White Nights
Questions
The most common questions about White Nights, answered from the novella.
- What is the summary of White Nights?White Nights tells of four nights and one morning in the life of a man of twenty-six, unnamed, who lives alone in St. Petersburg and by reverie: on...
- What is White Nights about?White Nights is about what a man who lives by reverie does when real life finally happens to him, and the book's answer is that he turns it into a...
- Does the Dreamer of White Nights have a name?No. The narrator of White Nights never says his own name, and no one calls him by a name in the book. He is known by the word with which he...
- Who is Nastenka in White Nights?Nastenka, a diminutive of Anastasia, is the seventeen-year-old girl whom the Dreamer finds weeping on the embankment on the First Night. Orphaned of...
- Why is the book called White Nights?The book is called White Nights because of the bright nights of early summer in St. Petersburg, when the sun dips just below the horizon and the sky...
- Is the ending of White Nights happy?It depends on whom you ask, and the book leaves the answer open on purpose. For Nastenka, the ending is happy: the lodger returns, in love, and the...
- Who is the lodger in White Nights?The lodger is the young man who rents the mezzanine of Nastenka's grandmother's house and for whom she has been waiting for a year. He has no name,...
- How many pages does White Nights have, and how many days does it take to read it?White Nights is a short novella of about 67 pages, and it can comfortably be read in a week, one night a day. Many people read it all at once, in one...
- Is White Nights a good book with which to start reading Dostoevsky?Yes, White Nights is one of the best doorways into Dostoevsky: it is short, has only two characters on stage for most of the time and a story that is...
- What is the relationship between White Nights and Notes from Underground?Notes from Underground, of 1864, can be read as the continuation of White Nights: the man from underground is the dreamer sixteen years later,...
- What is the Petersburg dreamer in White Nights?The Petersburg dreamer is the type of man the narrator describes in the Second Night, speaking of himself in the third person: someone who lives in a...
- What does Turgenev's epigraph in White Nights mean?The epigraph is a question: was someone created only to be, even for an instant, in the neighborhood of a heart? These are three lines signed by...
- What does the pin mean in White Nights?The pin is the object with which Nastenka's blind grandmother fastens the girl's dress to her own, to keep watch over her without seeing her, and it...
- Where and when does White Nights take place?White Nights takes place in St. Petersburg, at the start of summer, on the bright nights when the sky never fully darkens and the city empties toward...