Popularity on TikTok can make almost anything a hit - from beauty products to cucumbers, which became one of the most ordered items on Deliveroo after 'cucumber guy' Logan Moffitt's recipes went viral earlier this year. Books are no exception – authors like Colleen Hoover and Sarah J. I can thank "BookTok" for my dizzying success. Now, in an unexpected twist, Fyodor Dostoevsky joins them.
This year, the Penguin Classics edition of Dostoyevsky's "White Nights" was the fourth best-selling translated work of literature in the United Kingdom.
"We have a member of staff who has been here for 25 years and said we would occasionally sell a few copies. But in the last two years we have definitely seen an increase," said Amy Wright, a sales assistant at Pritchards bookshop in Liverpool.
The famous 19th-century novelist has become a "phenomenon", points out Francis Klevrdon, general manager of the Hatchards Piccadilly bookstore in London.
"Last year we sold 190 copies of that little pocket edition," he says.
Since December of last year, "White Nights" have flooded BookTok and its Instagram counterpart, Bookstagram. Searching for this story from 1848 on the aforementioned platforms results in pages and pages of reviews, quotes and artistic photographs of the book next to cups of coffee. There are also "White Nights"-inspired Spotify playlists full of Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich. Social media users from all over the world are raving about the book's beautiful love story and how it broke their hearts.
One viral tweet reads: "Everyone wants to fall head over heels in love. Then they read Dostoyevsky's 'White Nights'."

Certain types of books tend to become popular on TikTok – romance novels, young adult books, and fantasy, mostly recent releases. Why, then, did a more than 150-year-old Russian novel suddenly attract the attention of readers to such an extent?
One practical reason is its length – just over 80 pages.
"'White Nights' appealed to me partly because it's short," said Ellie Howlett, a Londoner who writes about the books as @ellisrubyreads on TikTok.
On BookTok, short books are often attractive because they allow people to easily add one title to their list of books they've read during the year, as many BookTok users set goals for the number of books they want to read in a year, using platforms like Goodreads- a. The short length of "White Nights" also makes it easy to enter the often terrifying world of classical Russian literature.
But the reason why this book resonated with so many readers this year also has to do with the story itself. A nameless young man accidentally meets a woman named Nastenka one night on the streets of St. Petersburg. He is painfully lonely, and she is going through her own agony as she waits for news from her true love, who has returned from Moscow but hasn't gotten back to her as promised. The narrator meets Nastenjka two more nights, and believes that he has fallen deeply in love with her, despite her protests that he should only see her as a friend. When Nastenjka begins to think that her lover has left her, she and the narrator indulge in imagining their life together. The next day, her lover returns and she leaves the narrator.
It's a story about someone who feels things intensely and lives in his head.
"At such moments it begins to seem to me that I am incapable of starting a life in the real world, for I seem to have lost all touch, all instinct for the real," complains the narrator.
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that the story of someone who built a complex fantasy world has become popular on social media, where users deliberately romanticize their lives. The tendency to see ourselves as the protagonist of a fictional life has been called "protagonist syndrome," and the narrator of "White Nights" is a typical example.
"I think the book hits those who dream, who think they're better than everyone, but really they're just in their own world. Which is something that social media has gotten us used to," says 22-year-old Bookstagrammer Mausami Avira.

Although "White Nights" is not the typical romantic novel that usually becomes popular on TikTok, it is still a love story, and many readers were drawn to it.
Naomi Philpott, a 21-year-old who goes by Instagram as @bookish.naomi, picked up the book thinking it was a romantic story and was surprised when she started reading.
"I'm not sure why people interpreted it as a romance and not a novel about loneliness, it's quite scary that those two things are brought together," she says.
He believes that young people's fatigue with dating apps may be part of the reason why the book resonates so much with them.
"I wonder if people think that the fact that the narrator and Nastenjka just met live is in itself romantic," she adds.
Chelsea Watkins, who writes on Instagram as @theclassiclibrarian and has 14 followers, thinks readers empathize with the narrator's need to be seen, seeing the story as "an exploration of finding purpose and meaning in human connection, after you've been desperately denied it— and the pain that comes with losing that relationship."
"Almost everyone can relate to the feeling of isolation. I don't like when everything is linked to the pandemic, but I think it increased the feeling of loneliness because we were all very alienated at one time, and some people still feel the effects of that," says Filpot.
Whether the "White Nights" fever will turn into a wider enthusiasm for Dostoyevsky on the Internet remains to be seen. But, for now, "BookTok girls are taking Dostoyevsky", as one commenter wrote under the TikTok video about "White Nights". "Well, that's the right characterization", he pointed out.
Bonus video:
