Review: The Eternal Husband by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Alexey Ivanovich Velchaninov is a man who has everything he wants: land, money, prestige, and, most importantly, a way with women. All this is thrown in jeopardy when he becomes shadowed by a mysterious man who eventually reveals himself as Pavel Pavlovich Trusotsky, a man whose house Velchaninov used to visit frequently in another city. With a good deal of his land and money at stake in a lawsuit, Velchaninov faces added psychological turmoil at the memory of an affair he had with Pavel Pavlovich’s late wife. He begins to wonder anxiously whether his new “friend” is aware of the affair and whether he has sought him out to execute revenge. In the middle of this silent feud is Pavel Pavlovich’s young daughter Liza, a tormented girl whom Velchaninov begins to treat like his own daughter, and after all, she might well be.

After being underwhelmed by The Double and Notes From theUnderground, I was delighted to rediscover what I love about Dostoyevsky in this little novella. It has all the psychological roller coaster of his other works, but loses no coherence even when Velchaninov is at his least sane. Its ethical focus is what ties it together; Velchaninov, though justly persecuted by a man he has wronged, has matured since his affair and become a kinder man than Pavel Pavlovich. His efforts to give Pavel Pavlovich the benefit of doubt are an even greater struggle than his fear of retribution. In many ways, the suspense of this story has less to do with fear and more to do with redemption, which, as always, is a great theme of Dostoyevsky.

Redemption is presented even to the readers who do not identify with Velchaninov as a great, sucessful man; Pavel Pavlovich, too, has many opportunities to regain his honor without harming his old friend. His portrayal as a far less likable character invites us to assume the worst of him, but gradually there emerges the possibility of a second life for this man who lost everything at once. What looms in the background is the great seed of human vice: that wrong will never stop growing, here if Velchaninov’s wrong toward Pavel Pavlovich will cause the latter to destroy himself in wronging the former. We can learn from this most effectively on a microcosmic scale, by examining where we “pay forward” grievances and where we allow them to die.

I recommend this novel to anybody looking for an entrance to this era of Russian literature. While not as grand or genius as Dostoyevsky’s more famous books, it is more accessible and contains most of his essential themes. The characters are masterfully woven and relatable, complete with hopes and pains we all feel at some point.

Review: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1864)

A mysterious narrator presents the first part of this book as a series of essays about the nature of suffering, ethics, and reason. His rhetoric is passionate and intuitive, conveying the thinly veiled implication that his words stem from pivotal emotional experiences in his own life. He describes himself as having lived underground for forty years, until in the moment of his speaking he has finally come forth to share his insight with an audience whose attention and agreement is not guaranteed.

The second part describes a series of embarrassing events in the narrator’s early life. Driven by a fragile ego and an obsession with honor, he socially disgraces himself in front of coworkers, then runs straight into the bed of a random prostitute. Her candid innocence is unprepared for his dramatic raving, especially as she grows to love him.

19^th-century Russians never produced light bedtime reading, and Dostoevsky was no exception. I was entranced by two of his classics, Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, for their exploration of light in the darkest corners of the human soul. Notes from the Underground displays the same capacity, but unlike those later and longer novels, there is little story to match it. My guess is that this work laid the philosophical groundwork for Dostoevsky’s later and greater writing, and in that regard it is essential to an understanding of his messages. The trouble is that it’s downright uncomfortable to read.

Like much European literature of this era and later, the narrator is heavily unreliable. His initial essays vacillate widely, which is partly prevarication and partly the self-contradiction that comes from a troubled but insightful mind. This is a man who aches to be a hero but considers himself lower than a worm. His intense self-focus borders on narcissism, but for the fact that he is harshly critical of many of his actions and does not deflect the blame for the implied straits in which he has found himself. The central paradox of this half is, for me, the contrast between his stated age and the maturity of all the lesser paradoxes he writes, which fit perfectly into a troubled adolescent consciousness. To feel so vile and yet so self-important, with an urgency of life or death, would more accurately describe a teenage psyche, and without true narrative we have no knowledge of any late-blooming coming of age for our sad narrator.

The second half, while easier to understand for its narrative cohesiveness, is that much more painful for the narrator’s social awkwardness. He is a man of little consequence, and his typical social relationships leave him in shambles and the other parties more or less unaffected. This tendency is illustrated by his obsession with an officer who once moved him out of the way without acknowledgement in a crowded bar; the narrator schemes like a maniac to collide with the officer in the street to reassert his self-worth. Such desperate pettiness in a narrator, a position with whom the reader naturally identifies on some level, is difficult to swallow, and it only gets worse. His buffoonery culminates when Liza, the prostitute mentioned earlier, becomes the first person to take him seriously. His reaction toward her attempt to understand him is great tragedy, a gem of interesting relationship amid a shipwreck of unsettling gaffes.

The elements of human introspection in this book are fundamental and worthy of study, but their conveyance comes up short, at least in the English translation. I recommend this book to any dedicated fan of Dostoevsky, but not to anybody else.

Review: The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)

When I said this blog was going to review the books I read, I meant almost all of those books. Limiting myself to fantasy would limit fantasy, saying that it can't stand on the same shelf as other great literature.

But enough griping. I present: The Brothers Karamazov.

Set in post-feudal, pre-Communist Russia, this book follows the trials of the dysfunctional Karamazov family, the father of which is Fyodor Pavlovich, an old man known for his buffoonery and sexual promiscuity. Fyodor's eldest son, Dmitri Fyodorovich (you get the hang of the naming rules after a while), is a hotheaded man who often gets into trouble with love and money. The middle son, Ivan, is cold and critical, but tragically passionate. And the youngest, Alexey, is an overzealous monk whose dying elder knows that Alexey belongs out in the world for a longer time. Reuniting after living apart for many years, the family must find a way to keep from destroying each other over matters of money, women, and ethics.

You guessed it: this book is very different from anything I've already reviewed on this blog, both in time and space. I'm a big fan of Dostoevsky's philosophic beliefs, and so I must recognize from the beginning that these may tip the enjoyment of the book depending on where you stand. Because, as it turns out, philosophy and moral speculation are the backbone of this book. Its biggest problem is that the plot is secondary until the dramatic twist.

I'll tackle things chronologically. Dostoevsky's characters are amazingly complex and come with lots of baggage. I don't know whether this is more a 19th century trope or a Russian one, but that baggage is described in massive detail, including an entire chapter of back-story whenever a significant minor character is introduced. It's important to note that the book was originally released in chapter-long installments in a magazine. Dostoevsky was enormously popular by then, and readers were hooked; they looked forward to this month's exposition of the disgraced army captain's woes. But put into a continuous narrative, translated into English, and picked up by a young man in the attention span-fearing 21st century, the technical details slow the story nearly to a standstill. If it were written in the U.S. today, The Brothers Karamazov would need to be a third of its current size for a publisher to touch it with a ten-foot copyright. As it is, the first task is to sort out all the characters and their histories, making the book difficult to dive straight into.

Once it picks up, the book fluctuates between solid and brilliant. The long characterization pays off: everyone is understandable as a real person, and their actions make them more understandable rather than too complicated. For me, all the real points of gold come to or from the character Alexey, who is the only character without any concealed intentions. His bravery and honesty do not make him simple-minded or even all that naïve, as is the tendency. He is faced with the problem that too few books try to tackle, perhaps because nobody knows the answer: what to do when you have succeeded in becoming humble and good-hearted, but the world keeps on turning up new problems.

The other characters are explored just as well. I didn't understand or like Ivan until the very end, mostly because he felt like a crabby "stock atheist" who should have been more complex. Here's a spoiler: he is. The women in the book are brilliant, which is more remarkable considering the time (I don't know about the place, never having read a Russian, non-Dostoevsky book). 19th century authors, even those I wouldn't consider sexist, didn't tend to know quite how complex women act. I'm not an expert, but at least I try to give my women characters layered personality traits and actual motivations. Dostoevsky's women are at least as complex as his men–they're as realistic as people. None of his characters is limited to a desire for love, sex, money, power, purpose, or any other mold into which a sociologist might try to cram one of us. Just like anybody, they're not always sure what they want. This is something I try to give my characters, so I can say from experience that it's the hardest character trait to write, because the whole character goes bonkers if he's not written naturally. And Dostoevsky does it masterfully.

The political and religious debates were interesting. Not knowing enough about Russian history, I didn't have enough context to judge the attitudes with which his characters discuss socialism, which was already a common–if not popular–concept there. I was able to get down and dirty with the religion, and I found myself morbidly fascinated by Ivan's story "The Grand Inquisitor," in which a bishop explains his dystopian vision of the Catholic Church to his prisoner, a heretic who is actually Christ. Dostoevsky does well to include his characters' personalities in their religious views, keeping them real and at least semi-rational. After all, it's people who believe that humans and faith can be separated who have the dimmest sense of what constitute belief, apart from those who take it for granted. This, I digress, is the reason stories are useful for exploring philosophy.

What lost my interest was the turn of the story after its climax, which I won't spoil here. It involves a crime, an investigation, and a trial, none of which interested me very much. Caught up in rhetoric, the book loses some opportunities for its characters to develop smoothly, although they get there in the end. It's certainly not a thriller.

Although I hold this book in high regard, it's not the first one I'd recommend off the shelf. Read it if you're looking for some solid insight on Christianity, ethics, psychology, Dostoevsky, or Russia. Don't read it if you're looking for some insight on legal proceedings, or if you're looking for thrills and spills. Better find those elsewhere.