Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novella White Nights was first published in 1848.
The work appeared in the literary collection Notes of the Fatherland, a major Russian periodical publication of the nineteenth century. It is set in Saint Petersburg during the city’s famous summer white nights, when darkness is brief and the sky remains unusually bright.
The narrator is an unnamed lonely dreamer who encounters Nastenka over four nights. Their conversations create a short-lived emotional connection, but the story’s ending turns on Nastenka’s continuing attachment to another man.
White Nights is sometimes mistaken for one of Dostoevsky’s later major novels because it is widely anthologized. It is actually an early novella, published only two years after Poor Folk and before his Siberian exile.