The Presidential Library spotlighting the white nights of St. Petersburg

White nights are one of the symbols of St. Petersburg. This period is a source of inspiration for many poetic minds.

The expression "white nights" has become common after the publication of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel White Nights (1848) as it means the time of falling in love and dreams ("Yesterday there was our third date, our third white night"). However, Maurice Michelson (1825-1908), a Russian scientist and teacher who studied Russian phraseology, in the book Russian Thought and Speech: Own and Others (1902-1903), referring to the French expression "Passer une nuit blanche" (" spend the night without sleep"), believed that the expression "white night" means "sleepless". One of the editions of this book is available in the Presidential Library.

The artist Alexander Benois, who subtly feels the peculiarity of St. Petersburg, wrote: “White nights - how much has already been said and written about them. How they were hated by those who could not get used to them, how passionately loved by others. But nowhere did the white nights so dominate the minds, did not receive ... such content, such saturation with poetry, as precisely in St. Petersburg, as precisely on the waters of the Neva. I think that Peter himself, who founded his Petersburg in May, was enchanted by some such white night, unknown to central Russia”.

The singer of St. Petersburg twilight Alexander Blok wrote about white nights as an unsettling time that "takes" a person out of the familiar world of everyday life and draws him into a mysterious world full of passions and madness. In the poem “May is cruel with white nights” the poet refers to a time in which “women ... with an eternally crumpled rose on their chests” appear and asks to be freed from destructive power: “Awake! Pierce me with swords, free me from my passions! The poem was published in 1908 in the 11th issue of the St. Petersburg magazine Zolotoe Runo, in which Blok worked at that time. An electronic copy of this journal is available in the Presidential Library.

Alexander Kuprin wrote about the gentle, disturbing charm of the white nights in the story White Nights (1904). The story White Nights, imbued with existential anxiety, is included in the 6th volume of the complete works of Kuprin, stored in the electronic collections of the Presidential Library.

The phrase White Nights began to be actively used in the 20th century as a name for city periodicals. In the period of the 70s, a collection of documentary and artistic essays White Nights was published in Leningrad, and at the beginning of the 20th century there were several literary almanacs with the same name in St. Petersburg. One of them is available on the Presidential Library’s portal. This is a humorous almanac White Nights (1905).

The contradictory mood in relation to the white night is conveyed in music. Piano cycle by Pyotr Tchaikovsky includes the piece May. White Nights, the epigraph to which is  taken from the poem by Afanasy Fet “What a night! What a bliss!” Composer Yuri Butsko wrote the one-act opera White Nights in 1968. It was staged at the Mariinsky Theatre.

Modern St. Petersburg is known for the White Nights music festivals. This festival brand has its roots in the middle of the 20th century. The first Leningrad festival White Nights was held in June in 1958, almost all cultural and educational institutions of Leningrad participated in it. Music sounded in the city gardens, exhibitions were held in libraries, Open Days were held in museums, and scientists from libraries and museums gave lectures at factories, in which they talked about the events of the art world. The central venue for the concerts was chosen by Kirov Central Park. In order the memory of the first steps of the White Nights festival does not disappear, the Presidential Library keeps posters that testify to the names and musical events of those years.

The white nights of St. Petersburg are imprinted by life itself, they are inevitable and inevitable, according to poet Viktor Krivulin, they “cannot be taken away from the forehead” and “cannot be wiped off the cheeks”. A person who is “surrounded by plaster casts” of the architecture of St. Petersburg, in its “boundless whitish haze”, is as if placed in the conditions of the existence of a “white world”, in which he seeks to “warm the numb forms with his breath and look”, to comprehend the mysterious phenomenon of the white St. Petersburg night, thereby raising the mind above her insomnia and daydreaming.