After the reclusive and bookish scholar Vasily Ordynov is compelled to leave his apartment he wanders aimlessly through Saint Petersburg, contemplating his despair over a loveless life, his childhood and his future.

Ordynov tries to convince Katerina of her need to detach herself from Murin physically and psychologically, and believes he has overcome her reluctance to do so when he hears her sing a song of love and freedom.

[1] Murin afterwards explains to the police that both Katerina and Ordynov are weak and would hand back freedom if it were given; that she needs the control of a master, and he couldn't kill a stronger man even with the means to do so.

In October 1846 Dostoevsky wrote to his brother Mikhail that his short story Mr. Prokharchin was well-received, and that he was continuing to work on Saved Sidewhiskers for Vissarion Belinsky.

The idea for The Landlady already existed at that point, and three days later he again wrote to Mikhail saying that the proposed Saved Sidewhiskers would be shelved as he wanted to introduce a new style, and that "more original, lively and bright thoughts were asking to be put on paper".

[1][2] On 26 November 1846 Dostoevsky announced that he had ended his affiliation with Nekrasov and Panaev's journal The Contemporary, to join Andrey Krayevsky's Notes of the Fatherland.

According to Professor S. Gibian, The Landlady is a "recreation of folktale diction and imagery" and "its plot is based on the three folklore motifs, man–woman dominance, the incestuous father–daughter relationship, and Volga outlaw tales.

Influenced by Freud's psychoanalysis, he argued that Ordynov's familial relationship with Katerina and Murin was similar to Dostoevsky's own, and found reflections of the writer's affair with Avdotya Panayeva, whom he met within her husband's political circle.

[9] Bem states that tiring quarrels between circle members Nikolay Nekrasov and Ivan Turgenev worsened Dostoevsky's health, which was already unstable due to stress.

Vissarion Belinsky called the novella "terrible rubbish" and further commented that he "had tried to reconcile Marlinsky to Hoffmann, adding a bit of humour after the latest fashion, and covering the whole with a thick veneer of "narodnost" [Russian cultural tradition].

"[7][8][11] Belinsky saw the work as resembling the stories of Tit Kosmokratov (Vladimir Titov), that it has "not a single simple and lively word or phrase" and that "everything is affected, strained, on stilts, artificial and false.