Moscow

Moscow is the city to which the young Lodger, having finished his business in Petersburg, announces he must return for a year. It is the place that separates him from Nastenka and becomes the central object of her hope and despair throughout the story.

The Lodger's Departure and Promise

Just a year before the main events, in May, the Lodger comes to Nastenka and her Grandmother to inform them that his business in Petersburg is finished and that he must go back to Moscow for a year. When Nastenka hears this, she sinks into a chair half dead, though her Grandmother notices nothing. That evening, after Grandmother has gone to bed, Nastenka makes up her mind to end the situation. She packs all her linen into a parcel and, more dead than alive, goes upstairs to the Lodger's room. When he opens the door, he cries out as though seeing a ghost and rushes to give her water, for she can hardly stand. After she recovers and bursts into tears, he explains that he is a poor man with nothing, not even a decent berth, and asks how they could live if he were to marry her. After a long conversation in which Nastenka becomes frantic, saying she cannot go on living with her Grandmother and will run away to Moscow if he likes, the Lodger sits in silence for some minutes, then takes her hand and swears that if he is ever in a position to marry, she will make his happiness. He tells her he is going to Moscow and will be there just a year, hoping to establish his position. When he comes back, if she still loves him, he swears they will be happy. He repeats that if it is not within a year it will certainly be some time, provided she does not prefer anyone else, for he cannot and dare not bind her by any sort of promise. The next day he goes away, and they agree together not to say a word to Grandmother.

The Year of Waiting

For a full year, Nastenka waits for the Lodger's return from Moscow. During this time, she is pinned to her Grandmother's dress, unable to leave the house freely. The year passes, and the Lodger arrives back in Petersburg, but for three days he does not show himself and sends no sign or sound. Nastenka knows he is in the city because they had made an agreement on the evening before his departure: when he arrived, he would come directly to her, or if that were impossible, he would leave a letter with some good simple people of her acquaintance. They had also arranged to meet at ten o'clock on the day he arrived at the same seat on the Canal Embankment where they had walked that last evening. Now it is the third day, and there is no sign of him and no letter. Nastenka's anguish is acute: she feels that he has cast her off cruelly and inhumanly, and she cannot understand how anyone could behave with such barbarous coarseness. The Dreamer, who has become her confidant, suggests writing a letter, and Nastenka eventually produces one she has already written and sealed. The Dreamer takes it to the address she gives him, but the next day there is still no answer. On the fourth night, when the Dreamer arrives at the Canal Embankment, Nastenka is already there, and when he tells her there is no letter, she turns fearfully pale and says, "God be with him if he leaves me like that." She weeps bitterly, and the Dreamer confesses his love for her. In her grief and gratitude, she begins to turn toward him, saying she will get over her love for the Lodger and that she loves the Dreamer because he is better and nobler. They make plans to live together, with the Dreamer moving into the empty top floor of Nastenka's house. But as they walk, the Lodger suddenly appears. Nastenka cries out, tears herself from the Dreamer's arms, rushes to the Lodger, and then, in a flash, returns to give the Dreamer a warm, tender kiss before drawing the Lodger away. The next morning, the Dreamer receives a letter from Nastenka in which she explains that the Lodger has come back in love and has never forgotten her, and that she is to be married to him the following week. She asks the Dreamer to forgive her and to remain a friend and brother.

The Dreamer's Relation to Moscow

For the Dreamer, Moscow represents the kind of real, consequential life from which he feels permanently excluded. In his long confession to Nastenka on the Second Night, he describes how he lives entirely in a world of fantasy, dreaming of adventures and loves that never happen. He speaks of his loneliness in Petersburg, where he has hardly an acquaintance and where the summer exodus of its inhabitants to their villas leaves him feeling abandoned. Moscow, as the place where the Lodger goes to establish his position and build a real future, stands in stark contrast to the Dreamer's own stagnant, dream-filled existence. The Dreamer has no history, no real life, no one to whom he can speak. The Lodger's journey to Moscow and his successful return embody everything the Dreamer lacks: purpose, action, and the capacity to make a tangible life with another person. When Nastenka's letter arrives, the Dreamer reads it over and over, tears gushing to his eyes. He looks out the window and sees the house opposite grown old and dingy, the stucco peeling, the cornices cracked, and he imagines his own future fifteen years hence: older, in the same room, just as solitary, with the same Matrona grown no cleverer. He then blesses Nastenka, wishing her a clear sky and a bright, untroubled smile, and concludes that a whole moment of happiness is enough for the whole of a man's life. Moscow, though never seen in the narrative, thus functions as the geographical and symbolic locus of the real life that the Dreamer can only dream about.