Russian Tsar Era Classics — White Nights, by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
The complete story, in a fresh in-house English translation, performed by the KacheliTV cast: Dostoevsky's luminous tale of four Petersburg nights — the most tender thing he ever wrote.
A lonely young dreamer, who knows every house and face in Petersburg but has never spoken to a living soul, rescues a girl from a drunken stranger on a canal embankment — and falls, over four white nights, into the only real week of his life. She is Nastenka, seventeen, who lives pinned by a pin to her blind grandmother's dress, and who is waiting for the lodger who promised to return for her in a year. The year is up. He has come back to Petersburg. He has not come to her. What the dreamer does with another man's happiness — and what one minute of bliss is worth against a whole lifetime — is the story Dostoevsky tells here, complete and unabridged: all four nights and the morning after.
The nights:
1:03 — Night One
26:18 — Night Two
58:58 — Nastenka's Story
1:20:00 — Night Three
1:33:47 — Night Four
1:53:59 — The Morning
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881), «Белые ночи» — first published 1848 in Otechestvennye Zapiski. Public domain. Russian text via ilibrary (24glo.com). Fresh in-house English translation made for this production; no existing translation was used or consulted. Nothing has been cut: all four nights, Nastenka's story and the morning are performed complete, in the author's order, with the epigraph from Turgenev. One period word for a peasant is rendered neutrally in translation; no fact, event or sentence is altered. No passage required exclusion under the shelf's content law — this is the gentle Dostoevsky: a story of love, loyalty and renunciation, without violence.
A dramatized performance by the KacheliTV cast: narrated by Benedetto, who is also the Dreamer; with Violetta as Nastenka; Magnolia as her grandmother; Felix as the lodger; and Lulu as Matryona.
Music: "Moonlit Garden Harp" (KacheliTV instrumental library) — opening theme, between the nights, and closing theme. No music under the narration.
Season 147 — Russian Tsar Era Classics, Episode 9. The shelf so far: Lefty, by Nikolai Leskov · The Queen of Spades, by Alexander Pushkin · The Overcoat, by Nikolai Gogol · The Death of Ivan Ilyich, by Leo Tolstoy · The Lady with the Dog, by Anton Chekhov · The Tales of Belkin, by Alexander Pushkin · Woe from Wit, by Alexander Griboyedov · The Government Inspector, by Nikolai Gogol · White Nights, by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
KacheliTV — world classics, read aloud.
