Swiping right on Dostoevsky

Why Gen Z is in love with 'White Nights'

KARACHI:

When Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote White Nights in 1848, he captured the ephemeral glow of St Petersburg summers - a season where night is barely distinguishable from day, and emotions, like shadows, blur and extend. It's a story of fleeting connection, unrequited love, and yearning for something just beyond reach. Over 175 years later, this novella has found a new audience, not in the salons of 19th-century Russia, but on TikTok. Young readers are turning Dostoevsky's melancholic tale into an anthem for their own midnight confessions, often pairing quotes with moody music or urban landscapes.

The Guardian recently reported on this resurgence, attributing it to a generation drawn to Dostoevsky's exploration of loneliness and self-delusion. But why does a story about a dreamer wandering 19th-century Russia resonate so deeply with digital natives?

Part of the answer lies in Dostoevsky's timeless exploration of isolation. In White Nights, the protagonist's life is a solitary orbit of the city until a chance encounter with Nastenka, a young woman as lonely as he is. Their conversations over four nights are rich with vulnerability, filled with moments where they reveal their fears, desires, and the burdens of their pasts. Yet, just as quickly as the connection forms, it dissolves. Nastenka chooses another, leaving the narrator's dreams shattered.

"I like you because you have not fallen in love with me," she tells the narrator on their third night. "You know that some men in your place would have been pestering and worrying me, would have been sighing and miserable, while you are so nice."

In today's online vernacular, Nastenka's unheeding compliment would be textbook "friendzoning". Conversely, many older reads can be combed through for modern-day parallels, only proving the long life of literature. But there is something about White Night's central premise hinged on caducity. In a world where connections often form and fade over the course of a few text exchanges or late-night messages, Dostoevsky's portrayal of fleeting intimacy feels strikingly familiar. It's the heartbreak of being seen, only to be forgotten again, like a casual swipe on yet another dating app.

A prime candidate

In recent years, online communities dedicated to books and readers, dubbed BookTok and Bookstagram, have built a divisive reputation for amplifying certain genres and themes - namely romance and fantasy. Controversial authors like Colleen Hoover and Penelope Douglas typically cater to fans of an equally provocative subgenre of fiction: dark romance.

Dark romance walks a razor-thin line between fascination and discomfort. It delves into the murky depths of human relationships, where love intersects with betrayal, trauma, and redemption. Defined by morally ambiguous characters and charged with high-stakes narratives, it offers a striking departure from conventional love stories. For readers, it's not about idyllic romance but the visceral, sometimes unsettling exploration of power dynamics and emotional scars that linger long after the last page is turned.

The genre finds its roots in literary classics, with Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights serving as an early blueprint. Heathcliff and Catherine's tempestuous relationship set the stage for the emotionally fraught dynamics that define dark romance. But while Brontë's gothic masterpiece hinted at destructive love, modern iterations dive headfirst into the psychological labyrinth of such relationships.

Even if contemporary works like CJ Roberts' The Dark Duet series and Sarah J Maas' A Court of Thorns and Roses take generous detours from Brontë, Gen Z is always ready to absorb a certain type of classic. Like dark romance, dark academia was the cultural phenomenon of the moment in TikTok and Tumblr circles not long ago. According to Forbes India, the aesthetic emerged in 2020 with the onset of COVID-19 and lockdown forcing school closures. English school uniforms, early 20th-century novels, and the timeless charm of university library decor found a renewed reverence among Gen Z.

Just as dark romance finds its roots in gothic literature, dark academia draws heavily from classics like Donna Tartt's The Secret History, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and even TS Eliot's poetry. It resurrects these works, embedding them in a modern context while embracing their themes of isolation, ambition, and moral ambiguity. On platforms like TikTok, where the aesthetic has flourished, Shelley's exploration of hubris and Eliot's meditations on time and decay feel particularly resonant, finding new life among young readers who seek depth in their engagement with art and literature.

More than the algorithm

Despite all laments, some rightful, some paranoid, Bookstagram and Booktok do consult an established canon every now and then. And Dostoevsky's White Nights is a prime candidate for these literary corners owing to its short length (around 80 pages long) and themes of loss and love to invite visuals of rain-soaked streets and cityscapes at dusk.

But is Dostoevsky's newfound popularity among Gen Z all about aesthetics? "I feel the book captures people who dream, who think they are better than everyone else but are actually in their own world, which is something that social media has groomed us into believing," 22-year old Bookstagrammer Mausami Avira told The Guardian. Indeed, the dreamer of White Nights is painfully aware of his own tendency to escape into fantasies. He's not just romanticising loneliness; he's dissecting it. This is a trait that many modern readers can identify with and not because the present moment heralds a novel introspection. Enduring terms like "oversharing" and "trauma-dumping" affirm a culture of hypersurveillance, of ourselves and others.

Had the narrator of White Nights been a product of 2024, it's tempting to imagine him as terminally online—lamenting his entanglement in yet another "talking stage," dodging accusations of being a "simp," and simultaneously finding himself cancelled for the perceived misogyny of his unease with the friend zone. This modern caricature is easy to conjure. Yet, while it's a romantic notion to claim that Dostoevsky alone possessed such incisive self-awareness, his revival on social media speaks to an enduring and profoundly human pursuit of meaning.

Gen Z users online are already infamous for coining words like "brainrot" and "skibidi." Of course, they are taken by Dostoevsky's ability to articulate the inarticulable. His stories are also about cities and the people who inhabit them. St Petersburg in White Nights is more than a backdrop; it's a living, breathing entity that shapes the lives of its characters. Dostoevsky's streets, bridges, and canals mirror the dreamer's emotional landscape, becoming spaces of possibility and despair.

For readers today, particularly those navigating harsh urban environments, this interplay between person and place feels remarkably relevant. The dreamer's journey is not one of triumph but of self-discovery.