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Why Generation Z loves Dostoyevsky
Why Generation Z loves Dostoyevsky A lesser-known work by the 19th-century Russian novelist is enjoying a sales boom driven by TikTok. What’s that all about?
As the literary world enters a new year, it’s time for publishers to look back at the hits and misses of the year just passed. What, for example, do you expect was the UK’s bestselling Penguin Classic title of 2024? In most years, the correct answer would be a predictable one: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
In 2024, however, one surprising title has leapfrogged all the others to become Penguin’s top-selling classic of the year: Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1848 novella White Nights, which has shifted more than 50,000 copies since last January.
But this answer raises bigger questions. What is the appeal of a lesser-known early work from Russia’s trickiest master that has led it to outstrip hardy perennials such as F Scott Fitzgerald and Emily Brontë?
The solution, in part, lies in TikTok, the short-form video social media platform favoured by the young: two-thirds of its users are under 35, and a third are under 25. And within the platform lies the BookTok community, where readers share brief, heartfelt literary recommendations. It’s massively influential: a poll in 2022 found that three-fifths of 16-25-year-olds said BookTok had helped them discover a passion for reading.
Careers have been built on BookTok — though it’s traditionally been the preserve of contemporary writers of young adult fiction. English author Alice Oseman’s graphic novel series Heartstopper, about two schoolboys who fall in love, went global there. The same happened with Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us, which blew up so much that it became the bestselling novel in the US of 2022 and 2023.
It’s hard to go viral outside the mainstream, and Hoover’s books are not high literature: they are consciously sentimental and carelessly written. Yet in the shadow of these juggernauts, more interesting things are happening too. Classics are finding new life, helping them break away from the long tail of slow, regular sales.
What is it about White Nights, a book written 176 years ago, that appeals to BookTok’s Generation-Z base in particular? It helps that it was written when Dostoyevsky was 26 years old, and describes what its unnamed narrator — also 26 — calls “a wonderful night, the kind of night, dear reader, that is only possible when we are young”. He is a lonely young man, gawky and nerdish, who has “grown quite unused to women . . . I don’t even know how to talk to them”. (Already you can see the potential appeal for the terminally online and isolated.)
Our narrator does meet a woman, however, on a bridge in St Petersburg one evening, as she’s trying to evade the unwelcome attention of another man. Over the next four nights, our pair exchange histories and hopes: he is intoxicated by this unaccustomed meeting of souls. “Now in my head thousands of valves have opened and I must set loose this river of words, or I will choke to death.” This volatile, highly strung emoting — will they love one another? Will he be resolutely friend-zoned? — is matched in the videos sharing a passion for White Nights on TikTok.
One BookTok video that simply plays Frank Sinatra singing Strangers in the Night (“two lonely people”) over an image of the book cover has received 1.6mn views, and more than 600 comments. Another, with 3.7mn views, features bookish social media celebrity Jack Edwards gushing about how White Nights is “one of the most devastating books about love I have ever experienced . . . it warmed my heart and then broke it into teeny tiny little pieces”.
These don’t amount to in-depth literary criticism — “My favorite self-help book is White Nights”, says another — nor do they seek to be. Social media virality is driven by extremes — including extreme enthusiasm. By contrast, one TikTok video where a reader argues more soberly that White Nights is not about unrequited love but about Dostoyevsky’s rejection of idealisation, has amassed a mere 100,000 views. Chicken feed, in TikTok terms.
Of course, young people have always identified with messed-up, lovelorn protagonists, with chiming but star-crossed souls. (For my generation, it was Richard Linklater’s film Before Sunrise.) With White Nights, the difference is the medium, not the message. Its success is a combination of the qualities — and brevity — of the book, the irresistible virality of TikTok’s recommendations algorithm, and very smart marketing by Penguin Classics.
Penguin has never been slow to exploit its rich back catalogue — it currently has seven different editions of George Orwell’s Animal Farm in print — and White Nights is available in two editions, both perfect for social media penetration. A small format paperback costs just £3, and a white clothbound pocket-sized hardback is pricier at £10 but looks beautiful on TikTok and Instagram. Of the 50,000 sales of White Nights in 2024, 86 per cent are of the cheaper edition.
But White Nights is just the most prominent success story in the catalogue. Penguin has enjoyed growth in other books by Dostoyevsky in the past few years, including his meatiest, most challenging novel The Brothers Karamazov, whose sales have almost trebled since 2020. (Crime and Punishment has enjoyed a similar surge.)
Dostoyevsky is the perfect voice for a sensitive Gen-Z readership: the angsty monster of 19th-century Russian lit — rawer than the patrician Tolstoy, more dangerous than the liberal Turgenev — whose characters in books like Notes from Underground expressed his own existential angst, and whose opposition to western capitalism and constitutionalism chimes with a young readership.
Dostoyevsky is not the only nervy, skittish classic writer to break through to a new generation through BookTok. Last year, Franz Kafka’s Letters to Milena (“You are the knife I turn inside myself”) enjoyed a similar, if smaller-scale, success. And now TikTokers are offering further recommendations — Rainer Maria Rilke, Knut Hamsun, Anton Chekhov — for those who want to move beyond White Nights.
This is how books persist, by speaking to us across multiple generations and through different languages. The White Nights phenomenon is simply a very modern, tech-turbocharged proof of Italo Calvino’s definition of a classic: a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
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