The Eternal Husband and Other Stories

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  These portraits are still single, anecdotal figures. Their opposition is mainly social and external. In the underground, the divisions become internal and rivalry acquires a metaphysical dimension. This is shown clearly in The Eternal Husband, written in 1870. Dostoevsky said at the time, in a letter to his friend and editor N. Strakhov: “I thought of writing this story four years ago, the year of my brother’s death, in response to the words of Apollon Grigoriev, who praised my Notes from Underground and said to me then: ‘That is how you should write.’ But this is not Notes from Underground, it is quite different in form, though the essence is the same, my usual essence, if only you, Nikolai Nikolaevich, will acknowledge that, as a writer, I have some particular essence of my own.” The more spectacular ideological elements of Dostoevsky’s work, such as the polemical monologue of the man from underground or the “poem” of the Grand Inquisitor, which have drawn so much commentary from critics and philosophers, are entirely absent from The Eternal Husband. They are not of the essence, then. What is of the essence, of his “usual essence,” is the mechanism of metaphysical rivalry and deviated transcendence, which is portrayed here in its purest form, as a kind of duel, almost a prizefight, its rounds signaled by the ringing of bells.

  There is a certain way in which the double makes his appearance in Dostoevsky’s work. Raskolnikov, in acute anguish at the end of the third part of Crime and Punishment, dreams that he is murdering the old woman again, but this time she does not die but instead laughs wildly at him. Terrified, he attempts to cry out and wakes up:

  He drew a deep breath—yet, strangely, it was as if the dream were still going on: his door was wide open, and a man completely unknown to him was standing on the threshold, studying him intently.

  Raskolnikov had not yet managed to open his eyes fully, and he instantly closed them again. He lay on his back without stirring. “Is this the dream still going on, or not?” he thought, and again imperceptibly parted his eyelashes a little: the stranger was standing in the same place and was still peering at him!… Finally it became unbearable: Raskolnikov raised himself all at once and sat up on the sofa.

  “Speak, then. What do you want?”

  “Ah, I just knew you were not asleep, but only pretending,” the unknown man answered strangely, with a quiet laugh. “Allow me to introduce myself: Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov.…”

  Similarly, Ivan Karamazov finds himself in an inexplicable state of anguish as he approaches his father’s house:

  Above all this anguish was vexing and annoyed him by the fact that it had some sort of accidental, completely external appearance; this he felt. Somewhere some being or object was standing and sticking up, just as when something sometimes sticks up in front of one’s eyes and one doesn’t notice it for a long time, being busy or in heated conversation, and meanwhile one is clearly annoyed, almost suffering, and at last it dawns on one to remove the offending object, often quite trifling and ridiculous, something left in the wrong place, a handkerchief dropped on the floor, a book not put back in the bookcase, or whatever. At last, in a very bad and irritated state of mind, Ivan Fyodorovich reached his father’s house, and suddenly, glancing at the gate from about fifty paces away, he at once realized what was tormenting and worrying him so.

  On the bench by the gate, idly enjoying the cool of the evening, sat the lackey Smerdyakov, and Ivan Fyodorovich realized at the first sight of him that the lackey Smerdyakov was also sitting in his soul, and that it was precisely this man that his soul could not bear.

  Or there is the moment a little later in the same novel when Alyosha, in great grief and temptation over the death and “disgrace” of the elder Zosima, meets the dubious novice Rakitin:

  … some vague but tormenting and evil impression from the recollection of the previous day’s conversation with his brother Ivan now suddenly stirred again in his soul, demanding more and more to come to the surface. It was already quite dark when Rakitin, passing through the pine grove from the hermitage to the monastery, suddenly noticed Alyosha lying face down on the ground under a tree, motionless and as if asleep.

  Rakitin seems suddenly to materialize from the evil impression in Alyosha’s soul, evoked by the abrupt shift in point of view. So Smerdyakov “sticks up” in Ivan’s soul, and so Svidrigailov emerges from Raskolnikov’s dream and steps across his threshold. There is the same premonitory anguish, the same mingling of inner and outer reality, when Pavel Pavlovich, the “eternal husband,” appears in the way and only then in the memory of the “eternal lover” Velchaninov. But here the confrontation is more elaborately and mysteriously delayed, being more exclusively the subject of the story.

  Formally, The Eternal Husband is the most classically proportioned and perfectly constructed of Dostoevsky’s works. There are no digressions, no subplots, no secondary characters, no personified narrator, no accompanying commentary or analysis. With an extreme economy of means, Dostoevsky is able to portray people acting in ways they themselves do not understand, so that we see both their acts and their own incomprehension, and glimpse through their partial explanations the puzzle of their true motives. The question of who knows what and how much remains open almost to the end of the story. But behind that obvious question is a vanishing sequence of others. Narrative omniscience is limited to Velchaninov, a sort of underground Pralinsky (he twice uses the term “underground” himself, once referring to Pavel Pavlovich, the second time referring to himself as well). The “eternal husband” of the title remains more shadowy, impenetrable—buffoon, victim, avenger, rival, admirer, and even lover of the handsome younger man. Yet the final mystery lies in Velchaninov, who is unable to free himself from the mechanism of his own behavior, who is as automatic in his gallantry as Pavel Pavlovich is in his cuckoldry. He knows that some power contradicts him at the very center of his personality, and the knowledge humiliates him, but only at moments. Then he glides on his way. The death of “their daughter Liza” in the middle of the story is a loss the meaning of which is beyond the grasp of both protagonists. They seem to forget her almost at once, Pavel Pavlovich in his new courtship, Velchaninov in his own self-admiration. Sentimental complacency has seldom been so chillingly portrayed as in the scene of Velchaninov’s visit to the cemetery:

  It was a clear evening, the sun was setting; round about, near the graves, lush green grass was growing; not far away amid the eglantines, a bee buzzed; the flowers and wreaths left on Liza’s little grave by the children and Klavdia Petrovna after the burial still lay there, half their leaves blown off. Even some sort of hope, for the first time in a long while refreshed his heart. “What lightness!” he thought, feeling the silence of the cemetery and gazing at the clear, serene sky. A flood of some pure, untroubled faith in something filled his soul. “Liza sent it to me, it’s she talking to me,” came the thought.

  This passage epitomizes the expressive concision of style in The Eternal Husband.

  Tragedy is singular, comedy repetitive. The tragedy of Liza’s death is the hidden heart of the story, hidden precisely by the ongoing “duel” of her two “fathers.” In the epilogue, comedy asserts itself, almost to the point of scandal, in the absurd repetition of the same relations and the same automatic behavior we have just witnessed. Everything is about to begin over again. At that moment the final bell rings.

  Two of the last three stories here Dostoevsky specifically labeled “fantastic,” but in fact all three are fantastic stories. Their narrators are all underground men, though at different depths of the underground. All are nameless, like the hero of Notes from Underground. Like him, they have fallen out of normal human society, they despise and are despised by everyone, they nurse their own separate plans and intentions. We will have more to say about these special cases in a moment.

  Bobok and The Dream of a Ridiculous Man are examples of Dostoevsky’s use of Menippean satire, a genre that includes fantastic voyages, dream visions, and dialogues of the dead. Bakhtin finds these stories “menippea almost in the strict sense
of the term, so precisely and fully manifest in them are the classical characteristic features of the genre.” We shall not try to summarize his detailed discussion here. “We would hardly be mistaken,” he concludes, “in saying that Bobok, in all its depth and boldness, is one of the greatest menippea in all world literature.” If A Nasty Anecdote is the most farcical, Bobok is the most shameless and outrageous of Dostoevsky’s scandal scenes, a dialogue not of the illustrious dead in the realm beyond the grave, but of rotting “contemporary dead men.” Through the half-mad narrator, an unsuccessful writer, Dostoevsky connects the satire with his own polemics and thus with the society of the living, so sharply mirrored in the society of the dead. The little story is an acute formulation of the theme of social decay among people who have lost their faith in God (only the simple tradesman here is still a believer). Such punning literalism is part of the story’s humor.

  The Meek One grew out of Dostoevsky’s meditations on the suicide of a young woman, mentioned briefly in the October 1876 installment of his Diary of a Writer, the issue before the one in which the story itself was published. “About a month ago,” he wrote, “there appeared in all the Petersburg newspapers a few short lines in small type about a certain Petersburg suicide: a poor young girl, a seamstress, threw herself out of a fourth-story window—‘because she simply could not find work to feed herself.’ It was added that she threw herself out and fell to the ground holding an icon in her hands. This holding of an icon is a strange and unheard-of feature in suicides! So then this was some sort of meek, humble suicide.” In shaping a story around this incident, Dostoevsky went back to the “love story” in the second part of Notes from Underground, where the hero, in indirect revenge for an earlier humiliation, first “rescues” and then rejects a young prostitute. He is such an underground reasoner that he never imagines the girl may have her own mind and will. “For me to love meant to tyrannize and to preponderize morally,” he explains. “All my life I’ve been incapable even of picturing any other love, and I’ve reached the point now of sometimes thinking that love consists precisely in the right, voluntarily granted by the beloved object, to be tyrannized over.” The girl leaves, the man rushes after her a moment later, but then stops: “Why am I running after her? Why? To fall down before her, to weep in repentance, to kiss her feet, to beg forgiveness!… But—why?… Won’t I hate her, maybe tomorrow even, precisely for kissing her feet today?… Won’t I torment her to death?” In The Meek One, the hero marries the girl, and proceeds to do just that. But there are significant differences.

  These appear clearly in the form of the two works. The Meek One has none of the discursive and polemical character of Notes. It is the most intimate of Dostoevsky’s stories; reading it seems almost like a profanation. The man from underground is a writer, though a careless and defiant one; the narrator here is a desperately speaking voice. But despite his rambling efforts to “collect his thoughts to a point,” the story is highly unified, concentrated into the few hours following the catastrophe, during which he tries to understand what has happened. As in The Eternal Husband, Dostoevsky shows himself a master at revealing events through the incomprehension of the person who experiences them. But here the double story of the marriage and the “attempt to understand” unfolds simultaneously. There is a difference, too, in the consciousness of the hero, who is in the process of exchanging defiance for grief. All this gives his voice a piercing urgency.

  Like Bobok, the brief Dream of a Ridiculous Man is a compendium of themes central to Dostoevsky’s work. One of these is the theme of “ridiculousness.” The fear of being or looking ridiculous marks most of Dostoevsky’s underground heroes, including the suave Velchaninov and even the proud Nikolai Stavrogin. Ridiculousness is the shameful other face of pride. The narrator of The Meek One refuses to challenge a fellow officer, not from fear of a duel but from fear of looking ridiculous in the theater buffet, and for that he pays the most terrible price. In this last story, the label of “ridiculous” is fastened on the narrator from the start. The second paragraph is a succinct description of the doubled personality of all of Dostoevsky’s ridiculous men. The metaphysical malady it leads to is the same that afflicts Kirillov in Demons: “The conviction was overtaking me,” says the ridiculous man, “that everywhere in the world it made no difference.” It is an ethical solipsism the implications of which the narrator ponders for a long time while sitting in his Voltaire armchair. And he resolves on the Kirillovian solution of suicide, though without the messianic ambition that pushes Kirillov into demonic parody. At this extremity he is granted two things which are really one—first, a moment of “irrational” pity, which he repulses, and then a saving dream. In the end, which is the beginning, he not only loses his shame at being ridiculous, but even embraces his ridiculousness. He has gone through the underground and come out on the other side.

  These ridiculous narrators are all extreme cases. Dostoevsky was obviously drawn to such cases, perhaps for the reason suggested by the man from underground at the end of his story: “As far as I myself am concerned, I have merely carried to an extreme in my life what you have not dared to carry even halfway, and, what’s more, you’ve taken your cowardice for good sense, and found comfort in thus deceiving yourselves. So that I, perhaps, come out even more ‘living’ than you. Take a closer look!” The extreme and eccentric have a heroic and representative quality, despite their social isolation. Bakhtin goes so far as to say that “Dostoevsky’s mode of artistic thinking could not imagine anything in the slightest way humanly significant that did not have certain elements of eccentricity (in all its diverse manifestations).” The Dream of a Ridiculous Man was Dostoevsky’s last artistic work before The Brothers Karamazov and points to that novel’s hero, Alyosha Karamazov, who is beyond the fear of being ridiculous, that is, beyond the doubled consciousness of the underground. The author says of Alyosha in his opening note: “… not only is an odd man ‘not always’ a particular and isolated case, but, on the contrary, it sometimes happens that it is precisely he, perhaps, who bears within himself the heart of the whole, while the other people of his epoch have all for some reason been torn away from it for a time by some kind of flooding wind.”

  The dream that saves the ridiculous man is a vision of the earthly paradise—a “second earth” that has not known the Fall into sin and evil. Similar dreams come to Stavrogin in Demons and to Versilov in The Adolescent, but the theme is treated most fully here. Stavrogin discovers the “tiny red spider” of his own terrible sin in the center of his vision, and it is suddenly dispelled. The Fall is not absent from the ridiculous man’s dream either: he brings it about himself. What comes then is a condensed and somewhat polemicized history of humanity, which so fills the dreamer’s heart with guilt, pity, grief, and love that he wakes up—and for him it is a true awakening, to life, “life—and preaching!” In the terms of the epigraph I have placed at the head of this preface, he moves from “eternal defection” to “ever increasing participation.” He will preach because he has seen the “living image” of the truth, beyond conceptual understanding. It has shown him “that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the ability to live on earth.” And he goes and finds the little girl he offended. The Dream of a Ridiculous Man thus resolves a whole series of interlocking motifs in Dostoevsky’s work.

  This book begins and ends with attempts to speak the saving word that will unite mankind. But Pralinsky’s absurd “hu-humaneness” had to pass through the underground of duplicity and silence—the failure of Velchaninov to tear “the very last word” either from Pavel Pavlovich or from himself in The Eternal Husband; the putrefaction of souls leading to the senselessly repeated “bobok, bobok” that haunts the writer of Bobok; and finally the hell of “silent speaking” in The Meek One—before it could emerge in the ridiculous man’s preaching, the same yet quite transformed.

  —Richard Pevear

  A NASTY ANECDOTE

  A STORY

  THIS NASTY anecdote occu
rred precisely at the time when, with such irrepressible force and such touchingly naive enthusiasm, the regeneration of our dear fatherland began, and its valiant sons were all striving toward new destinies and hopes. Then, one winter, on a clear and frosty evening, though it was already past eleven, three extremely respectable gentlemen were sitting in a comfortably and even luxuriously furnished room, in a fine two-storied house on the Petersburg side,1 and were taken up with a solid and excellent conversation on a quite curious subject. These three gentlemen were all three of general’s rank.2 They were sitting around a small table, each in a fine, soft armchair, and as they conversed they were quietly and comfortably sipping champagne. The bottle was right there on the table in a silver bucket with ice. The thing was that the host, privy councillor Stepan Nikiforovich Nikiforov, an old bachelor of about sixty-five, was celebrating the housewarming of his newly purchased house, and, incidentally, his birthday, which happened to come along and which he had never celebrated before. However, the celebration was none too grand; as we have already seen, there were only two guests, both former colleagues of Mr. Nikiforov and his former subordinates, namely: actual state councillor Semyon Ivanovich Shipulenko and the other, also an actual state councillor, Ivan Ilyich Pralinsky. They came at around nine o’clock, had tea, then switched to wine, and knew that at exactly eleven-thirty they should go home. The host had liked regularity all his life. A couple of words about him: he began his career as a fortuneless petty clerk, quietly endured the drag for forty-five years on end, knew very well how far he would be promoted, could not bear having stars in his eyes, though he was already wearing two of them,3 and particularly disliked expressing his own personal opinion on any subject whatsoever. He was also honest, that is, he had never happened to do anything particularly dishonest; he was a bachelor because he was an egoist; he was far from stupid, but could not bear to display his intelligence; he particularly disliked sloppiness and rapturousness, which he considered moral sloppiness, and toward the end of his life sank entirely into some sweet, lazy comfort and systematic solitude. Though he himself sometimes visited people of the better sort, from his youth he could never bear to receive guests, and of late, when not playing patience, he was content with the company of his dining-room clock, imperturbably listening, as he dozed in his armchair, to its ticking under the glass dome on the mantelpiece. He was of extremely decent and clean-shaven appearance, looked younger than his years, was well preserved, promising to live a long time, and adhered to the strictest gentlemanliness. His post was rather comfortable: he sat somewhere and signed something. In short, he was considered a most excellent man. He had only one passion, or, better, one ardent desire: this was to own his own house, and precisely a grand house, not simply a solid one. His desire was finally realized: he picked out and purchased a house on the Petersburg side, far away, true, but the house had a garden, and was elegant besides.The new owner reasoned that far away was even better: he did not like receiving at home, and as for going to visit someone or to work—for that he had a fine two-place carriage of chocolate color, the coachman Mikhei, and two small but sturdy and handsome horses. All this had been duly acquired by forty years of painstaking economy, and so his heart rejoiced over it all. This was why, having acquired the house and moved into it, Stepan Nikiforovich felt such contentment in his peaceful heart that he even invited guests for his birthday, which before he used carefully to conceal from his closest acquaintances. He even had special designs on one of the invited. He himself occupied the upper story of the house, and he needed a tenant for the lower one, which was built and laid out in the same way. So Stepan Nikiforovich was counting on Semyon Ivanovich Shipulenko, and during the evening even twice turned the conversation to that subject. But Semyon Ivanovich kept silent in that regard. This was a man who had also had a long and difficult time cutting a path for himself, with black hair and side-whiskers and a permanently bilious tinge to his physiognomy. He was a married man, a gloomy homebody, kept his household in fear, served self-confidently, also knew very well what he would achieve and still better what he would never achieve, sat in a good post and sat very solidly. At the new ways that were beginning he looked, if not without bile, still with no special alarm: he was very confident of himself and listened not without mocking spite to Ivan Ilyich Pralinsky’s expatiating on the new themes. However, they were all somewhat tipsy, so that even Stepan Nikiforovich himself condescended to Mr. Pralinsky and entered into a light dispute with him about the new ways. But a few words about His Excellency Mr. Pralinsky, the more so as he is the main hero of the forthcoming story.