Forgotten book becomes a Brazilian bestseller 180 years after publication

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “White Nights” has found an unexpected new audience in Brazil, nearly two centuries after its publication. The book’s sudden TikTok success began attracting attention after young Brazilian book influencer Marcelo Nogueira, who is not usually drawn to classic literature, became captivated by it.

The novella tells a gentle, unusual love story about an isolated young dreamer who meets Nastenka during a white night in St Petersburg. They walk and talk over several evenings, and he falls in love with her.

Their growing closeness develops into an unexpected love triangle. That forces the dreamer to confront life more directly for the first time. He has become accustomed to living among ideas and fantasies drawn from books rather than in the real world, and the couple’s night-time meetings expose how fragile the boundary between imagination and reality can be.