White Nights

Over four nights in St Petersburg, in the season when the sky never fully darkens, a lonely young man — a self-described "dreamer" — meets a girl named Nastenka on a canal embankment. She is waiting for someone who promised to come back. As they talk, he falls in love with her.

It is Dostoevsky's most lyrical and gentle early story: short, easy to love, and often the first of his works people read. Directors from Visconti to Bresson have returned to it for the screen.