White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky Review

This Penguin Little Black Classics edition collects two stories: the novella-length White Nights and the short story Bobek, both by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a writer whose name I’ve seen spelt differently depending on who’s publishing him, and many publishers publish him. Why is that?! It’s his name! The vagaries of the Russian language eh?

Dosty (as I’m now going to call him because I can’t be bothered to write it out in full each time) is having a weird renaissance on social media. I’m seeing lots of book videos with his books featured in nearly all of them. Why?!! They’re terrible! It’s probably an aesthetics thing? Maybe Crime and Punishment or Karamazov really are that good (almost certainly not - we get it, morals, etc.). These people making videos constantly are definitely reading all the books they’re making content about, right? Maybe they really did find a gem of a book by this unlikely choice for readers of the Digital/Information Age who’ve lost the ability to read actual books?

So the dark magic of social media works on yet another rube and I pick up this book, having last read Dosty Rhodes the Russian Dream years and years ago and vowing never again to bother, and, yup, whaddayaknowit, White Nights stinks.

The title story is about a lonely man who meets a lonely woman who tells him her story of a year ago some guy she fell in love with said he’ll come back for her in a year and sweep her away. Well, it’s a year later and has he shown up or will she settle for the sad new guy? That’s the hook.

At this point, I’m not sure why Dosty is considered a good writer. The only book of his I’ve enjoyed - House of the Dead - has accessible prose; the few others of his I’ve read have had this unnatural, melodramatic, annoying style to them, particularly regarding dialogue. So it goes with White Nights where Dosty hams it up with his bad romance writing. Everyone’s bursting into tears on every page and making absurd declarations of love at one another - it’s not great literature, it’s embarrassing and dumb writing at a hack level. Even soap operas have better writing than this!

Without spoiling this nearly 200 year old crummy tale, it’s amusing to note that simps and white knights seem to have always existed and they’re not just a wretched byproduct of our contemporary culture.

Somewhat impressively, Bobek manages to be far worse than White Nights in far fewer pages! The framing device is of a writer writing a story but, after that, the story is completely incomprehensible. It’s just a lot of random voices talking nonsense to one another. I literally had to look up the wiki for this story to find out that it’s about a writer in a cemetery overhearing ghosts waffle on about social mores and other uninteresting tosh.

All I got out of White Nights was total boredom and irritation the whole way through. Social media’s wrong again - Dosty remains an overrated and tedious writer to read.