It takes place in a world of office, lodging-house and seamstress's rooms and consists of an impoverished love affair in letters between a copy clerk and a young girl who lives opposite him. Of the other stories in this volume The Landlady portrays a dreamer hero, housed in dreams of art until he is forced to move from his lodgings; and >Polzunkov is a sketch of a 'voluntary buffoon'. For Mr. Prokharchin Dostoyevsky lifted a plot from a stranger-than-fiction newspaper story and transformed it into inspired and desolate comedy.