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How Dostoevsky became a social media sensationWhite Nights, the author’s 1848 novella, sounds an unlikely candidate to go viral, but the story of lovelorn loneliness is now a favourite among TikTok and Instagram users
In 2024, the Penguin Classics little black book edition of Dostoevsky’s White Nights was the fourth most sold work of literature in translation in the UK. “We have a member of staff who has worked here for 25 years and he said we’d sell the odd one,” Amy Wright, a bookseller at Pritchards in Liverpool told me, “but the last two years there’s definitely been an upsurge.”
The celebrated 19th-century Russian writer’s novella has become “a phenomenon”, says Francis Cleverdon, general manager of Hatchards Picadilly bookshop in London. “We’ve sold 190 copies of the little paperback in the last year.”
Since about December of last year, White Nights has been all over BookTok and its Instagram parallel, Bookstagram. Searching for the 1848 tale on these platforms will result in page after page of reviews, quotes, and moody shots of the book next to cups of coffee. There are White Nights Spotify playlists full of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich. Social media users from all over the world have rhapsodised about the beautiful love story it tells, and bewailed getting their hearts smashed into pieces by it. “Everyone wants to fall head over heels in love. Then they read Dostoevsky’s White Nights,” read one viral tweet.
There’s one prosaic but important reason: it’s just over 80 pages long. “White Nights appealed to me partly because of its shorter length. On BookTok, a short book is often an appealing one, because it allows people to add an easy notch to their annual reading goal – many BookTokers set themselves a target number of books to get through per year, using tracking platforms such as Goodreads. White Nights’ length also makes it an easy first dip of the toe into the somewhat daunting pool of classic Russian literature.
It’s a story about someone who feels things very keenly, and lives in his own head. “It begins to seem to me at such times that I am incapable of beginning a life in real life, because it has seemed to me that I have lost all touch, all instinct for the actual, the real,” the narrator laments.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that a story about someone who has built an elaborate life of fantasy should become popular on social media, where users intentionally romanticise their lives. The tendency to think of oneself as the protagonist of a fictionalised version of life has been termed “main character syndrome”, and boy does the narrator of White Nights have a bad case.
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https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2024/dec/17/white-nights-fyodor-dostoevsky-social-media-instagram-booktok-tiktok
