The Landlady

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS

GENERAL EDITOR: SUSAN L. RATTINER

EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME: JANET B. KOPITO

Copyright

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2019, is a newly reset, unabridged republication of the C. J. Hogarth translation of the work, as originally published by J. Dent & Sons, Ltd., London, in 1913. A new introductory Note has been specially prepared for the present edition.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 1821–1881, author. | Hogarth, C. J., translator.

Title: The landlady / Fyodor Dostoyevsky ; translated by C.J. Hogarth.

Other titles: Khoziaika. English (Hogarth) | Dover thrift editions.

Description: Mineola, New York : Dover Publications, Inc., 2019. | Series: Dover thrift editions

Identifiers: LCCN 2018054007| ISBN 9780486832449 | ISBN 0486832449 Classification: LCC PG3326 .K4 2019 | DDC 891.73/3—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018054007

Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications

83244901 2019

www.doverpublications.com

Note

A TOWERING FIGURE of Russian literature, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow in 1821. His early years were marred by loss—his mother died when he was sixteen, and his father was, allegedly, murdered by his own serfs several years later. After attending the School of Military Engineers in St. Petersburg and serving in the army, Dostoyevsky chose to pursue a literary career. He was an early reader and had read Russian literature as well as translations of Goethe, Homer, and Cervantes. The publication in 1846 of Poor Folk, a realistic work consisting of letters written by two impoverished residents of St. Petersburg—a struggling writer and a seamstress—brought much acclaim to the twenty-four-year-old Dostoyevsky. Dostoyevsky was arrested and imprisoned in St. Petersburg in 1849 because of his involvement in a utopian socialist organization opposed to Russia’s tsarist regime. Tried for treason and sentenced to death, he was among a group who faced a firing squad—only to be “spared” at the last moment. He was sentenced to four years of hard labor in Siberia; he describes his experience in the Russian penal system in his 1861 work The House of the Dead. These harsh years of penal servitude led the writer to embrace the Russian Orthodox Church—which re-shaped both his world view and his writing.

His marriage to his first wife, Maria Dmitrievna Isaeva, in 1857, was troubled, especially after Dostoyevsky, during his travels to Europe, became very fond of gambling. Maria died in 1864, and, in 1867, the writer married Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, a young stenographer who assisted him that year in producing his short novel The Gambler. Their first child, Sonya, died of pneumonia at three months of age; they had a second daughter, Lyubov, in 1869 while living abroad in Germany. After they returned to Russia, they had two more children, Fyodor and Alexey. Dostoyevsky’s continual lack of funds dogged the couple, and they ventured into publishing, founding the Dostoyevsky Publishing Company. Through this business, they brought out the writer’s novel The Demons (1873). After a period of declining health, Dostoyevsky died in January 1881 after suffering a pulmonary hemorrhage.