Fyodor Fever: How Dostoevsky became a social media sensation | Fyodor Dostoevsky

BPopularity on TikTok causes everything from beauty products to cucumbers to fly off the shelves. Cucumbers became one of Deliveroo’s most ordered products after ‘cucumber guy’ Logan Moffitt’s recipe videos went viral earlier this year. Books are no exception. Authors such as Colleen Huber and Sarah J. Maas are known as “BookTok” in recognition of their huge success. In a turn no one expected, Fyodor Dostoyevsky joined their ranks.

In 2024, Penguin Classics’ Little Black Book edition of Dostoyevsky’s White Nights became the fourth best-selling translated literary work in the UK. Amy Wright, who runs a bookstore at Preachers in Liverpool, said: “I have a member of staff who has worked here for 25 years and she told me she had some unusual books for sale.” ”

Francis Cleverdon, general manager of Hatcher’s Piccadilly bookstore in London, says the famous 19th-century Russian author’s novellas have become a “phenomenon”. “Last year we sold 190 copies of this little paperback.”

Since around December of last year, White Nights has been trending on BookTok and its Instagram counterpart, Bookstagram. If you search for The Story of 1848 on these platforms, you’ll see page after page of reviews, quotes, and atmospheric photos of the book next to your coffee. I have a “White Nights” Spotify playlist full of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich. Social media users around the world are gushing over the beautiful love story told in this film, and are heartbroken and saddened by it. “Everyone wants to fall head over heels in love. Then they read Dostoyevsky’s White Nights,” one tweet went viral.

Usually, it’s some type of book that becomes popular on TikTok. Like YA and fantasy, romance novels sell well, and most are new or recently released. So why has this previously little-known Russian novella from over 150 years ago suddenly caught the attention of readers in such a big way?

There is one common but important reason. That’s because this book is just over 80 pages long. “White Nights was appealing to me in part because of its brevity,” Ellie Howlett, a Londoner who posts about the book on TikTok as @ellisrubyreads, told me. On BookTok, short books are often attractive. That’s because people can easily increase their annual reading goals. Many BookToks use tracking platforms like Goodreads to set goals for the number of books they read in a year. The length of White Nights also makes it easy to dip your toe into the somewhat daunting pool of classical Russian literature for the first time.

But the reason this book has resonated with so many new readers this year also has to do with the story itself. A nameless young man happens to meet a woman named Nastenka on the streets of St. Petersburg one night. He is painfully alone, and she experiences her own suffering as she waits to hear from her one true love, who returns from Moscow but never calls as promised. The narrator meets Nastenka for two more nights and believes that he has fallen deeply in love with her, despite her protests that he should see her as a friend. When Nastenka begins to think that her lover has abandoned her, Nastenka and the narrator become obsessed with imagining the life they might spend together instead. The next day, when Nastenka’s lover returns, Nastenka abandons the narrator.

This is the story of a person who feels things very sensitively and who lives inside his own head. “At times like this, it seems to me that I cannot begin a real life, because I seem to have lost all sense of reality, all instincts,” Narrator laments.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that stories of people who create elaborate fantasy lives become popular on social media, where users intentionally romanticize their lives. The tendency to think of oneself as the protagonist of a fictionalized life is called “protagonist syndrome,” and the narrator of Midnight Sun has a bad case of it. Mausami Avila, a 22-year-old bookstagrammer, said: “This book captures people who dream, people who think they’re better than everyone else, but are actually in their own world. I think that’s what social media has led us to believe.”

White Nights is not the typical romance novel that tends to be popular on TikTok, but it is a love story, and many readers were drawn to it for that reason. Naomi Philpott, 21, who posts on Instagram as @bookish.naomi, picked up the book thinking it was a romance, and was surprised when she started reading. “I don’t know why people interpreted it as a romance rather than a novel about loneliness. It’s really scary that the two are actually being mixed up,” she says. She thinks part of the reason this book resonates with them is because young people are fed up with app-based dating. “Do people think that just seeing the narrator and Nastenka in person is romantic?”

Chelsea Watkiss, who posts to her 14,000 followers on Instagram as @theclassiclibrarian, believes readers empathize with the narrator’s desire to be seen by someone, calling the story “hopelessly deprived.” “The quest to ultimately find purpose and meaning in the relationships between people.” That, and the subsequent pain of having to let it go. ”

“Almost everyone can relate to feelings of loneliness,” Philpott says. “I don’t like everything to be connected to the pandemic, but I think it’s increased people’s sense of isolation because we’ve all been so estranged for a while, and some people are still feeling the effects of that. I think there is.”

It remains to be seen whether the “Midnight Suns craze” will lead to a more general enthusiasm for Dostoyevsky’s work online. But for now, at least, as one commenter on a TikTok video about Byakuya put it, “BookTok girls love Dostoyevsky.” “Now it’s character development.”