*White Nights is a short story about a lonely young man who meets Nastenka, a young woman waiting for someone she loves. Over a few nights, they talk about love, loneliness, dreams and the lives they wish they had.*

I actually read this once before and, honestly, I didn’t really understand the hype around it. Reading it for the second time, though, I think I approached it differently. I stopped looking at it as a romance and started seeing it as a very human story about loneliness, dreams, connection and the desperate need to belong. And honestly, I think I liked it much more once I stopped reading it as a romance and started reading it as that.

Spoilers beyond this point. In case, you don’t plan to read the book you can know everything about it from my PoV and hopefully, wouldn’t need to read it. :))

I felt bad for the narrator because he is so lonely and starved for connection that the moment Nastenka gives him some attention, he almost immediately builds an entire world around her. He puts her on a pedestal and falls in love with the idea of her, even though she is quite clear about where her heart is. I could relate to that part of him more than I would like to admit. When you’ve felt like an outsider for long enough, sometimes the smallest bit of warmth can feel enormous. Someone simply choosing to talk to you can make you feel seen, and when you have been unseen for a long time, it is very easy to mistake that feeling for love.

That is also where I struggled with the narrator. Nastenka tells him that she has been waiting for someone else, yet he continues to build this version of her in his head. He isn’t necessarily seeing Nastenka as she is. He is seeing what she represents to him: companionship, hope and an escape from the loneliness he has lived with for so long. There were moments where that felt emotionally uncomfortable to me because loving someone should also mean accepting their reality, even when it doesn’t fit the version you’ve created of them.

And then there is Nastenka. I found her frustrating, but I also found it difficult to be too harsh on her. She is seventeen, confused and desperately looking for a way out of her situation. When she starts imagining a life with the narrator, it didn’t feel like some great declaration of love to me. It felt more like two lonely people finding something to hold onto. Almost like, you need someone, I need someone, maybe we can be that for each other. That is why the whole thing felt less like love and more like desperation dressed up as love.

I think that is what made the narrator’s heartbreak so interesting. He goes from having very little to suddenly having something to look forward to, and when you’ve been lonely for a long time, you don’t just hold onto the person. You hold onto everything you’ve imagined around them. We get the smallest bit of hope and give it everything we have, only to realise later that we had built an entire future around something that had barely begun. When it disappears, we’re not just losing that one thing. We’re losing the future we had already imagined around it.

What I really enjoyed was the psychology of the narrator. He is a dreamer who spends so much of his life inside his own head, creating a beautiful version of the world without really participating in it. He feels deeply and imagines deeply, but doesn’t quite live. Nastenka becomes the first real piece of life that enters that little world, so it makes sense that he holds onto her so tightly. It almost felt like the book was asking what happens when someone who has spent their entire life dreaming finally gets a small taste of something real.

That connects to what I took from the more philosophical parts of the book, especially the passage about looking back at your life and wondering where all your years and dreams went. I read it less as a celebration of dreaming and more as a warning against getting completely lost in it. Dreams are beautiful, but at some point you have to actually go out and live. You have to do the things you want to do, take the chances and let yourself participate in life. Because eventually the years pass, the dreams change and life moves on. If you spend all of it imagining the life you could have had, you might eventually be left with nothing but memories of a life you never actually lived.

And maybe that is why I don’t really see White Nights as a romance. I see it as a story about loneliness, connection and the very human need to feel chosen. The narrator desperately wants to be loved, while Nastenka desperately wants an escape from her own situation. They find comfort in each other and, for a brief moment, that comfort feels like something bigger.

That was probably my biggest takeaway from the book. Love isn’t just about feeling intensely. Sometimes it is about actually seeing the other person as they are, accepting what they want, and not turning them into an answer to your own loneliness.

I don’t think White Nights was a tragic love story for me. It was a quiet, slightly uncomfortable and very human story about loneliness, dreams, connection and the desperate need to belong. And honestly, I think I liked it much more once I stopped reading it as a romance and started reading it as that.

White Nights by Fyodor Dostoevsky