Fyodor fever: how Dostoevsky became a social media sensation

White Nights, the author’s 1848 novella, sounds an unlikely candidate to go viral, but the story of lovelorn loneliness is now a favourite among TikTok and Instagram users

Being popular on TikTok can make just about anything fly off the shelves, from beauty products to cucumbers, which became one of the most-ordered Deliveroo items after “cucumber guy” Logan Moffitt’s recipe videos went viral earlier this year. 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.”

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