The Landlady
DOVER THRIFT EDITIONS
GENERAL EDITOR: SUSAN L. RATTINER
EDITOR OF THIS VOLUME: JANET B. KOPITO
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 by Dover Publications, Inc.
All rights reserved.
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.
By turns engrossing, fantastical, and darkly humorous, Dostoyevsky’s novella The Landlady was first published in 1847. Set in St. Petersburg, the story concerns an anxious young man, Vassilii Ordynov, who lives in a state of “prosaic tedium.” His passions for books and love of learning have stunted his social growth, and he lives an isolated, solitary life. Forced to find new lodgings, he wanders the city, eventually entering a church, where he is mesmerized by a strange couple: an elderly man and a girl of twenty years or so. Impulsively, he follows them to their dwelling, where they agree to rent him a room. The nature of the relationship between the man, Ilia Murin, and the girl, Katerina, is unclear—is she his wife, his daughter, or his “ward”? After moving into his rented room, Ordynov falls gravely ill; he senses that Katerina is nursing him through a hallucinatory delirium in which he glimpses a “weird universe of dreams” consisting of “stately, magic gardens,” and “great cities springing up and falling into decay,” as well as vivid childhood memories. Katerina’s devotion to him during this troubled time, as well as her offers of affection and even romance, make a deep, but troubling, impression on Ordynov.
He learns more about Murin from a friend, Yaroslav Ilyitch, whom he encounters in the street. Murin, he learns, is a fortune-teller of sorts who has lost his business and turned to religious devotion. Yaroslav is uncertain about the relationship between Murin and Katerina as well. Thereafter, Murin behaves erratically, blaming epilepsy, and Katerina tells Ordynov an incoherent, bizarre story about her own background. Frightened by the couple, Ordynov concludes that he must leave the house. At their next encounter, Murin appears to have reached the same conclusion: Ordynov must go. Murin states that Katerina has been verified “by a medical board in Moscow” as “a little wrong in the head.” Ordynov remains tormented by the nature of the connection between Murin and Katerina: “For what were they to one another?” Plagued by recurrent illnesses and having lost any interest in the future, Ordynov returns to his solitary existence. Filled with bizarre encounters; outlandish characters, and a gothic atmosphere, The Landlady entertains with its puzzles and mystery, while presenting genuine inquiries into choices about the sort of existence one chooses to live—in the words of Yaroslav, “the particular futility which is known as ‘life.’ ”
Contents
Part I
Part II
PART I
I
AT LENGTH ORDYNOV had to make up his mind to change his lodgings, since his landlady—the poor widow of a civil service official—unexpectedly found herself obliged to leave St. Petersburg, and to repair to her parents’ house in the country without waiting for the first day of the month—the day when her tenancy was to expire. As the young man had hitherto had every expectation of completing his sub-tenancy with her, he was a good deal put out at this sudden eviction from his den. Besides, he was poor, and lodgings were dear. So, the day before his landlady left, he took his cap, and set forth into the back streets of the capital. As he went along he examined every bill of rooms to let which he saw affixed to a door; always choosing, for his purpose, the most dilapidated, the largest, and the most crowded of buildings, as places where he had the best chance of encountering not only such a room as he wanted, but also tenants who were as poor as himself.
Although for a time he held strictly to his quest, certain new and strange feelings gradually began to steal over him. At first in an absent-minded sort of way, then with some attention, and, lastly, with great curiosity he set himself to take note of his surroundings. The crowds, the din and life of the streets, the bustle and movement around him, the many unfamiliar sights which he beheld, his unfamiliar position—all this petty material of a daily existence which merely wearies the active, preoccupied habitué of St. Petersburg in a strenuous and constant, but vain, struggle for rest and quiet in the home which he has won by labour or otherwise—all this prosaic tedium and banalité evoked in Ordynov’s breast, rather, a sensation of calm, bright cheerfulness. His pale cheeks took on a faint tinge of colour, and his eyes shone with new hope as he greedily inhaled deep draughts of the chill, fresh air. Somehow he seemed to himself extraordinarily light.
The life he had hitherto led had been a quiet, absolutely solitary one. Three years ago, on taking a university degree and becoming practically his own master, he had been summoned to the house of an old man whom hitherto he had known only by name. There he had waited until at length the liveried servant had condescended to announce his presence; after which he had entered a lofty, dimly-lighted drawing-room which was almost bare of furniture—a room of the depressing type which is still to be met with in old mansions which stand as survivals from the epoch of great families and seigniorial houses. In this room he had found himself confronted by a much-bemedalled, grey-haired dotard—the friend and colleague of Ordynov’s father, and Ordynov’s guardian—who had handed to his ward what seemed to the latter a very small sum, as representing a legacy derived from some property which had just been sold under the hammer, to liquidate a debt incident upon his grandfather’s estate. Ordynov had received the money with indifference, taken his first and last leave of his guardian, and departed. The evening had been a cold, misty one in autumn, and Ordynov had felt in a meditative mood, for a sort of unconscious depression had been chafing his heart. Also, his eyes had been burning with fever, and every moment he could feel hot and cold shivers running down his body. He had calculated that, with the sum just received, he could subsist for two, for three, or, if he stinted himself carefully, even for four years. But darkness was now coming on, and rain was falling, so he had hired the first room which he had come across, and within an hour had moved his effects into it. There he had shut himself up as in a monastery where men renounced the world; and before two years were over he had become, to all intents and purposes, a savage.
Yes, he became a savage unawares. Of the fact that there might be another existence—an existence full of sound and fury, and constantly seething and changing—the existence which eternally appeals to a man and, sooner or later, absorbs him, since it will take no denial—he had not an inkling. True, it was not that he had never heard of it; it was, rather, that he had never himself known it, and had never sought such knowledge. From infancy upwards he had been sunk in a state of mental isolation which had gradually become confirmed through the fact of its being swallowed up by the deepest and most insatiable of all passions; by the passion which exhausts the vital forces without according such beings as Ordynov any foothold in the sphere of practical, everyday, strenuous activity. That passion was love of learning. Like a slow poison it was corroding his youth, destroying his capacity for sleep, and injuring his appetite both for healthy sustenance and for the fresh air which occasionally penetrated to his narrow retreat. Yet his state of morbid exaltation had never allowed of his noticing these things. He was young, and his wants were modest. Indeed, his passion for books had already rendered him an infant as regards any fitting of him for competition with his peers whenever it should become necessary for him to win a place in their ranks. In the hands of its more skilful devotees science is so much capital; whereas Ordynov’s scientific devotion was a weapon which he was turning against himself.
Moreover, this devotion of his was an unconscious abstraction rather than a logically thought-out means for the acquisition of knowledge and culture; and the same peculiarity had marked every other pursuit—even the most petty—in which he had engaged. From his earliest days he had had a reputation for singularity, as being a boy between whom and his comrades there was nothing in common. Parents he had never known, and his strange, retiring nature, had earned for him, at school, much bad treatment and brutality. Consequently, thrown back upon himself, he had come to be shy, morose, and practically a world of his own. Yet in his solitary pursuits there had not, at first, been any system or ordered routine—everything had represented only the first raptures, the first enthusiasms, the first fever of an artist; but now he had created for himself a system which had grown with the years until in his soul it had come to establish a vague, a dim, yet a perfectly comfortable, form of ideas which were gradually undergoing incarnation into such a new and brilliant shape as his soul at once yearned for and found a burden. Already he was faintly conscious of the originality of this form—of its truth and of its power to stand alone. It was a creation which corresponded to his strength; it was one which was gradually materialising; it was one which was ever gathering unto itself new vigour. But the term of its incarnation and final fulfilment was yet a long way off—perhaps a very long way off—perhaps altogether beyond reach!
So this afternoon he walked the streets like a stranger—like an ascetic who has left his dumb solitude for the din and bustle of a town. Everything seemed to him novel and unfamiliar. Yet so unused was he to this world which boiled and seethed around him that he had no room even for astonishment at his own sensations. He had ceased now to feel ill at ease, but, on the contrary, was filled with a joy, an intoxication, which can be compared only to that of a starving man who has just been given meat and drink. Was it not curious that so trivial a turn of fortune as a change of lodgings should be able thus to agitate and bewilder an habitué of St. Petersburg like Ordynov? The truth is that he had hardly ever before been called upon to go out on a business errand.
With increasing delight he pursued his way through the streets; looking at everything in a critical way, and, faithful to his mental habit, reading the pictures which unrolled themselves before him in the same manner that a person reads between the lines of a book. Everything made an impression upon him, and not a single impression escaped him as, with thoughtful gaze, he scanned the faces of the passers-by, and also listened to any conversation which was going on around him, as though he wished to prove the conclusions at which, during the quiet meditations of his lonely nights, he had arrived. Frequently some new trifle would catch his attention, and give rise to a new idea; whereupon he would, for the first time in his life, feel vexed that he should have buried himself alive in his solitary cell. Everything here seemed to move faster. Here his pulse beat more quickly and vigorously; here his intellect, which solitude had but cramped, seemed to be whetted and cheered with its own intense, exultant activity, until it worked with swift precision and assurance. He would have liked to have plunged straight into all this strange life which, as yet, had been wholly unknown to him—or, rather, had been known to him only through his artistic sense. His heart beat with a gust of involuntary love and sympathy as eagerly he set himself to consider the passers-by. Yet suddenly he perceived that some of them looked anxious and absorbed! At this revelation his composure vanished, and the reality of things began to impress him with a sense of respect. He felt himself growing weary of the flood of new impressions which had come upon him, in much the same manner that a sick man, after walking a tentative step or two, suddenly falls to the ground—blinded by the glitter and sparkle and turmoil of life, stunned by the roar of human activity, and confused by the sounds emitted by the ever-changing, ever-seething crowd around him. By degrees Ordynov began to distrust both the tendencies and activities of his present life and his prospects for the future. A thought which particularly troubled him was the circumstance that always he had been alone in the world, without love or the prospect of love. For example, some few passers-by whom, early in his walk, he had tried to engage in conversation had turned from him with an air of brusquerie and estrangement (which, indeed, they had some reason to do); and instantly he had remembered that confidences of his had always been repelled in this way, and that throughout his boyhood persons had invariably avoided him as a youth of dogged, abstracted temperament. In short, he found himself struck with the fact that his sympathy had never known any method of self-disclosure than through ambiguous, painful efforts which were devoid of moral balance. Above all things it had been the constant sorrow of his youth to realise that he was unlike such other boys as were his equals in age; and now that he remembered this he made up his mind that always, and for ever, he would find himself avoided—find himself left to his own devices.