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FYODOR MIKHAILOVICH DOSTOEVSKY’s life was as dark and dramatic as the great novels he wrote. He was born in Moscow in 1821, the son of a former army surgeon whose drunken brutality led his own serfs to murder him. A short first novel, Poor Folk (1846), brought him instant success, but his writing career was cut short by his arrest for alleged subversion against Tsar Nicholas I in 1849. In prison he was given the “silent treatment” for eight months (guards even wore velvet-soled boots) before he was led in front of a firing squad. Dressed in a death shroud, he faced an open grave and awaited his execution when, suddenly, an order arrived commuting his sentence. He then spent four years at hard labor in a Siberian prison, where he began to suffer from epilepsy, and he returned to St. Petersburg only a full ten years after he had left in chains.
His prison experiences coupled with his conversion to a profoundly religious philosophy formed the basis for his great novels. But his fortunate marriage to A
THE ETERNAL HUSBAND
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam trade paperback edition published October 1997
Bantam mass market edition published September 2000
Bantam mass market reissue / December 2008
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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eISBN: 978-0-307-79361-4
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v3.1
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
A NASTY ANECDOTE
THE ETERNAL HUSBAND
BOBOK
THE MEEK ONE
THE DREAM OF A RIDICULOUS MAN
Notes
PREFACE
It is the road of every Christian man, who starts from the senses, who is endowed with reason as a dialectical principle which, in the drama of his earthly life, must make a decision between ever increasing participation and eternal defection.
—ERICH AUERBACH,
DANTE, POET OF THE SECULAR WORLD
DOSTOEVSKY’S WORK represents a life-long meditation on the same few themes, motifs, and figures. The love triangle, for instance, with all its ambiguities of pride and humiliation, outward magnanimity, and i
The figure of the “dreamer” also entered Dostoevsky’s work with Poor Folk, took a central part in much of his early writing, both fiction and journalism, re-emerged quite changed in Notes from Underground (1864), and continued to appear in virtually all his later work. Mikhail Bakhtin notes in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics: “Dostoevsky made very wide use of the artistic possibilities of the dream in almost all its variations and nuances. Indeed, in all of European literature there is no writer for whom dreams play such a large and crucial role as Dostoevsky.” We must distinguish, however, between the dreamer and the dream, because dreaming takes two main forms in Dostoevsky. The first is the form of a reverie produced by the dreamer, who longs to transform the squalid reality around him into something nobler, loftier, more beautiful. The dreamer is a fervent idealist, a great reader of German romantic poetry, but his consciousness is isolated and he usually ends badly. Reality triumphs. Yet the dreamer’s aspirations receive a backhanded vindication: aesthetically he is right; art and sensibility are exalted in his person above the mea
The second form dreaming takes in Dostoevsky is that of an unexpected and intense vision, which comes to the dreamer in sleep as a gift or a final revelation, a “living image” that awakens him to a truth he had not suspected or had not understood before. Such are Alyosha’s dream of the messianic banquet and Mitya’s dream of “the wee one” in The Brothers Karamazov. These are confirming, saving dreams. They have a negative counterpart, ultimately serving the same purpose, in the nightmares of Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment, of Stavrogin in Demons, and finally in Ivan Karamazov’s “hallucination” of the devil.
With his second book, The Double (1846), another key motif of Dostoevsky’s work appears. The story tells about the emergence of a “Mr. Golyadkin Jr.” in the government office where the petty clerk Golyadkin serves, a parody and rival of himself who eventually drives him mad. Mr. Golyadkin Sr. is a proud man and keeps aloof from his fellow clerks; his double is the reverse. Golyadkin Sr. says of him: “He has such a playful, nasty character… He’s such a scoundrel, such a fidget, a licker, a lickspittle,” but then adds, “such a Golyadkin.” Here Dostoevsky first came upon the surprising truth that pride, far from unifying and fortifying the person, as we might think, is the source of all i