Fyodor fever: how Dostoevsky became a social media sensation

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Posted on 12/22/2024 9:28:11 AM PST by CondoleezzaProtege

Being popular on TikTok can make just about anything fly off the shelves, from beauty products to cucumbers…Books are no exception – authors such as Colleen Hoover and Sarah J Maas have what is known as “BookTok” to thank for their stratospheric success. Now joining their ranks, in a twist nobody saw coming, is Fyodor Dostoevsky.

In 2024, the Penguin Classics little black book edition of Dostoevsky’s White Nights was the fourth most sold work of literature in translation in the UK. “We have a member of staff who has worked here for 25 years and he said we’d sell the odd one,” Amy Wright, a bookseller at Pritchards in Liverpool told me, “but the last two years there’s definitely been an upsurge.”

The celebrated 19th-century Russian writer’s novella has become “a phenomenon”, says Francis Cleverdon, general manager of Hatchards Picadilly bookshop in London. “We’ve sold 190 copies of the little paperback in the last year.”

Since about December of last year, White Nights has been all over BookTok and its Instagram parallel, Bookstagram. Searching for the 1848 tale on these platforms will result in page after page of reviews, quotes, and moody shots of the book next to cups of coffee. There are White Nights Spotify playlists full of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich. Social media users from all over the world have rhapsodised about the beautiful love story it tells, and bewailed getting their hearts smashed into pieces by it. “Everyone wants to fall head over heels in love. Then they read Dostoevsky’s White Nights,” read one viral tweet.

So why has a previously little known Russian novella from more than 150 years ago suddenly caught the attention of readers in such a big way?

(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...

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…A nameless young man meets a woman called Nastenka by chance one night on the streets of St Petersburg…

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