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 afternoon; divided, it takes on the rhythm of the book itself, which is told night by night.
The text has five parts: First Night, Second Night, Third Night, Fourth Night and the Morning. They are not the same length. The Second Night, which takes up nearly half the book, gathers the Dreamer's discourse on the Petersburg dreamer and Nastenka's story; the First Night takes up close to a fifth; the Third and Fourth are shorter; and the Morning, with the letter and the last page, runs two or three pages.
A one-week schedule works like this: one night a day for the first four days, with the Morning read on the fourth day together with the Fourth Night, or on the fifth, on its own. Since the Second Night is long, whoever prefers may split it over two days, stopping at the end of the Dreamer's discourse, before Nastenka's story. The last day is left for rereading Turgenev's epigraph and the marked passages.
For those who read slowly, the advice is not to skip the Second Night, which seems like a digression and is the centre of the book: it is there that the Dreamer describes himself and that Nastenka tells the story that moves the rest. Whoever reads it with attention understands why the last sentence, about a minute of happiness, weighs so much.