One Moment of Happiness | Dostoevsky's White Nights

Four summer nights in a city where the sun never sets, and a lonely dreamer who meets a young woman waiting for someone else.

This episode walks through Fyodor Dostoevsky's early story White Nights, told over four luminous Petersburg nights and a single morning. We meet the dreamer, a man so sealed inside his own head that he has befriended the houses of the city because he cannot speak to its people, and we follow what happens when he meets Nastenka weeping at a canal railing and is asked to be her friend on the single condition that he not fall in love.

We trace the warmth and the self-deception of his inner life all the way down, and the quiet question the story keeps asking, what one moment of happiness is worth to a person who has been allotted almost none. No background in the book is needed to follow along.

Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.