Pavel is pathetic. His feelings are feverish and confused. His actions are always distressingly inadequate. Pavel is human. I am Pavel. You are Pavel. Actually, he is quite the monster. I would put him right there with Dracula, Frankenstein's creature and the Orla. Scratch that. Pavel is scarier. We all are. I hate to break it to you. Humans can be more terrifying than made-up monsters. Particularly, those humans that are undergoing pain and don't know how to deal with it.

The blurb of my edition says people consider The Eternal Husband to be a summary of Dostoyevsky's work. Apparently, we didn't read the same book. The Eternal Husband is completely different from Dostoyevsky’s other works. First, I find it to be genuinely funny. I could picture Jane Austen reading some chapters and thinking: "This, but from the perspective of the woman". Velchaninov is unlike other Dostoyevsky’s protagonists too. He is quite sociable and able. By the end of the novella, he looks more like a bystander than an active part of the narrative.