The Landlady

After a brief military career, the illustrious Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky quickly turned to writing as a profession, sparking a literary career that would eventually cement Dostoyevsky’s reputation as one of the greatest novelists of the nineteenth century. Early participation in a literary political group landed the writer in exile in Siberia for nearly a decade, an experience which had a profound influence on Dostoyevsky’s understanding of fate, the suffering of human beings, and which resulted in a powerful religious conversion. Dostoyevsky’s works are marked by his penetrating exploration of psychology and morality, which are today cited as highly existentialist. Originally published in the Russian Literary magazine “Notes of the Fatherland” in the fall of 1847, Dostoyevsky’s “The Landlady” is a novella which stands apart in its uniqueness from the author’s other works. It tells the story of Vasily Mikhailovich Ordynov, an aimless young man who wanders aimlessly in despair over his life through the streets of Saint Petersburg. When Vasily enters a church he notices an old man, Ilia Murin, with his young wife, Katerina. He quickly becomes infatuated with the woman and contrives a set of circumstances which bring him to lodge at their home. There he begins to uncover the strange and suspicious circumstances of the couple’s past.