“White Nights” by Fyodor Dostoevsky
This is a story about the unnamed narrator of the book, a man who lives a lonely introverted life.
He begins the narration by describing the everyday sceneries of St. Petersburg, where he walks around the city alone observing his surroundings. All the familiar faces that he never actually spoke with, the polite non-greetings with each others, the stories he build up about them in his head, all contributed in setting up a gentle tone of the book.
And then he met Nastenka. The book is largely about the 3 proceeding nights that the narrator get to spend talking with Nastenka, after their first encounter on night number 1. And the conversation and quotes over these 4 nights are what make this book a classic.
It is a deep talk over sorrow and loneliness, on falling in love and heart break, about regret over the past and over missed chances in life. All wrapped in a relatively short story.
They say that you don’t know love until you read White Nights. I guess I get it, but not the way I thought it would look like (as the cliche “greatest love story ever told”). But instead it is the expression of many different types of love, from the good, to the bad, to the naive.
THE CHAOS THEORY 