The Eternal Husband and Other Stories

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Oh, everyone laughs in my face now and assures me that even in dreams one cannot see such details as I’m now telling, that in my dream I saw or felt only a certain sensation generated by my own heart in delirium, and that I invented the details when I woke up. And when I disclosed to them that perhaps it was actually so—God, what laughter they threw in my face, what fun they had at my expense! Oh, yes, of course, I was overcome just by the sensation of that dream, and it alone survived in the bloody wound of my heart: yet the real images and forms of my dream, that is, those that I actually saw at the time of my dreaming, were fulfilled so harmoniously, they were so enchanting and beautiful, and so true, that having awakened, I was, of course, unable to embody them in our weak words, so that they must have been as if effaced in my mind, and therefore, indeed, perhaps I myself unconsciously was forced to invent the details afterward; and of course distorted them, especially with my so passionate desire to hurry and tell them at least somehow. And yet how can I not believe that it all really was? And was, perhaps, a thousand times better, brighter, and more joyful than I’m telling? Let it be a dream, still it all could not but be. You know, I’ll tell you a secret: perhaps it wasn’t a dream at all! For here a certain thing happened, something so terribly true that it couldn’t have been imagined in a dream. Let my dream have been generated by my heart, but was my heart alone capable of generating the terrible truth that happened to me afterward? How could I myself invent or imagine it in my heart? Can it be that my paltry heart and capricious, insignificant mind were able to rise to such a revelation of the truth! Oh, judge for yourselves: I’ve concealed it so far, but now I’ll finish telling this truth as well. The thing was that I… corrupted them all!

  V

  Yes, yes, it ended with me corrupting them all! How it could have happened I don’t know, but I remember it clearly. The dream flew through thousands of years and left in me just a sense of the whole. I know only that the cause of the fall was I. Like a foul trichina, like an atom of plague infecting whole countries, so I infected that whole happy and previously sinless earth with myself. They learned to lie and began to love the lie and knew the beauty of the lie. Oh, maybe it started innocently, with a joke, with coquetry, with amorous play, maybe, indeed, with an atom, but this atom of lie penetrated their hearts, and they liked it. Then sensuality was quickly born, sensuality generated jealousy, and jealousy—cruelty… Oh, I don’t know, I don’t remember, but soon, very soon, the first blood was shed; they were astonished and horrified, and began to part, to separate. Alliances appeared, but against each other now. Rebukes, reproaches began. They knew shame, and shame was made into a virtue. The notion of honor was born, and each alliance raised its own banner. They began tormenting animals, and the animals withdrew from them into the forests and became their enemies. There began the struggle for separation, for isolation, for the personal, for mine and yours. They started speaking different languages. They knew sorrow and came to love sorrow, they thirsted for suffering and said that truth is attained only through suffering. Then science appeared among them. When they became wicked, they began to talk of brotherhood and humaneness and understood these ideas. When they became criminal, they invented justice and prescribed whole codices for themselves in order to maintain it, and to ensure the codices they set up the guillotine. They just barely remembered what they had lost, and did not even want to believe that they had once been innocent and happy. They even laughed at the possibility of the former happiness and called it a dream. They couldn’t even imagine it in forms and images, but—strange and wonderful thing—having lost all belief in their former happiness, having called it a fairy tale, they wished so much to be innocent and happy again, once more, that they fell down before their hearts’ desires like children, they deified their desire, they built temples and started praying to their own idea, their own “desire,” all the while fully believing in its unrealizability and unfeasibility, but adoring it in tears and worshipping it. And yet, if it had so happened that they could have returned to that innocent and happy condition which they had lost, or if someone had suddenly shown it to them again and asked them: did they want to go back to it?—they would certainly have refused. They used to answer me: “Granted we’re deceitful, wicked, and unjust, we know that and weep for it, and we torment ourselves over it, and torture and punish ourselves perhaps even more than that merciful judge who will judge us and whose name we do not know. But we have science, and through it we shall again find the truth, but we shall now accept it consciously, knowledge is higher than feelings, the consciousness of life is higher than life. Science will give us wisdom, wisdom will discover laws, and knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness.” That’s what they used to say, and after such words each of them loved himself more than anyone else, and they couldn’t have done otherwise. Each of them became so jealous of his own person that he tried as hard as he could to humiliate and belittle it in others, and gave his life to that. Slavery appeared, even voluntary slavery: the weak willingly submitted to the strong, only so as to help them crush those still weaker than themselves. Righteous men appeared, who came to these people in tears and spoke to them of their pride, their lack of measure and harmony, their loss of shame. They were derided or stoned. Holy blood was spilled on the thresholds of temples. On the other hand, people began to appear who started inventing ways for everyone to unite again, so that each of them, without ceasing to love himself more than anyone else, would at the same time not hinder others, and thus live all together in a harmonious society, as it were. Whole wars arose because of this idea. At the same time, the warring sides all firmly believed that science, wisdom, and the sense of self-preservation would finally force men to unite in a harmonious and reasonable society, and therefore, to speed things up meanwhile, the “wise” tried quickly to exterminate all the “unwise,” who did not understand their idea, so that they would not hinder its triumph. But the sense of self-preservation quickly began to weaken, proud men and sensualists appeared who directly demanded everything or nothing. To acquire everything, they resorted to evildoing, and if that did not succeed—to suicide. Religions appeared with a cult of nonbeing and self-destruction for the sake of eternal peace in nothingness. Finally, these people grew weary in meaningless toil, and suffering appeared on their faces, and these people proclaimed that suffering is beauty, for only in suffering is there thought. They sang suffering in their songs. I walked among them, wringing my hands, and wept over them, but I loved them perhaps still more than before, when there was as yet no suffering on their faces and they were innocent and so beautiful. I loved their defiled earth still more than when it had been a paradise, only because grief had appeared on it. Alas, I had always loved grief and sorrow, but only for myself, for myself, while over them I wept, pitying them. I stretched out my arms to them, in despair accusing, cursing, and despising myself. I told them that I, I alone, had done it all; that it was I who had brought them depravity, infection, and the lie! I beseeched them to crucify me on a cross, I taught them how to make a cross. I couldn’t, I hadn’t the strength to kill myself, but I wanted to take the suffering from them, I longed for suffering, I longed to shed my blood to the last drop in this suffering. But they just laughed at me and in the end began to consider me some sort of holy fool. They vindicated me, they said they had received only what they themselves had wanted, and that everything could not but be as it was. Finally, they announced to me that I was becoming dangerous for them and that they would put me in a madhouse if I didn’t keep quiet. Here sorrow entered my soul with such force that my heart was wrung, and I felt I was going to die, and here… well, here I woke up.

  It was already morning, that is, not light yet, but it was about six o’clock. I came to my senses in the same armchair, my candle had burned all the way down, everyone was asleep at the captain’s, and around me was a silence rare in our apartment. First of all, I jumped up extremely surprised; nothing like that had ever happened to me, even down to trifling little
details: for instance, never before had I fallen asleep in my armchair like that. Here suddenly, while I was standing and coming to my senses—suddenly my revolver flashed before me, ready, loaded—but I instantly pushed it away from me! Oh, life, life now! I lifted up my arms and called out to the eternal truth; did not call out, but wept; rapture, boundless rapture, elevated my whole being. Yes, life and—preaching! I decided on preaching that same moment, and, of course, for the rest of my life! I’m going out to preach, I want to preach—what? The truth, for I saw it, saw it with my own eyes, saw all its glory!

  And so, since then I’ve been preaching! What’s more—I love those who laugh at me more than all the rest. Why that’s so I don’t know and can’t explain, but let it be so. They say I’m already getting confused now, that is, if I’m already so confused now, how will it be later? The veritable truth: I’m getting confused now, and maybe it will be worse later. And of course I’m going to get confused a few times before I discover how to preach, that is, in what words and in what deeds, because it’s very hard to do. I see it clear as day even now, but listen: is there anyone who doesn’t get confused? And yet everyone goes toward one and the same thing, at least everyone strives for one and the same thing, from the sage to the last robber, only by different paths. This is an old truth, but what is new here is this: I cannot get very confused. Because I saw the truth, I saw and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the ability to live on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of people. And they all laugh merely at this belief of mine. But how can I not believe: I saw the truth—it’s not that my mind invented it, but I saw it, I saw it, and its living image filled my soul for all time. I saw it in such fulfilled wholeness that I cannot believe it is impossible for people to have it. And so, how could I get confused? I’ll wander off, of course, even several times, and will maybe even speak in other people’s words, but not for long: the living image of what I saw will always be with me and will always correct and direct me. Oh, I’m hale, I’m fresh, I’m going, going, even if it’s for a thousand years. You know, I even wanted to conceal, at first, that I corrupted them all, but that was a mistake—already the first mistake! But truth whispered to me that I was lying, and guarded and directed me. But how to set up paradise—I don’t know, because I’m unable to put it into words. After my dream, I lost words. At least all the main words, the most necessary ones. But so be it: I’ll go and I’ll keep talking, tirelessly, because after all I saw it with my own eyes, though I can’t recount what I saw. But that is what the scoffers don’t understand: “He had a dream,” they say, “a delirium, a hallucination.” Eh! As if that’s so clever? And how proud they are! A dream? what is a dream? And is our life not a dream? I’ll say more: let it never, let it never come true, and let there be no paradise (that I can understand!)—well, but I will preach all the same. And yet it’s so simple: in one day, in one hour—it could all be set up at once! The main thing is—love others as yourself, that’s the main thing, and it’s everything, there’s no need for anything else at all: it will immediately be discovered how to set things up. And yet this is merely an old truth, repeated and read a billion times, but still it has never taken root! “The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness”—that is what must be fought! And I will. If only everyone wants it, everything can be set up at once.

  And I found that little girl… And I’ll go! I’ll go!

  NOTES

  A NASTY ANECDOTE (1862)

  1. The Neva River divides into three main branches as it flows into the Gulf of Finland, marking out the three main areas of the city of St. Petersburg. On the left bank of the Neva is the city center, between the Neva and the Little Neva is Vasilievsky Island, and between the Little Neva and the Nevka is the so-called “Petersburg side,” which is thus some distance from the center.

  2. These three gentlemen are all in the civil service, not the military. But civil service ranks had military equivalents, which were sometimes used in social address. The following is a list of the fourteen civil service ranks from highest to lowest, with their approximate military equivalents:

  1. Chancellor

  Field Marshal

  2. Actual Privy Councillor

  General

  3. Actual State Councillor

  Major General

  5. State Councillor

  Colonel

  6. Collegiate Councillor

  Lieutenant Colonel

  7. Court Councillor

  Major

  8. Collegiate Assessor

  Captain

  9. Titular Councillor

  Staff Captain

  10. Collegiate Secretary

  Lieutenant

  11. Secretary of Naval Constructions

  12. Government Secretary

  Sub-lieutenant

  13. Provincial Secretary

  14. Collegiate Registrar

  The rank of titular councillor conferred personal nobility; the rank of actual state councillor made it hereditary. Wives of officials shared their husbands’ rank and were entitled to the same mode of address—“Your Honor,” “Your Excellency,” “Your Supreme Excellency.” Mention of an official’s rank automatically indicates the amount of deference he must be shown, and by whom.

  3. The star was the decoration of a number of orders, among them the Polish-Russian Order of St. Stanislas (or Stanislav) and the Swedish Order of the North Star.

  4. Certain Russian decorations had two degrees, being worn either on the breast or on a ribbon around the neck.

  5. “Botched existence” or “failed life” (French).

  6. “Talker” and “phrase-maker” (French).

  7. A tax-farmer was a private person authorized by the government to collect taxes in exchange for a fixed fee. The practice was open to abuse, and tax-farmers could become extremely rich, though never quite respectable. Tax-farming was eventually abolished by the economic reforms of the emperor Alexander II in the 1860s, to which reference is made here.

  8. A reference to Christ’s teaching: “Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved” (Matthew 9:17).

  9. “That’s the word” (French).

  10. “Good sense” (French).

  11. Pralinsky is mulling over the “problem” of the abolition of corporal punishment with birch rods, then still allowed in the army and in the schools as well as with serfs.

  12. The clerk’s name is absurdly close to the Russian psevdonym (“pseudonym”), a fact Pralinsky later mentions himself. Pseldonymov is a collegiate registrar.

  13. “Mlekopitaev” is also an absurd, though just plausible, name derived from the Russian word for “mammal.”

  14. Clerks in the civil service had to have their superiors’ permission to change departments, to move elsewhere, and even to marry.

  15. The leader of the romantic movement in Russian art, K. P. Briullov (1799–1852), was most famous for his enormous historical painting The Last Day of Pompeii, evidently the epitome of turmoil and confusion for Pralinsky.

  16. “Ladies join hands; swing!” (French).

  17. Harun-al-Rashid, or Harun the Just (?766–809), Abbasid caliph of Baghdad (786–809), is known in legend for walking about the city anonymously at night, familiarizing himself with the life of his subjects. He became a hero of songs and figures in some of the tales in The Thousand and One Nights.

  18. A parodical Dream Book of Contemporary Russian Literature, written by N. F. Shcherbina, was circulated in manuscript at the end of the 1850s.

  19. Ivan Ivanovich Panaev (1812–62), a now-forgotten writer and journalist, published some important memoirs in The Contemporary, a liberal magazine he co-edited for a time with the poet Nikolai Nekrasov.

  20. The “new lexicon” in question was the government-subsidized Encyclopedic
Dictionary Composed by Russian Scholars and Writers, which began to appear in 1861. When A. A. Kraevsky (1810–89), then editor of the magazine Fatherland Notes, was named editor-in-chief of this project, there was general indignation, since he was neither a scholar nor a writer. N. D. Alferaki (d. 1860), a merchant from Taganrog in the south of Russia, was a notorious entrepreneur of the time. The exposé (which Dostoevsky jocularly refers to here, as he would later in Notes from Underground, with the mispronunciation “esposé”), was the favorite journalistic form of the young radicals of the 1860s.