White Nights

For four luminous nights, when the Petersburg sky refuses to go fully dark, a lonely dreamer who has never truly lived walks the empty embankments and finds a girl weeping against a canal railing. Her name is Nastenka, and over those pale nights he pours out the whole of himself to her, the years spent loving imaginary people from behind a window, until for once he is not alone. But Nastenka is waiting for someone else, a man who promised to come back and marry her, and the dreamer understands even as he falls that he is loving her toward another man's arms. This is the tenderest thing Dostoevsky ever wrote, the story of a heart that has hoarded all its feeling and spends it at last on someone who cannot keep it. When it ends he does not curse his fate. He blesses the single minute of happiness she gave him, and wonders whether one whole minute of bliss is really too little for a lifetime.