What It Is
The Dreamer's room, with green, smoke-stained walls and a ceiling covered in cobwebs that Matryona cultivates, and the corner where the dreamer of the speech hides from the light. The cobweb opens and closes the book: it is on the ceiling on the First Night, survives the master's scolding and is removed on the day Nastenka's letter arrives. On the same morning, the yellow house across the way gives back the little house of the first night, painted yellow against its will.
Where It Appears
On the First Night, the Dreamer, not knowing where his anguish comes from, examines the walls, the cobwebbed ceiling, every chair; he gives Matryona a fatherly scolding about the cobweb, and she leaves without answering. At the same beginning, a little pink house he loves cries out in the street:
слышу жалобный крик: «А меня красят в желтую краску!», I hear a plaintive cry: «They are painting me yellow!»
On the Second Night, the room becomes the corner of the dreamer in general, the place where he settles like an animal:
Селится он большею частию где-нибудь в неприступном углу, как будто таится в нем даже от дневного света, и уж если заберется к себе, то так и прирастет к своему углу, как улитка, He usually settles in some inaccessible corner, as if he hid even from daylight, and once he has got himself home, he clings to his corner like a snail.
In the same speech, the room is where imagination simmers slowly while Matryona's coffeepot simmers in the kitchen, and where the hero dines without noticing until he receives his pipe.
On the Fourth Night, in the plans, the Dreamer will leave the room to rent the mezzanine of Nastenka's house.
On the Morning, back in the room, with fever, he receives the letter and hears Matryona:
А паутину-то я всю с потолка сняла; теперь хоть женись, гостей созывай, Well, I took all the cobwebs off the ceiling; now you can even get married and call the guests.
He sees the maid and the room age together, the cobwebs more numerous, and the house across the way decrepit, with the plaster of its columns peeling and its yellow walls stained:
я увидел себя таким, как я теперь, ровно через пятнадцать лет, постаревшим, в той же комнате, так же одиноким, с той же Матреной, I saw myself as I am now, exactly fifteen years from now, aged, in the same room, as lonely as I am now, with the same Matryona.
What It Means
The room is the Dreamer's solitude with walls, and the cobweb is time within it: while it stays on the ceiling, nothing changes in the life of whoever lives there. The snail's corner of the Second Night is the version he makes of himself to tell Nastenka, with grace; the room of the Morning is the same corner seen without any grace at all.
The book closes in a ring. The cobweb of the First Night returns on the Morning, removed at the worst moment, and the yellow house across the way gives back the little house of the first night: what the Dreamer sees age outside is what he sees aging within himself. The cobweb removed does not open the room to a new life; Matryona speaks of marriage and guests, and what he sees is the same room with more cobwebs, fifteen years from now.
Relationships
- Standard themes: Solitude and isolation, Memory and the past.
- Themes of the work: Solitude and isolation, Memory and the past.
- Characters: the Dreamer, Matryona, Nastenka.
- Neighboring symbols: the pin, Nastenka's prison beside the Dreamer's prison.