White Nights

This collection, translated by Constance Garnett in 1918, opens with 'White Nights', the story of a lonely young dreamer in St Petersburg who, during the pale summer nights when the sun hardly sets, meets a girl named Nastenka on a bridge. Over four nights she tells him of the lodger who promised to return for her, and he falls helplessly in love. The book also contains 'Notes from Underground', the bitter confession of a retired official who rejects reason and progress ('I am a sick man... I am a spiteful man'), together with five shorter stories, among them 'A Christmas Tree and a Wedding' and 'A Little Hero'.

'White Nights' (1848) is Fyodor Dostoevsky at his most tender, and Luchino Visconti filmed it in 1957; 'Notes from Underground' (1864) is often called the first existentialist novel, the doorway to his great later books. A separate edition of Notes from the Underground is also in the library, and his first novel is Poor Folk.

Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) was sentenced to death in 1849 for his part in a radical circle, reprieved at the last moment and sent to hard labour in Siberia, which he described in The House of the Dead.

His great novels, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov, turn questions of guilt, faith and freedom into stories; White Nights is a gentle place to start.