金融时报 | Z世代为什么会喜爱陀思妥耶夫斯基？

Why Generation Z loves Dostoyevsky


A lesser-known work by the 19th-century Russian novelist is enjoying a sales boom driven by TikTok. What’s that all about?
在2024年，初版于1848年的《白夜》意外地成为了畅销经典文学作品。是什么原因让这本书焕发了新生？部分答案在于TikTok。



As the literary world enters a new year, it’s time for publishers to look back at the hits and misses of the year just passed. What, for example, do you expect was the UK’s bestselling Penguin Classic title of 2024? In most years, the correct answer would be a predictable one: Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.
随着文学界进入新的一年，出版商应该回顾一下刚刚过去的一年里的成功与失败。例如，你认为2024年英国最畅销的企鹅经典(Penguin Classic)作品是什么？在大多数年份，正确答案是可以预测的：简•奥斯汀(Jane Austen)的《傲慢与偏见》(Pride and Prejudice)或乔治•奥威尔(George Orwell)的《一九八四》(Nineteen Eighty-Four)。
    
In 2024, however, one surprising title has leapfrogged all the others to become Penguin’s top-selling classic of the year: Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s 1848 novella White Nights, which has shifted more than 50,000 copies since last January.
然而在2024年，有一部令人惊讶的小说超越其他所有作品，成为年度最畅销的企鹅经典作品：最初于1848年出版的费奥多尔•陀思妥耶夫斯基(Fyodor Dostoyevsky)的中篇小说《白夜》(White Nights)，自去年1月以来，该书的销量已超过5万册。
    
But this answer raises bigger questions. What is the appeal of a lesser-known early work from Russia’s trickiest master that has led it to outstrip hardy perennials such as F Scott Fitzgerald and Emily Brontë?
但这个答案引发了更大的问题。这位俄罗斯最难读懂的文学大师的一部较少为人所知的早期作品究竟有什么吸引力，使其能够超越出自F•斯科特•菲茨杰拉德(F Scott Fitzgerald)和艾米莉•勃朗特(Emily Brontë)之手的传统经典作品？
The solution, in part, lies in TikTok, the short-form video social media platform favoured by the young: two-thirds of its users are under 35, and a third are under 25. And within the platform lies the BookTok community, where readers share brief, heartfelt literary recommendations. It’s massively influential: a poll in 2022 found that three-fifths of 16-25-year-olds said BookTok had helped them discover a passion for reading.
答案部分在于TikTok这个年轻人喜爱的短视频社交媒体平台：其三分之二用户的年龄在35岁以下，三分之一用户的年龄在25岁以下。平台内有一个BookTok社区，读者在此分享简短、出自真心的文学推荐。它具有巨大的影响力：2022年的一项民调发现，五分之三的16-25岁年轻人表示BookTok帮助他们发现了对阅读的热情。
    
Careers have been built on BookTok — though it’s traditionally been the preserve of contemporary writers of young adult fiction. English author Alice Oseman’s graphic novel series Heartstopper, about two schoolboys who fall in love, went global there. The same happened with Colleen Hoover’s It Ends With Us, which blew up so much that it became the bestselling novel in the US of 2022 and 2023.
一些人借助BookTok打造了职业生涯——尽管它主要仍是当代青少年小说作家的专属。英国作家爱丽丝•欧斯曼(Alice Oseman)的图画小说系列《心跳漏一拍》(Heartstopper)——讲述两个男生坠入爱河的故事——就是从那里走向全球的。科琳•胡佛(Colleen Hoover)的《爱情，到此为止》(It Ends With Us)也发生了同样的事情，这部小说大获成功，成为2022年和2023年的美国最畅销小说。
    
It’s hard to go viral outside the mainstream, and Hoover’s books are not high literature: they are consciously sentimental and carelessly written. Yet in the shadow of these juggernauts, more interesting things are happening too. Classics are finding new life, helping them break away from the long tail of slow, regular sales.
在主流以外很难流行起来，而胡佛的书也算不上高雅文学：它们有意识地伤感，而且文笔粗糙。然而，在这些巨大成功的阴影下，也在发生一些更有意思的事情。经典作品焕发新生，帮助它们摆脱缓慢、常态化销售的长尾效应。
    
What is it about White Nights, a book written 176 years ago, that appeals to BookTok’s Generation-Z base in particular? It helps that it was written when Dostoyevsky was 26 years old, and describes what its unnamed narrator — also 26 — calls “a wonderful night, the kind of night, dear reader, that is only possible when we are young”. He is a lonely young man, gawky and nerdish, who has “grown quite unused to women . . . I don’t even know how to talk to them”. (Already you can see the potential appeal for the terminally online and isolated.)
176年前写的《白夜》有什么魔力，使其对BookTok以Z世代为主的书迷群体特别有吸引力？这本书写于陀思妥耶夫斯基26岁时，该书采用第一人称叙事，同为26岁的匿名叙述者描述了“一个美妙的夜晚。那样的夜晚，亲爱的读者，大概只有在我们年轻幼稚的时候才会出现”。他是一个孤独的年轻人，笨拙而书呆子气，他“已经变得相当不习惯女性……我甚至不知道该怎么和她们说话”。（你已经可以看出这种思绪对成天上网离群索居的人的潜在吸引力。）
Our narrator does meet a woman, however, on a bridge in St Petersburg one evening, as she’s trying to evade the unwelcome attention of another man. Over the next four nights, our pair exchange histories and hopes: he is intoxicated by this unaccustomed meeting of souls. “Now in my head thousands of valves have opened and I must set loose this river of words, or I will choke to death.” This volatile, highly strung emoting — will they love one another? Will he be resolutely friend-zoned? — is matched in the videos sharing a passion for White Nights on TikTok.
然而，书中的叙述者确实在某天晚上在圣彼得堡的一座桥上遇到一位女士，当时她正试图躲避另一个男子不受欢迎的关注。在接下来的四个晚上，书中的这对男女交流了各自的经历和憧憬：他陶醉于这一不寻常的灵魂相遇。“现在我脑海里的几千座闸门都已打开，我必须口若悬河、滔滔不绝地讲下去，否则，我就会憋死。”这种扣人心弦、高度紧张的情绪——他们会相爱吗？抑或他会被坚决挡在“朋友区”？——与在TikTok上分享对《白夜》热情的视频有得一比。
    
One BookTok video that simply plays Frank Sinatra singing Strangers in the Night (“two lonely people”) over an image of the book cover has received 1.6mn views, and more than 600 comments. Another, with 3.7mn views, features bookish social media celebrity Jack Edwards gushing about how White Nights is “one of the most devastating books about love I have ever experienced . . . it warmed my heart and then broke it into teeny tiny little pieces”.
有一段BookTok视频只是播放弗兰克•西纳特拉(Frank Sinatra)演唱的《夜晚的陌生人》(Strangers in the Night)，配上该书的封面，就获得160万次观看和600多条评论。另一段视频获得370万次观看，书生气的社交媒体名人杰克•爱德华兹(Jack Edwards)在视频中滔滔不绝地谈论《白夜》是“我读过的关于爱情的最令人心碎的书之一……它先是温暖了我的心，然后把它撕得粉碎”。
    
These don’t amount to in-depth literary criticism — “My favorite self-help book is White Nights”, says another — nor do they seek to be. Social media virality is driven by extremes — including extreme enthusiasm. By contrast, one TikTok video where a reader argues more soberly that White Nights is not about unrequited love but about Dostoyevsky’s rejection of idealisation, has amassed a mere 100,000 views. Chicken feed, in TikTok terms.
这些算不上有深度的文学评论——另一位网友称“我最喜欢的自助书是《白夜》”——深度也不是它们追求的目标。社交媒体上的病毒式传播是由极端性——包括极端的激情——驱动的。与此形成反差的是，在一段TikTok视频中，一位读者更为冷静地辩称，《白夜》并不关乎单恋，而是关乎陀思妥耶夫斯基对理想化的拒绝。这段视频的观看次数仅为10万次，按照TikTok的标准微不足道。
    
Of course, young people have always identified with messed-up, lovelorn protagonists, with chiming but star-crossed souls. (For my generation, it was Richard Linklater’s film Before Sunrise.) With White Nights, the difference is the medium, not the message. Its success is a combination of the qualities — and brevity — of the book, the irresistible virality of TikTok’s recommendations algorithm, and very smart marketing by Penguin Classics.
当然，年轻人总是认同那些一团糟、单相思的故事主角，那些互生情愫但命中注定不能走到一起的灵魂。（对我们这一代人来说，理查德•林克莱特(Richard Linklater)的电影《爱在黎明破晓前》(Before Sunrise)讲述了这样的故事。）《白夜》的不同之处在于媒介，而不是中心思想。它的成功得益于多个因素的结合，包括这本书的特质和简洁性、TikTok推荐算法不可抗拒的病毒式传播，以及企鹅经典的高超营销手法。
    
Penguin has never been slow to exploit its rich back catalogue — it currently has seven different editions of George Orwell’s Animal Farm in print — and White Nights is available in two editions, both perfect for social media penetration. A small format paperback costs just £3, and a white clothbound pocket-sized hardback is pricier at £10 but looks beautiful on TikTok and Instagram. Of the 50,000 sales of White Nights in 2024, 86 per cent are of the cheaper edition.
在利用其丰富的旧书目录方面，企鹅出版社一直相当勤快——它目前发行乔治•奥威尔《动物农场》(Animal Farm)的七个不同版本——《白夜》有两个版本，都非常适合社交媒体传播。小版面平装书售价仅为3英镑，白色精装版售价更高，为10英镑，但在TikTok和Instagram上看起来很漂亮。在2024年5万本《白夜》的销量中，较便宜的版本占了86%。
    
But White Nights is just the most prominent success story in the catalogue. Penguin has enjoyed growth in other books by Dostoyevsky in the past few years, including his meatiest, most challenging novel The Brothers Karamazov, whose sales have almost trebled since 2020. (Crime and Punishment has enjoyed a similar surge.)
但《白夜》只是旧书目录中最突出的成功故事。过去几年，企鹅出版社的其他陀思妥耶夫斯基作品销量也出现增长，包括他最宏大、最具挑战性的小说《卡拉马佐夫兄弟》(The Brothers Karamazov)，自2020年以来销量增长近两倍。（《罪与罚》(Crime and Punishment)也经历了类似的销量增长。）
Dostoyevsky is the perfect voice for a sensitive Gen-Z readership: the angsty monster of 19th-century Russian lit — rawer than the patrician Tolstoy, more dangerous than the liberal Turgenev — whose characters in books like Notes from Underground expressed his own existential angst, and whose opposition to western capitalism and constitutionalism chimes with a young readership.
陀思妥耶夫斯基是敏感的Z世代读者的完美代言人：19世纪俄罗斯文学中的焦虑怪物——比贵族出身的托尔斯泰(Tolstoy)更粗犷，比自由派的屠格涅夫(Turgenev)更危险——其《地下室手记》(Notes from Underground)等书中的人物表达了他自己的存在主义焦虑，而他对西方资本主义和宪政主义的反对引起年轻读者的共鸣。
    
Dostoyevsky is not the only nervy, skittish classic writer to break through to a new generation through BookTok. Last year, Franz Kafka’s Letters to Milena (“You are the knife I turn inside myself”) enjoyed a similar, if smaller-scale, success. And now TikTokers are offering further recommendations — Rainer Maria Rilke, Knut Hamsun, Anton Chekhov — for those who want to move beyond White Nights. 
陀思妥耶夫斯基并不是唯一通过BookTok赢得新一代读者的神经质、易受惊吓的古典作家。2023年，弗朗茨•卡夫卡(Franz Kafka)的《致米莱娜的信》(Letters to Milena)（“你是我内心的利刃”）也取得了类似的成功，尽管规模较小。现在，TikTok网红为那些想要在《白夜》之后阅读更多经典作品的人提供了进一步的推荐——莱纳•马利亚•里尔克(Rainer Maria Rilke)、克努特•汉姆生(Knut Hamsun)、安东•契诃夫(Anton Chekhov)。
    
This is how books persist, by speaking to us across multiple generations and through different languages. The White Nights phenomenon is simply a very modern, tech-turbocharged proof of Italo Calvino’s definition of a classic: a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
好书就是这样经久不衰的，它跨越多个世代，用不同的文字与我们对话。《白夜》现象是伊塔洛•卡尔维诺(Italo Calvino)对经典作品定义——一本从未说完自己想说的话的书——的非常现代的、技术驱动的证明。