White Nights. The Boy at Christ's Christmas Tree

Both works are included in the school curriculum. Precisely through them children first plunge into the unique world of Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. And if the sad story about a poor boy who watched the celebration of Christmas in a rich house is, more likely, an adaptation to Russian realities of Andersen’s “The Little Match Girl,” then in “White Nights” there is practically everything that is usually called “dostoevshchina.” And above all—the sorrow for every humiliated and insulted person who never even got a simple human happiness.