dreamer is, and how a dreamer’s years slip by. She tells him her whole history, and he agrees to help her reach the man she is waiting for. Somewhere in the telling he falls in love, and for one night it seems she might choose him. Then a wet morning comes, and with it a letter.

White nights are the pale midsummer evenings of the Russian north, when the sky never quite darkens, and the story keeps that half-light throughout. It is early Dostoevsky, written before the great novels and gentler than any of them: a sentimental story, as he subtitled it, about a lonely man's one chance at love. The mood sits close to early Turgenev, or to Chekhov on one of his quieter days.

The walks along the embankment stay slow, the speeches under that pale sky stay long, and Elizabeth Grace lets both run their full length across the four parts. You are unlikely to still be awake when the letter comes.