A Magazine Novella
White Nights came out in 1848 in the journal «Отечественные записки» (Notes of the Fatherland), volume LXI, number 12, first section, pages 357 to 400. The St. Petersburg censorship committee approved publication on October 31, 1848.
The Dedication to Pleshcheev
The first publication carried a dedication to the poet Aleksei Pleshcheev, a close friend of Dostoevsky in those years, with whom he first attended the literary and philosophical circle of the Beketov brothers and then that of Petrashevsky. The dedication still appeared in the 1860 edition and was dropped from the 1865 one.
Petrashevsky's Circle and the Prison
From 1847 Dostoevsky attended the Friday meetings of Mikhail Petrashevsky, which discussed French socialism and the liberation of the serfs, and within them he joined the more radical group of Nikolai Speshnev. In the early hours of April 23, 1849, months after the novella, he was arrested along with the other members of the circle.
The Text Revised in 1860
For the collected works of 1860, Dostoevsky revised the novella: he gave sharper outline to the Dreamer's romantic motifs, rewriting his monologue and including images from Pushkin, and he cut sentimental phrases.
The Subtitle and the Epigraph
The novella bears the subtitle «Сентиментальный роман. Из воспоминаний мечтателя» (Sentimental Romance: From the Recollections of a Dreamer). The epigraph, signed Ив. Тургенев (Turgenev), opens the text.
Иль был он создан для того, / Чтобы побыть хотя мгновенье / В соседстве сердца твоего?.., Or was he created just for this: / to be, even if only for a moment, / in the vicinity of your heart?..