There are, Nastenka, though you may not know it, strange nooks in Petersburg. It seems as though the same sun that shines for all Petersburg people does not peep into those spots, but some other different, new one, as if bespoken expressly for those nooks, and it throws a different light on everything. In these corners, dear Nastenka, a quite a different life is lived, quite unlike the life that is surging round us. But such as perhaps exists in some unknown realm, not among us in our serious, overserious, time. Well, that life is a mixture of something purely fantastic, feverently ideal, with something (alas! Nastenka) dingly prosaic and ordinary, not to say incredibly vulgar…
Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett. In: Dostoevsky, Fyodor. White Nights. London: Heinemann, 1970, p. 15