White Nights

By: Fyodor Dostoevsky

Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini

“White Nights” tells the story of a lonely man who wanders the streets of St. Petersburg over the course of four nights, searching for an escape from his isolation.

Public Domain (P)2021 Sylo Studios LLC

A Superb Early Story

How incredible an early story by the great Dostoevsky!

If you’re interested in clues of where Dostoevsky is headed in his first produced writings, you’ll enjoy mining the techniques, strategies, uses of vocabulary here. Or if you’re simply interested in a superb short story, you’ll be much pleased with this effort.

The narration is excellent as well.

Absolutely worth the 2 hours

Amazing narrator and an incredibly immersive story that will make me quiver at the thought for ages to come.

Whoa...

An amazing story, so sentimental, so familiar, so distant, so sad. I've fallen in love with this man's books...

Applause!!!

Glad I listened to the audiobook first before reading the story. While reading the story, I imagine the voice how it was beautifully narrated. I could feel so much emotions, as if my heart was broken. Some parts are funny and silly too. Excellent story and excellent narration! Just perfect!

Fantastic narration!

Another tour de force from narrator extraordinaire Eduardo Ballerini. A classic short story given supreme meaning and intentionally by a seasoned narrator.

Intense

This was my first intro to this author the entire time I was a bit confused in all the different emotions & details. But then the outcome and the detailed descriptions I mean he had my heart wrenched in a tight fist which I was surprised by & loved it! I need more of his books now.

A great book

A wonderful book that I find is a classic underpinning of the western thought process.

Great Story

i wish there was more, the story ends on a sad but heart warming note.

Can't we just be friends?

This is one of Fyodor Dostoevsky's earliest works, published when he was only 27, and is either a novella or a short story, depending on definition. It’s around 80+ pages and won’t take very long to read but in those few pages is crammed more than most authors can get into several hundred. In that short time, you meet two people, people who seem real, people with depth and character. And it is a story of 4 nights, not complete nights but brief encounters and conversations on the streets of St. Petersburg, and a morning after. It is a love story, romantic love, but platonic love, and love that is not matched on both sides.
The narrator is the protagonist and he is unnamed, other than his calling himself a dreamer. He is a very smart young man, a thinker, and a dreamer. He is a lonely man with no friends or acquaintances because he is very shy. He has never spoken to a young woman. He tends to walk the streets in the evening because it is quieter and familiar faces are no longer out. But one night, he meets a woman in tears and approaches her to console her, and we do know her name, emphasizing her importance. She is Nastenka, a diminutive form of Anastasia. He walks her home and falls for her. He tells her that he hopes to see her tomorrow night and will be at the same place they met tonight. She is hesitant but says that she needs to go back there anyway and perhaps she will tell him why tomorrow.
The second night, she returns and they talk again. She asks him about his story and then she tells him hers. He finds that she is waiting on a lover, a man who had left for Moscow to establish himself, promising to return within a year and marry her. It has now been a year and he has not returned. He realizes that he has truly fallen in love but also realizes that such love will remain platonic. On the third night, he helps her write a letter to her lover. She tells him that she loves him because he has not fallen in love with her. On the fourth night, she has found out that her lover is in St. Petersburg and yet she has not seen him so she is in despair, feeling that he has forgotten her. He expresses his love for her and their relationship becomes more confused. They begin to talk about what that means and pass a young man who calls out for her. It is her lover and she excitedly runs to him.
The ending is brilliant. The following morning, he receives a letter from her apologizing for hurting him and hoping that they can forever remain friends. She invites him to her wedding within a week. As he reads the letter, with tears in his eyes, his maid enters to announce that she has just cleaned and removed all the cobwebs. But he sees the apartment and her with new eyes. The apartment, he sees, is a dingy old place and at that moment a tiny ray of a sunbeam that had entered suddenly disappears. And Matryona, the only other person with a name in this story, now looks much older than he had noticed before, causing him to wonder if his future was to be without companionship. He says, “My nights ended with the morning.”
And yet, the dreamer claims to not be resentful of Nastenka but instead rejoices in her happiness and relishes the moment of bliss that she had given to him, a lonely man, saying, “Isn't such a moment sufficient for the whole of a man's life?" The dreamer continues to hold to his dreams.

Absolute soul crusher

Written exquisitely and delivered exceptionally. Been wanting to check out Dostoevsky for a while and this is a great starting point. Short and sweet.