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 the country houses. The novella came out in 1848 and does not give a date to the story, which takes place in the Petersburg of that time, of civil servants, wooden houses and canals.
Almost everything happens in two places. The first is the embankment of a deserted canal, with the railing where Nastenka weeps on the First Night and the bench where the two sit on the following nights; it is the same bench where she said goodbye to the lodger a year earlier. The second is the Dreamer's room, with green, smoke-stained walls and cobwebs on the ceiling, where the book begins and ends. The grandmother's little wooden house, with the mezzanine, exists only through Nastenka's voice.
The city matters. The Dreamer knows St. Petersburg by its faces and facades, speaks with the houses and meets every day, on the Fontanka embankment, a little old man he has never spoken to. The departure of everyone for the country houses at the start of summer is what reveals his own loneliness: "It frightened me to be left alone", he says, because no one has invited him.
The narrative time also has a shape. It is four nights and one morning, told by the Dreamer already knowing the end; the Third Night is written on a rainy day, and the Morning, also rainy, closes the nights. The brightness of summer marks the meetings, and the return of ordinary light marks the end.