Fyodor Dostoevsky’s White Nights has been all over BookTok and Bookstagram:
It’s a certain type of book that becomes popular on TikTok, usually. Romance novels do well, as do YA and fantasy, and mostly they’re new or recent releases. So why has a previously little known Russian novella from more than 150 years ago suddenly caught the attention of readers in such a big way?
There’s one prosaic but important reason: it’s just over 80 pages long.
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But the reason this book has resonated with so many new readers this year also has to do with the the story itself. A nameless young man meets a woman called Nastenka by chance one night on the streets of St Petersburg. He is lonely to the point of pain, and she is experiencing her own agony of waiting to hear from her one true love, who has returned from Moscow but has not contacted her as he promised he would. The narrator meets Nastenka on two more nights, and he believes he has fallen deeply in love with her, despite her protestations that he should see her as a friend. When Nastenka starts to think her lover has abandoned her, she and the narrator get carried away imagining the life the two of them might have together instead. The following day, Nastenka’s lover returns, and she abandons the narrator.
It’s a story about someone who feels things very keenly, and lives in his own head. “It begins to seem to me at such times that I am incapable of beginning a life in real life, because it has seemed to me that I have lost all touch, all instinct for the actual, the real,” the narrator laments.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that a story about someone who has built an elaborate life of fantasy should become popular on social media, where users intentionally romanticise their lives.