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 inner and outer reality, when Pavel Pavlovich, the “eternal husband,” appears in the way and only then in the memory of the “eternal lover” Velchaninov. But here the confrontation is more elaborately and mysteriously delayed, being more exclusively the subject of the story.
Formally, The Eternal Husbandis 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 obviousquestion 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.
Bobokand The Dream of a Ridiculous Manare 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 Anecdoteis the most farcical, Bobokis 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 connects the satire with his own polemics and thus with the society of the living, so sharply mirrored in the society of the dead. The little story is an acute formulation of the theme of social decay among people who have lost their faith in God (only the simple tradesman here is still a believer). Such punning literalism is part of the story’s humor.
The Meek Onegrew 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 tyrannize and to preponderize morally,” he explains. “All my life I’ve been incapable even of picturing any other love, and I’ve reached the point now of sometimes thinking that love consists precisely in the right, voluntarily granted by the beloved object, to be tyrannized over.” The girl leaves, the man rushes after her a moment later, but then stops: “Why am I running after her? Why? To fall down before her, to weep in repentance, to kiss her feet, to beg forgiveness!… But—why?… Won’t I hate her, maybe tomorrow even, precisely for kissing her feet today?… Won’t I torment her to death?” In The Meek One, the hero marries the girl, and proceeds to do just that. But there are significant differences.
These appear clearly in the form of the two works. The Meek Onehas 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.
Like Bobok, the brief Dream of a Ridiculous Manis a compendium of themes central to Dostoevsky’s work. One of these is the theme of “ridiculousness.” The fear of being or looking ridiculous marks most of Dostoevsky’s underground heroes, including the suave Velchaninov and even the proud Nikolai Stavrogin. Ridiculousness is the shameful other face of pride. The narrator of The Meek Onerefuses to challenge a fellow officer, not from fear of a duel but from fear of looking ridiculous in the theater buffet, and for that he pays the most terrible price. In this last story, the label of “ridiculous” is fastened on the narrator from the start. The second paragraph is a succinct description of the doubled personality of all of Dostoevsky’s ridiculous men. The metaphysical malady it leads to is the same that afflicts Kirillov in Demons:“The conviction was overtaking me,” says the ridiculous man, “that everywhere in the world it made no difference.”It is an ethical solipsism the implications of which the narrator ponders for a long time while sitting in his Voltaire armchair. And he resolves on the Kirillovian solution of suicide, though without the messianic ambition that pushes Kirillov into demonic parody. At this extremity he is granted two things which are really one—first, a moment of “irrational” pity, which he repulses, and then a saving dream. In the end, which is the beginning, he not only loses his shame at being ridiculous, but even embraces his ridiculousness. He has gone through the underground and come out on the other side.