The Eternal Husband

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

All the people left in town, all the faces that flit by from morning till night so naïvely and openly betray their self-love, their guileless insolence, the cowardice of their little souls, the chicken-heartedness of their little natures—why, it’s a paradise for a melancholy man, seriously speaking!

It is true that there are faces that at once arouse an undefined and aimless aversion.

She was faithful to her lover, but only as long as he did not bore her. She was fond of tormenting her lover, but she liked making up for it too. She was of a passionate, cruel and sensual type. She hated depravity and condemned it with exaggerated severity and—was herself depraved.

To his mind, the essence of such a husband lay in his being, so to say, “the eternal husband,” or rather in being, all his life, a husband and nothing more. “Such a man is born and grows up only to be a husband, and, having married, is promptly transformed into a supplement of his wife, even when he happens to have unmistakable character of his own. The chief sign of such a husband is a certain decoration. He can no more escape wearing horns than the sun can help shining; he is not only unaware of the fact, but is bound by the very laws of his nature to be unaware of it.”

The very hottest days of July had come, but Velchaninov was oblivious of time. His grief ached in his heart like a growing abscess, and he was distinctly conscious of it and every moment with agonizing acuteness. His chief suffering was the thought that, before Liza had had time to know him, she had died, not understanding with what anguish he loved her! The object in life of which he had had such a joyful glimpse had suddenly vanished into everlasting darkness. That object—he thought of it every moment now—was that Liza should be conscious of his love every day, every hour, all her life.

“By my love for Liza,” he mused, “all my old putrid and useless life would be purified and expiated; to make up for my own idle, vicious and wasted life I would cherish and bring up that pure and exquisite creature, and for her sake everything would be forgiven me and I could forgive myself everything.”

“After sorrow comes rejoicing, so it is always in life;

He was a brilliant master of the art of small talk—that is, the art of seeming perfectly frank and at the same time appearing to consider his listeners as frank as himself.

“What is it to me,” Velchaninov reflected, “that he’s a buffoon and only spiteful through stupidity? I can’t help hating him, though he isn’t worth it!”

‘Great ideas spring not so much from noble intelligence as from noble feeling.’

“Pavel Pavlovitch did want to kill him, but the thought of the murder had never entered his head.”

Yes, it was from hatred that he loved me; that’s the strongest of all loves . . .

Yes indeed, nature dislikes monstrosities and destroys them with natural solutions. The most monstrous monster is the monster with noble feelings; I know that by personal experience, Pavel Pavlovitch!