The Eternal Husband

By Fyodor Dostoyevsky

"The Eternal Husband" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky revolves around the complex relationship between Velchaninov, a successful man with a dark past, and Trusotsky, the husband of his former lover. After the death of Velchaninov's friend, he encounters Trusotsky, and their lives become inextricably linked. As the story unfolds, themes of guilt, jealousy, and emotional turmoil come to the fore. Dostoyevsky skillfully explores the intricacies of human emotions and the consequences of past actions, creating a compelling narrative that delves into the eternal struggle of love and betrayal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Interactive Media
• Release date: Oct 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781909438675

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born in Moscow in 1821. He died in 1881 having written some of the most celebrated works in the history of literature, including Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov.

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Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Eternal Husband

Published by Sovereign

This Edition

First published in 2012

Copyright © 2012 Sovereign

ISBN: 9781909438675

ABOUT FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

A few words about Dostoyevsky himself may help the English reader to understand his work.

Dostoyevsky was the son of a doctor. His parents were very hard-working and deeply religious people, but so poor that they lived with their five children in only two rooms. The father and mother spent their evenings in reading aloud to their children, generally from books of a serious character.

Though always sickly and delicate Dostoyevsky came out third in the final examination of the Petersburg school of Engineering. There he had already begun his first work, Poor Folk.

This story was published by the poet Nekrassov in his review and was received with acclamations. The shy, unknown youth found himself instantly something of a celebrity. A brilliant and successful career seemed to open before him, but those hopes were soon dashed. In 1849 he was arrested.

Though neither by temperament nor conviction a revolutionist, Dostoyevsky was one of a little group of young men who met together to read Fourier and Proudhon. He was accused of taking part in conversations against the censorship, of reading a letter from Byelinsky to Gogol, and of knowing of the intention to set up a printing press. Under Nicholas I. (that stern and just man, as Maurice Baring calls him) this was enough, and he was condemned to death. After eight months’ imprisonment he was with twenty-one others taken out to the Semyonovsky Square to be shot. Writing to his brother Mihail, Dostoyevsky says: They snapped words over our heads, and they made us put on the white shirts worn by persons condemned to death. Thereupon we were bound in threes to stakes, to suffer execution. Being the third in the row, I concluded I had only a few minutes of life before me. I thought of you and your dear ones and I contrived to kiss Plestcheiev and Dourov, who were next to me, and to bid them farewell. Suddenly the troops beat a tattoo, we were unbound, brought back upon the scaffold, and informed that his Majesty had spared us our lives. The sentence was commuted to hard labour.

One of the prisoners, Grigoryev, went mad as soon as he was untied, and never regained his sanity.

The intense suffering of this experience left a lasting stamp on Dostoyevsky ’s mind. Though his religious temper led him in the end to accept every suffering with resignation and to regard it as a blessing in his own case, he constantly recurs to the subject in his writings. He describes the awful agony of the condemned man and insists on the cruelty of inflicting such torture. Then followed four years of penal servitude, spent in the company of common criminals in Siberia, where he began the Dead House, and some years of service in a disciplinary battalion.

He had shown signs of some obscure nervous disease before his arrest and this now developed into violent attacks of epilepsy, from which he suffered for the rest of his life. The fits occurred three or four times a year and were more frequent in periods of great strain. In 1859 he was allowed to return to Russia. He started a journal—Vremya, which was forbidden by the Censorship through a misunderstanding. In 1864 he lost his first wife and his brother Mihail. He was in terrible poverty, yet he took upon himself the payment of his brother’s debts. He started another journal—The Epoch, which within a few months was also prohibited. He was weighed down by debt, his brother’s family was dependent on him, he was forced to write at heart-breaking speed, and is said never to have corrected his work. The later years of his life were much softened by the tenderness and devotion of his second wife.

In June 1880 he made his famous speech at the unveiling of the monument to Pushkin in Moscow and he was received with extraordinary demonstrations of love and honour.

A few months later Dostoyevsky died. He was followed to the grave by a vast multitude of mourners, who gave the hapless man the funeral of a king. He is still probably the most widely read writer in Russia.

In the words of a Russian critic, who seeks to explain the feeling inspired by Dostoyevsky : He was one of ourselves, a man of our blood and our bone, but one who has suffered and has seen so much more deeply than we have his insight impresses us as wisdom... that wisdom of the heart which we seek that we may learn from it how to live. All his other gifts came to him from nature, this he won for himself and through it he became great.

Contents

ABOUT FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

CHAPTER XVI

CHAPTER XVII

NOTES

THE ETERNAL HUSBAND

CHAPTER I

Summer had come, and Velchaninoff, contrary to his expectations, was still in St. Petersburg. His trip to the south of Russia had fallen through, and there seemed no end to the business which had detained him.

This business—which was a lawsuit as to certain property—had taken a very disagreeable aspect. Three months ago the thing had appeared to be by no means complicated—in fact, there had seemed to be scarcely any question as to the rights and wrongs of the matter, but all seemed to change suddenly.

Everything else seems to have changed for the worse, too! said Velchaninoff to himself, over and over again.

He was employing a clever lawyer—an eminent man, and an expensive one, too; but in his impatience and suspicion he began to interfere in the matter himself. He read and wrote papers—all of which the lawyer put into his waste-paper basket—holus bolus; called in continually at the courts and offices, made inquiries, and confused and worried everybody concerned in the matter; so at least the lawyer declared, and begged him for mercy’s sake to go away to the country somewhere.

But he could not make up his mind to do so. He stayed in town and enjoyed the dust, and the hot nights, and the closeness of the air of St. Petersburg, things which are enough to destroy anyone’s nerves. His lodgings were somewhere near the Great Theatre; he had lately taken them, and did not like them. Nothing went well with him; his hypochondria increased with each day, and he had long been a victim to that disorder.

Velchaninoff was a man who had seen a great deal of the world; he was not quite young, thirty-eight years old—perhaps thirty-nine, or so; and all this old age, as he called it, had fallen upon him quite unawares. However, as he himself well understood, he had aged more in the quality than in the number of the years of his life; and if his infirmities were really creeping upon him, they must have come from within and not from outside causes. He looked young enough still. He was a tall, stout man, with light-brown thick hair, without a suspicion of white about it, and a light beard that reached half way down his chest. At first sight you might have supposed him to be of a lax, careless disposition or character, but on studying him more closely you would have found that, on the contrary, the man was decidedly a stickler for the proprieties of this world, and withal brought up in the ways and graces of the very best society. His manners were very good—free but graceful—in spite of this lately-acquired habit of grumbling and reviling things in general. He was still full of the most perfect, aristocratic self-confidence: probably he did not himself suspect to how great an extent this was so, though he was a most decidedly intelligent, I may say clever, even talented man. His open, healthy-looking face was distinguished by an almost feminine refinement, which quality gained him much attention from the fair sex. He had large blue eyes—eyes which ten years ago had known well how to persuade and attract; such clear, merry, careless eyes they had been, that they invariably brought over to his side any person he wished to gain. Now, when he was nearly forty years old, their ancient, kind, frank expression had died out of them, and a certain cynicism—a cunning—an irony very often, and yet another variety of expression, of late—an expression of melancholy or pain, undefined but keen, had taken the place of the earlier attractive qualities of his eyes. This expression of melancholy especially showed itself when he was alone; and it was a strange fact that the gay, careless, happy fellow of a couple of years ago, the man who could tell a funny story so inimitably, should now love nothing so well as to be all alone. He intended to throw up most of his friends—a quite unnecessary step, in spite of his present financial difficulties. Probably his vanity was to blame for this intention: he could not bear to see his old friends in his present position; with his vain suspicious character it would be most unpalatable to him.

But his vanity began to change its nature in solitude. It did not grow less, on the contrary; but it seemed to develop into a special type of vanity which was unlike its old self. This new vanity suffered from entirely different causes, higher causes, if I may so express it, he said, and if there really be higher and lower motives in this world.

He defined these higher things as matters which he could not laugh at, or turn to ridicule when happening in his own individual experience. Of course it would be quite another thing with the same subjects in society; by himself he could not ridicule then; but put him among other people, and he would be the first to tear himself from all of those secret resolutions of his conscience made in solitude, and laugh them to scorn.

Very often, on rising from his bed in the morning, he would feel ashamed of the thoughts and feelings which had animated him during the long sleepless night—and his nights of late had been sleepless. He seemed suspicious of everything and everybody, great and small, and grew mistrustful of himself.

One fact stood out clearly, and that was that during those sleepless nights his thoughts and opinions took huge leaps and bounds, sometimes changing entirely from the thoughts and opinions of the daytime. This fact struck him very forcibly; and he took occasion to consult an eminent medical friend. He spoke in fun, but the doctor informed him that the fact of feelings and opinions changing during meditations at night, and during sleeplessness, was one long recognised by science; and that that was especially the case with persons of strong thinking power, and of acute feelings. He stated further that very often the beliefs of a whole life are uprooted under the melancholy influence of night and inability to sleep, and that often the most fateful resolutions are made under the same influence; that sometimes this impressionability to the mystic influence of the dark hours amounted to a malady, in which case measures must be taken, the radical manner of living should be changed, diet considered, a journey undertaken if possible, etc., etc.

Velchaninoff listened no further, but he was sure that in his own case there was decided malady.

Very soon his morning meditations began to partake of the nature of those of the night, but they were more bitter. Certain events of his life now began to recur to his memory more and more vividly; they would strike him suddenly, and without apparent reason: things which had been forgotten for ten or fifteen years—some so long ago that he thought it miraculous that he should have been able to recall them at all. But that was not all—for, after all, what man who has seen any life has not hundreds of such recollections of the past? The principal point was that all this past came back to him now with an absolutely new light thrown upon it, and he seemed to look at it from an entirely new and unexpected point of view. Why did some of his acts appear to him now to be nothing better than crimes? It was not merely in the judgment of his intellect that these things appeared so to him now—had it been only his poor sick mind, he would not have trusted it; but his whole being seemed to condemn him; he would curse and even weep over these recollections of the past! If anyone had told him a couple of years since that he would weep over anything, he would have laughed the idea to scorn.

At first he recalled the unpleasant experiences of his life: certain failures in society, humiliations; he remembered how some designing person had so successfully blackened his character that he was requested to cease his visits to a certain house; how once, and not so very long ago, he had been publicly insulted, and had not challenged the offender; how once an epigram had been fastened to his name by some witty person, in the midst of a party of pretty women and he had not found a reply; he remembered several unpaid debts, and how he had most stupidly run through two very respectable fortunes.

Then he began to recall facts belonging to a higher order. He remembered that he had once insulted a poor old grey-headed clerk, and that the latter had covered his face with his hands and cried, which Velchaninoff had thought a great joke at the time, but now looked upon in quite another light. Then he thought how he had once, merely for fun, set a scandal going about the beautiful little wife of a certain schoolmaster, and how the husband had got to hear the rumour. He (Velchaninoff) had left the town shortly after and did not know how the matter had ended; but now he fell to wondering and picturing to himself the possible consequences of his action; and goodness knows where this theme would not have taken him to if he had not suddenly recalled another picture: that of a poor

Reviews for The Eternal Husband

[jonfaith · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A restless sense of being adrift plagued me the last few days. Watching American Gods helped. This brilliant novel cauterized my wounds and afforded me some welcome elan.

The Eternal Husband is wicked psychology. One could compare it with Tolstoy's Kreutzer Sonata as case studies on marriage. Dostoevsky appears more concerned with guilt as a driving force in behavior, whereas Lev was perhaps waxing fanciful, but nonetheless he blames the dames. Dostoevsky isn't misogynistic, he aptly fins some people ill disposed to fidelity and others incapable of an effective response to such.

There's much to embrace in these 140 pages, even if one's not blessed with white nights. There's drunkenness and brain fevers. There's even a hanging.

[alanteder · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The 2 stars are for the Jimcin Recordings audiobook edition from the mid-1980's which was added to Audible with a date of 2008. This is not recommended as a first introduction to this Dostoyevsky novella.The robotic narration with a New England accent is likely to put you off Dostoyevsky and audiobooks altogether. So it is better to start with a current translation such as The Eternal Husband and Other Stories by Pevear & Volokhonsky.If you can deal with the challenge, and aren't operating any dangerous machinery at the time, then at least the whiney snivelling tone for the "eternal husband" Trusotsky does hit the right note in the performance here.

[clara53_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

There is no question that Dostoyevsky is a master, as far as getting inside his protagonist's brain and dissecting it into the most unthinkable yet quite plausible details. I just couldn't help but practically "see" the instances of mental torment as Velchaninov, "a former society man", recollects certain grave indiscretions and even insignificant peccadilloes that humiliate and haunt him relentlessly. It actually makes him physically sick. (Many of us can relate to that, we have all been there - tormented by the past... Not to say that it could ever be to this extent, so sinister - this is Dostoyevsky's realm...). Enter Trusotsky - and mental war begins. Now guilt drives Velchaninov almost to madness and to involuntary decisions of repentance at the hand of the person whom he so cruelly cheated long ago. And here's a small paradox - the novella is predictable and unpredictable at the same time. And also a bit stretched out, it seemed. Probably to deepen the sense of no escape. The ending is rather ironic.

[donato_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is called "the eternal husband" but it's told from the point of view of the "eternal bachelor". In fact the novel opens with him, so right away we know it's really his story and not the eternal husband's. The title could be "what the eternal husband did to the eternal bachelor one hot Petersburg summer". (Strange, one doesn't think of St Petersburg as having hot summers...)But boy is this one hot! With tempers and passions, turmoils and paranoias!The eternal husband is that man who is born to be a husband, born to stay by his wife's side, even if she betrays him (which this one does, with our eternal bachelor, among others). (And born to become husband to another, should the first wife be no longer there...)The eternal bachelor is of course the man who never marries.What happens when the wife of the eternal husband dies, and the eternal husband seeks out the eternal bachelor who was once his wife's lover (does he know, or not?)That's our story, and it's a modern one, despite having been written in 1871 (in an introduction Alberto Moravia goes so far as to say that it's a typical 20th century comic novel, -- and therefore ahead of its time --, as opposed to the typical 19th century "pathetic" novel). Who says old novels can't speak to our day? (maybe no one, but I definitely hear talk of needing new forms because we live in a new and different age).There are no cars, no phones, no internet in this book (or forms that speak to those technologies), but it has people, (i.e. us), and people are the same time ever after.

[maryevelynls · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Another great classic from Dostoyevsky!!

[danielstj · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This novella was passable, but that was all. I did not feel especially involved with the narrative tone, the characters, or the plot-line. Overall, it felt like a lesser work from the well known Dostoyevsky and I would not recommend it unless you are a very large fan of him for the sake of curiosity.2.5 stars.

[ctpress_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dostoevsky’s story explores the relationship between two very different men - Trusotsky seems to be a complete idiot - drunk, feverish and babbling inconsistencies - one of those strange characters that the novels of Dostoevsky are populated with - Velchaninov is the respected, wealthy, bourgeois Petersborg man. Velchaninov once had an affair with Trusotsky’s wife - she’s now dead and the two men meet many years later. Velchaninov is not sure if Trusotsky knows about the affair and wants to find out more about Trusotsky - Trusotsky on the other hand seems both fascinated and repelled by Velchaninov.It might be labelled as a comedy - but it’s a black one - it's the unsettling laughter - there’s a very fine line between the hilarious and the hysterical and horrific here - the absurd cat-and-mouse psychotic game these two old “friends” have going on escalates and end in a bloody confrontation.

[dlsmithies · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Gripping, fascinating, darkly humourous, totally character-driven - this is vintage Dostoevsky. It didn't take long to read, but I'm pretty sure I'll be re-reading this one at some point. Highly recommended.