The Landlady

[Tetsu Arre]

Well, I'm on the verge of finishing this short story up. From the Penguin Classics version of "Poor Folk & Other Stories."

Must say, I thoroughly enjoyed the first part. But the second chapter of Part 2 just took the wind out of the story for me. Hoping the last chapter here has a great payoff. Anyone read it all? I won't be coming back to this topic till I've finished it, so feel free to discuss the deal in its entirety.

[poor knight]

Well, I'm not going to spoil it for you, so maybe I'll just ask you what you thought of the woman - The Landlady herself. You said in a recent post you didn't care for Poor Folk. But if you read Netochka Nezvanova  (also available by Penguin BTW) those stores make a very interesting triplet around the main woman. The pathos is very heartwarming to me and the sort of inevitability of the tragedy is a theme that FD  continually returns to. In these earlier works, I suppose they seem a little obvious relative to his later novels. Yet there is something heart-wrenchingly romantic or melodramatic in them nevertheless.

While FD rejected the romantic style after Siberia, he was a great lover of Shakespeare and Hugo and Western romantics. I think his earlier writing reflects almost a longing for a romantic ideal, even though he knows that such stories wouldn't be "Russian" enough for his audience, especially in the neo-socialist era in which he was writing.