Fyodor Dostoevsky
White Nights and Other Stories
1966 · 344 pages · Also in this volume: «Notes from Underground», «A Faint Heart», «A Christmas Tree and a Wedding», «Polzunkov», «A Little Hero», «Mr. Prohartchin»
- Author
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Edition
- Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett; first published 1918, reset 1957, reprint of 1966
- Published
- London, William Heinemann, 1966
- Pages
- 344
- File
- DjVu, 6 MB
- Text search
- yes
- Rights
- public domain
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About the book
This volume gathers Dostoevsky’s short fiction, most of it from the 1840s, before his arrest and Siberian exile, together with one of the key works of his later career. The title story, White Nights (1848), is told by a lonely young dreamer in St Petersburg who, during the pale summer nights, meets a girl named Nastenka on a canal embankment and over four nights falls in love with her while she waits for another man.
Notes from Underground (1864) is the confession of a bitter, spiteful retired official who has withdrawn from society. In the first part he attacks the faith of his age in reason, progress and enlightened self-interest; in the second he recalls humiliating episodes from his youth, ending with his cruelty to the young prostitute Liza. The short novel is often seen as the threshold of Dostoevsky’s great novels and a forerunner of twentieth-century existentialist writing.
The other stories are A Faint Heart, A Christmas Tree and a Wedding, Polzunkov, A Little Hero, which Dostoevsky wrote while imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress, and Mr. Prohartchin. Constance Garnett’s translations of them were first collected in this volume in 1918.
Contents
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About this edition
Constance Garnett’s collection as issued by William Heinemann in London. The copyright page records first publication in 1918, a reprint in 1923, a new impression in 1950 and a reset edition of 1957, reprinted in 1966, which is the copy scanned here; the title page itself is undated. A contents page lists the seven pieces, with Notes from Underground in its two parts. The scan has a text layer.
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Source
A scan from the Wikimedia Foundation's open projects. The book is in the public domain: free to read, download and share.