concept
Meblirovannye komnaty (furnished rooms)
furnished rooms
also: меблированные комнаты, furnished-rooms establishment
A common urban Russian lodging arrangement -- a house or set of rooms let out furnished, typically to single men (students, minor officials, musicians) on a monthly or weekly basis, run by a landlady/proprietress; the setting of the story, whose ownership (Brykovich's wife's, not his) is the source of the story's central irony.
Reading notes
- The Lodger §1 the furnished-rooms establishment "Tunis"
Meblirovannye komnaty -- furnished rooms let out, typically monthly, to single lodgers such as students, minor officials, and musicians, and run by a landlady. That the "Tunis" belongs to Brykovich's wife, not to him, is the story's whole engine: he plays landlord to a tenant while being, by Khalyavkin's tipsy logic, just another lodger himself.