The Landlady: Why Dostoevsky’s Story Feels So Strange

Part of: The Deep Reader

Spoiler note: This essay discusses The Landlady in full, including its ending.

To see into the next room, Ordynov hangs his weight from a nail. He has found a crevice in the partition beside his bed; through it he can watch an old man speaking to a young woman, an open book on his knees. A lamp burns before an icon. She listens, grows frightened, laughs, presses closer to the man whose voice has frightened her.

Ordynov is the solitary young scholar in Dostoevsky’s The Landlady, newly lodged with Murin and Katerina after following them through Petersburg. He has become absorbed in Katerina with a violence that makes the few days of their acquaintance feel like an entire life. Fever interrupts his sense of time, while the neighboring room seems to contain the answer to everything he needs to know.

The nail gives his effort to look a peculiar solidity. We can picture his hand, the partition and the strain of pulling himself up. He has woken from a dream and feels recovered; a little later, he is convinced he is still dreaming. Dostoevsky makes the passage into waking life almost as disorienting as the dream it follows. The story’s eerie, sometimes extravagantly surreal quality grows inside a flat whose walls never need to move.

The room is where it was

The move into that flat is described with the care of someone measuring an unsuitable room. A large space has been divided into three by partitions. Ordynov’s narrow corner is squeezed between a partition and two low windows; a cumbersome stove occupies part of his room and part of the passage. A table, two chairs, a locker and an icon leave very little room for a life.

The terms of the arrangement are much less definite. Ordynov and Katerina discuss them incoherently, scarcely understanding one another, while he attends to her trembling and the beating of her heart. Murin asks for a passport. The young man gives his name and social position; the old man gives his own. Ordynov soon carries the document to him, hoping for another glimpse of Katerina, and gets the door closed in his face.

Official identification, household geography and erotic bewilderment occupy the same few pages. A passport can establish a lodger’s identity without explaining the people who take him in. Ordynov has entered their domestic life before he knows what their looks and gestures mean, and his own impatience has helped to bring him there.

Once he falls ill, the writing changes scale violently. Memories, reading and thoughts take bodily shape around his bed. Gardens spread out; a town is built and demolished; the dead resume their lives; peoples appear and pass away. His own fancies acquire an independent existence that crushes him. The accumulated clauses keep producing more life than the sick man can survive or escape.

The effect is exhilarating as well as oppressive. A mind that has lived among books suddenly generates whole inhabited worlds, and the prose spends its energy on making those worlds proliferate. Its extravagance gives us the force of his imagination before that force turns against him. The room contains a feverish body; the sentence has expanded beyond any place where he could hide.

Then he wakes. A hoarse voice seems to be continuing a tale of forests, brigands and the Volga. He lies listening, uncertain whether he hears it, before deciding that he has recovered. In Garnett’s English the reassurance is complete: “The delirium was over and reality was beginning.”

The crevice and nail follow that announcement. They return us to the partition already described, with an actual effort of the arm replacing the uncontrollable worlds of the dream. However, the sight of Murin and Katerina draws Ordynov back into the conviction that he is dreaming. Waking has supplied another position from which to look, without supplying the confidence that should have come with it. We have been allowed to feel the return to reality and then to lose our footing inside it.

The book he cannot read

Katerina makes that uncertainty frightening in a more intimate way when she speaks about Murin. She says that he reads grim things over her, tells her she has committed an unpardonable sin and claims he will fetch her soul when he dies. His voice can seem to belong to someone else, an evil presence she cannot soften or entreat. The man who terrifies her also comforts her afterward.

She puts the book in Ordynov’s hands. Here is something he could inspect: a manuscript resembling old religious books he has seen before. He takes it mechanically, cannot concentrate on it and lets it fall. Instead he embraces her and tells her that she has been frightened, that she can rest with him.

Her answer interrupts his comfort: “You know nothing, nothing.” She presses his hand warmly as she says it. Her appeal to him and her objection to his assurance coexist; she can want his closeness without accepting his account of what that closeness will cure.

The dropped book leaves an extraordinary gap. Ordynov has spent his life among books, and the volume involved in her terror now lies within reach. At the moment when his old habits might help him examine it, love and agitation prevent him from doing so. We receive a description of its appearance and her account of its use, while the contents that could test his reassurance remain unread by him.

Katerina goes on to tell a long, tumultuous history of her own: her mother, a storm, Murin’s arrival, fire and flight. Its urgency deserves more attention than Ordynov’s ambition to save her. He tries to stop her speaking; she beseeches him to listen. Later, after hearing so much, he still fails to grasp what she calls her deepest grief. Dostoevsky lets her speak at length, making us listen beyond the point where Ordynov wants her to stop.

At first, however, the narration declares that he understands everything, so completely has he made her life and grief his own. In the next sentences, his blood is in turmoil and his reason obscured. The wicked old man from his dream has become the enemy before him, with the parenthesis “Ordynov believed this” marking the passage between them.

Her telling has entered an imagination already furnished with an antagonist. The dream lends a face to the person she describes, and her grief makes that face seem immediately present. We feel his conviction that he has entered her grief, even as the dream exposes what he has supplied himself.

Song with different words

Later, Katerina sings. The passage lavishes attention on the rising and falling voice, its tenderness, trills, withheld desire and gathering ecstasy. Sound seems to answer the anguish Ordynov has just suffered. For a moment the prose offers the intoxication he wants from her presence, and there is a pleasure in following it far beyond the modest scale of the lodging.

The words undergo an almost unnoticeable transformation. He can make them out: they are simple and sincere, composed long ago. Then he forgets them. Through the verses he hears other words, responsive to the yearnings in his own breast. Those imagined words carry him through grief, liberation, a beloved’s first avowal and an exultant, unashamed passion.

The prose dwells on his rapture while withholding the actual song from us. Katerina’s voice feels overwhelmingly close, yet the desires filling the passage are his.

This is among the strangest pleasures of The Landlady. The writing can seem to pour directly into Ordynov’s longing, borrowing its excess until a song fills the whole imaginable world. The small notice that he has forgotten its words remains inside that abundance. It prevents the reader from taking the ecstasy as a transparent revelation of Katerina’s feelings.

When she calls him into the room she shares with Murin, she has things of her own to say and do. She arranges their encounter, invites them to drink and asks the old man to tell her fortune. Her actions keep disturbing the solitary fulfillment Ordynov has heard in her voice. She is close enough to touch, yet her intentions remain capable of surprising and humiliating him.

After the fever

Murin’s menace supplies substantial grounds for fear. A gun is fired at Ordynov; Katerina describes threats, intimidation and a dependence in which terror and comfort come from the same person. The story’s uncertainty cannot make those things harmless. Nor does the young man’s failure to examine the book prove that there is nothing in it to fear.

What becomes uncertain is his power to turn this experience into a complete explanation. After leaving the flat, he repeatedly imagines how Murin has subdued Katerina. The account of her entrapment is persuasive enough to engage our sympathy. Dostoevsky nevertheless introduces its growth through fancy and conviction: Ordynov has come to believe it fully, although he still does not know who these people are.

Yaroslav Ilyich, an official acquaintance, eventually offers news from outside the flat. A gang has been discovered in the building, whose owner was its leader. Ordynov asks urgently about Murin. The report falters: Yaroslav has considered him respectable, momentarily entertains a suspicion, then recalls that Murin and his wife have gone away. The discovery makes the house more alarming without settling the part Murin played in it.

The official has also acquired a sweeping disillusionment with humanity. The narrator dryly identifies his habit of judging everyone from one example. Yaroslav’s new common sense generalizes as eagerly as Ordynov’s fantasy.

The cramped flat is still available to the imagination: the partitions, the low windows, the lamp and the room that can be watched through a crack.

Around those fixed things, a voice becomes an evil presence, an unread book threatens a soul, a remembered dream supplies an enemy and a song sounds out desires its singer has never stated.

That world is made intensely inhabitable while Dostoevsky is keeping us unsure how much of it belongs to the people Ordynov has encountered. The strangeness lasts as the ordinary room and the overwhelming experience continue to occupy the same space.

Sources

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Landlady, translated by Constance Garnett, in The Gambler and Other Stories (Heinemann; translation volume first published 1914). Parts I–II, especially I.1–2 and II.1–3; printed pp. 258–269, 283–284, 296 and 316–318. Wikisource supplies a later impression, not a first-edition copy. Quotations and the English phrasing discussed follow Garnett.