A lonely man walks Petersburg at night, meets a woman on a canal bridge, and is granted four white nights of company before the terms become clear. Dostoevsky's early stories work at the scale he would later abandon - a room, a street, one voice explaining itself - and the sentimental dreamer of these pages is the ancestor of every character he wrote afterwards. Sixty plates of moonlit water, wrecked frigates and stormy seas by painters including Ivan Shishkin and Caspar David Friedrich turn the dreamer's four nights into a gallery of the northern dark.