White Nights / Notes from the Underground (Terminal Classics)

My friend used to read to me. Those were the only times when he was calm, the tension left his face, and he began to glow in the dark. He read Miller and Fante, and he talked to me of Dostoyevsky, whose biography he was carrying in his coat pocket like a bible at all times. One evening he told me of this book, White Nights, and showed it to me. A thin, white, fragile slip of a book it was, and I sat down on my friend’s bedroom floor and read it, and drank it in. I finished it, I cried and I could not stop crying. My friend, meanwhile, had left the realms of Dostoyevsky and had immersed himself in the maze of his agony again, and we were lost to each other, both crying for our own reasons and our own seperate secret tragedies. We never talked about the book again. We said goodbye two days later, we just held each other’s hands, and we had tears in our eyes. Nothing could be said. We lived through that winter, both of us. White Nights, the overwhelming and inutterable loneliness of it – and yet, its kindness, its incredibly powerful tenderness and love, have never left me. Those white nights and the black ones that follow, those connections and the disconnections, the love and the pain of living and loving. The plunges we take, and the pain of the fall; the strangers we confide in, and the empty rooms we face, all those truths I found were articulated so gracefully, so simply, and so overwhelmingly, in this tiny book that broke my heart and then made me want to live on. --Katharina Sophia Grabner Photographer - Vienna, Austria