The lodger is the young man who rents the mezzanine of Nastenka's grandmother's house and for whom she has been waiting for a year. He has no name, hardly speaks and appears in person only for a few seconds, at the end of the Fourth Night. Everything known about him comes through Nastenka's voice, in the story she tells on the Second Night.
He arrived after the death of the old lodger, a young man from elsewhere, passing through the city, whom the grandmother accepted because he did not haggle. He saw Nastenka, pinned to her grandmother's dress, drag the armchair and weep with shame, and withdrew with delicacy. Afterwards he lent her books, by Walter Scott and Pushkin, and took the grandmother and granddaughter to The Barber of Seville. When she went up to his room with a bundle, on the eve of his departure for Moscow, he said he was poor and promised to marry her when he could, without binding her: "I cannot and dare not bind you with any word".
On the Third Night, absent, he is the subject: Nastenka describes him as serious and somewhat proud, says she fears him and that she loves him more than the Dreamer, though she judges him worse. On the Fourth, after days in the city without appearing and without answering the letter, he passes by the embankment, stops and calls Nastenka by name, and she goes away with him. The letter of the Morning says that he returned in love and never forgot her.
He can be read in two ways. On the one hand, he is delicate from beginning to end: he does not take her to the theatre in secret, refuses to tie her to his poverty and comes back as he promised. On the other, he is prudent to the point of coldness: he spends three days in the city without giving news, and Nastenka even says that he mocked her. The book does not explain the silence, and the reader is left with her version, which is the only one.