title: A Gentle Creature and Other Stories: White Nights; A Gentle Creature; The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (Oxford World's Classics)
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
description: Alan Myers has translated a wide variety of contemporary Russian prose, including poems, essays and plays by Joseph Brodksy. His translations of Dostoevsky's The Idiot and A Gentle Creature and Other Stories are published in World's Classics.
zlib_text: https://TheVirtualLibrary.org
  
  
  White Nights
  
  
  A Sentimental Story from the Diary of a Dreamer
  
  
  Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  
  
  Translated by Constance Garnett
  
  
  
  
  
  **TABLE OF CONTENTS**
  
  
  [First Night](index_split_000.html#4)
  
  
  [Second Night](index_split_000.html#15)
  
  
  [Third Night](index_split_000.html#37)
  
  
  [Fourth Night](index_split_000.html#45)
  
  
  
  
  
  **FIRST NIGHT**
  
  
  It was a wonderful night, such a night as is only possible when we are young,
  
  
  dear reader. The sky was so starry, so bright that, looking at it, one could
  not help asking oneself whether ill-humoured and capricious people could live
  under such a sky. That is a youthful question too, dear reader, very youthful,
  but may the Lord put it more frequently into your heart! . . . Speaking of
  capricious and ill-humoured people, I cannot help recalling my moral condition
  all that day.
  
  
  From early morning I had been oppressed by a strange despondency. It suddenly
  
  
  seemed to me that I was lonely, that every one was forsaking me and goi