The Eternal Husband and Other Stories brings together five of Dostoevsky's short masterpieces rendered into English by two of the most celebrated Dostoevsky translators of our time. Filled with many of the themes and concerns central to his great novels, these short works display the full range of his genius. The centerpiece of the collection, the short novel 7"he Eternal Husband, describes the almost surreal meeting of a cuckolded widower and his dead wife's lover. Dostoevsky's dark brilliance and satiric vision infuse the other four tales with all-too-human characters, including a government official who shows up uninvited at an underling's wedding to prove his humanity; a self-deceiving narrator who struggles futilely to understand his wife's suicide; and a hack writer who attends a funeral and ends up talking with the dead. The Eternal Husband and Other Stories is sterling Dostoevsky--a collection of emotional power and an uncompromising insight into the human condition.

It is the road of every Christian man, who starts from the senses, who is endowed with reason as a dialectical principle which, in the drama of his earthly life, must make a decision between ever increasing participation and eternal defection.

--Erich Auerbach,

Dante, Poet of the Secular World

Dostoevsky"s work represents a life-long meditation on the same few themes, motifs, and figures. The love triangle, for instance, with all its ambiguities of pride and humiliation,outward magnanimity, and inner rivalry, entered his work with his very first book, Poor Folk, finished in 1845, when he was twenty-four. Some ten years later, after passing through many ofhis early stories (The Landlady A Faint Heart, White Nights), the modf entered the writer"s own life in the form of his friendship with the Isaev family in Semipalatinsk and his later courtship of the widowed Marya Dmitrievna Isaev.Marya Dmitrievna eventually became his first wife, but before accepting his proposal she hesitated for a long time between Dostoevsky and a young schoolteacher by the name of Vergunov. Dostoevsky thus got to play two roles-the family friend who falls in love with the mistress of the house,and then the older rival of a handsome young suitor. The various moves of this elaborate game are detailed in the lettees he wrote at the time, which read like pages from one of his own epistolary tales...

PREFACE

A NASTY ANECDOTE

THE ETERNAL HUSBAND

BOBOK

THE MEEK ONE

THE DREAM OF A RIDICULOUS MAN

NOTES