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Marcelo Nogueira, a 27-year-old Brazilian book influencer not particularly well-versed in the classics, found himself drawn to Fyodor Dostoevsky's "White Nights," a 19th-century tale of love and loneliness now at the center of an unlikely TikTok craze.
Dostoevsky's story of a dreamer who, while strolling through the streets of Saint Petersburg, meets a young woman with whom he falls madly in love has become a bestseller in Brazil, nearly 180 years after its release.
Editora 34, the publishing house behind the Brazilian edition, said sales of the novella, one of Dostoevsky's earliest works, had jumped 463% year-on-year. In the United Kingdom and Spain, it's also flying off the shelves.
Nogueira, who has 13,000 followers on TikTok, said Gen Z readers found an echo in "the figure of the solitary dreamer, which is how many young people feel today."
The story follows its narrator over four nights and a morning, during which he steps out of his imagination and embraces reality for the first time. His wanderings become the prelude to a love story as passionate as it is fleeting.
"My God! A whole minute of bliss! Is that really so little for the whole of a man's life?" the narrator exclaims in one of the lines most quoted on social media—a reflection on the enduring value of brief bursts of joy.
Tens of thousands of comments on BookTok, a popular book community on TikTok, attest to the popularity of one of Russia's greatest novelists with the social media generation.
Paloma Lima, a 29-year-old influencer and fan of Russian literature, said that young TikTok users came to her YouTube channel after reading "White Nights."
"It makes sense" because it's a "short and intense" book and falls into one of the most popular tropes on TikTok, she said, citing popular narratives such as "friends becoming lovers."
In Russia, the phenomenon is a source of both surprise and pride. Speaking at the Moscow Book Fair, Ekaterina Kvitko, a 28-year-old author, said young Russian readers were far less enthused.
Perhaps it's because it's a "story about a protagonist who is alone, searching for some kind of love, some crutch to lean on. Maybe teenagers in the West are living in that state right now," she mused.
"White Nights" has emerged as a gateway book for Dostoevsky's work, with some young readers progressing onto more challenging novels, such as "Crime and Punishment."
It's an "unexpected" phenomenon, says Danilo Hora of Editora 34, reporting a 53% increase in sales of Dostoevsky's iconic tale of murder and guilt during the first seven months of the year.
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In an era when short TikTok and YouTube videos are being blamed for eroding attention spans and fueling a reading crisis, social media, it transpires, is creating new audiences for the classics. "Being a reader is a very beautiful idea; it can even be marketed. There's an associated aesthetic that's spreading" on TikTok, Nogueira said.
Aesthetics are also driving demand for the physical book over the digital version. "It attracts more attention to have a wonderful cover than a Kindle," said Nogueira.
Cecilia Rosas, a Brazilian researcher and translator of Russian literature, hailed the interest in the classics on social media. She stressed, however, the importance of distinguishing between literary criticism and what often passes for such on social media but which, in her view, amounts to "advertising."
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