Melville House Books

Fyodor Dostoevsky

On this day in 1821 was born the demi-god Fyodor Dostoevsky, about whom more than enough has been written. Nobelist J.M. Coetzee fictionalized him as The Master of Petersburg; Vladimir Nabokov, in a proof of the Freudianism he protested a mite too much, slagged him off in his Lectures on Russian Literature; Robert Hass, the former US Poet Laureate (1995-1997), has called Dostoevsky the Mount Everest of literature. (For the class on Dostoevsky that Hass and Mark Danner taught at UC Berkeley they “strongly recommend” the five-volume biography by Joseph Frank.)

The only thing for it is to read the books. In fact, I’m quitting my job now to do just that. Rather than tackle one of the monuments right off, however, why not warm up with one of the masterful shorter works? The Eternal Husband, for example.

This remarkably edgy and suspenseful tale shows that, despite being better known for his voluminous and sprawling novels, Fyodor Dostoevsky was a master of the more tightly-focused form of the novella.

The Eternal Husband may, in fact, constitute his most classically-shaped composition, with his most devilish plot: a man answers a late-night knock on the door to find himself in a tense and puzzling confrontation with the husband of a former lover–but it isn’t clear if the husband knows about the affair. What follows is one of the most beautiful and piercing considerations ever written about the dualities of love: a dazzling psychological duel between the two men over knowledge they may or may not share, bringing them both to a shattering conclusion.