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… 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 i
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 co
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 tyra
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.