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 memory before it ends. The novella deals with solitude in a big city, with the dream that takes the place of life and with love that arrives at the wrong time, but its centre is this operation of the Dreamer's, who sees an encounter as material to remember.
Right on the First Night, the meeting has barely begun and he asks to return to the embankment only to remember it: "I have so little real life that moments like this one, like now, I count so rarely that I cannot help repeating them in reverie". On the Second, he makes a diagnosis of himself and calls reverie, along the same lines, happiness and poison. He even confesses that he already celebrates "the anniversary of what was once so dear and, in truth, never happened".
The book sets beside him another form of loneliness. Nastenka lives pinned to her grandmother's dress by a pin and also dreams, but her dream has a face, that of the lodger, who may come along the street. The two arrive at reverie by opposite paths: he lives with no one, she lives clinging to someone. The difference between the two dreams decides the ending.
The final sentence hands the question back to the reader: "A whole minute of bliss! Can that be too little, even for a whole human life?" The text sustains two readings. For some, it is the gratitude of someone who is finally content with what exists. For others, it is the last reverie, in which he gives himself the noble role of the one who blesses.