The Landlady

Fedor Dostoevsky’s novella “The Landlady” tells about an intelligent hero with the character of a young “dreamer,” and how his view of life clashes with the existence of ordinary people from the common people: he rents a room from a couple of petty bourgeois whose fate and history seems to the tenant, day by day, more mysterious and more inexplicable.

Dostoevsky’s “The Landlady” was conceived in the autumn of 1846. Work on the novella lasted nearly a year. At the beginning of September 1847, “The Landlady” was finished. The novella was published in the journal “Отечественные записки,” and the first independent edition came out only in the mid-1860s. After Dostoevsky’s death, the novella received a new interpretation. “The Landlady” began to be considered a first step toward the socio-political themes that the writer explored more thoroughly in his later works.