![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
My classics book club decided to ease up a little after reading Proust, at least in terms of length. This means I have recently finished reading Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Eternal Husband, a novella of roughly 200 pages or so. I went with Constance Garnett’s translation since that was cheapest for Kindle.
This was my first experience with Russian literature outside of proofing a few short stories that cropped up in the Prentice Hall Literature anthologies. From this little exposure, I must say that, so far, Russian literature’s reputation for being gloomy and having lots of people dying seems fairly justified.
The Eternal Husband follows Alexei Ivanovitch Velchaninov, a middle-aged man who is struggling with a lawsuit about land that he refuses to leave alone for his lawyer to deal with, and some sort of existential crisis. Velchaninov is kind of a jerk. If he were alive today he would probably have a small cult following for being mean on the Internet.
Velchaninov's moping fit is interrupted one midnight by a knock on the door. His tipsy, nocturnal visitor is Pavel Pavlovitch Trusotsky, a man he had known several years ago when he was living out in the country somewhere. Trusotsky tells Velchaninov that his wife, Nadia had died. Turns out, Velchaninov had had a passionate year-long affair with Nadia back in the day, and now he isn't sure whether Trusotsky knows about it or not. The rest of the novella follows Velchaninov's awkward social dance as he tries to help his drunken acquaintance keep his shit together, and also to help out Nadia and Trusotsky's young daughter Liza, who was born at such a time that Velchaninov is pretty sure she's actually HIS daughter--but again, isn't sure if Trusotsky knows this or not. Velchaninov also gets awkwardly roped into wingmanning for Trusotsky in his attempts to woo a fifteen-year-old girl, the daughter of one of his friends, whose contempt for Trusotsky is obvious to absolutely everybody else.
The central question of "Does he or doesn't he know?" turns all these otherwise fairly mundane dramas of life into a high-tension mystery, and Dostoevsky's masterfully specific dialogue, tight plotting, dry humor, and deliberate pacing make the work not just a good story that happens to be a little too short for a novel, but a really compact, powerful gem of a story--precisely what a novella ought to be.
It has also had the happy side effect of making me much less scared than I previously was about tackling a full classic Russian novel one of these days. Will I regret it? Stay tuned!
This was my first experience with Russian literature outside of proofing a few short stories that cropped up in the Prentice Hall Literature anthologies. From this little exposure, I must say that, so far, Russian literature’s reputation for being gloomy and having lots of people dying seems fairly justified.
The Eternal Husband follows Alexei Ivanovitch Velchaninov, a middle-aged man who is struggling with a lawsuit about land that he refuses to leave alone for his lawyer to deal with, and some sort of existential crisis. Velchaninov is kind of a jerk. If he were alive today he would probably have a small cult following for being mean on the Internet.
Velchaninov's moping fit is interrupted one midnight by a knock on the door. His tipsy, nocturnal visitor is Pavel Pavlovitch Trusotsky, a man he had known several years ago when he was living out in the country somewhere. Trusotsky tells Velchaninov that his wife, Nadia had died. Turns out, Velchaninov had had a passionate year-long affair with Nadia back in the day, and now he isn't sure whether Trusotsky knows about it or not. The rest of the novella follows Velchaninov's awkward social dance as he tries to help his drunken acquaintance keep his shit together, and also to help out Nadia and Trusotsky's young daughter Liza, who was born at such a time that Velchaninov is pretty sure she's actually HIS daughter--but again, isn't sure if Trusotsky knows this or not. Velchaninov also gets awkwardly roped into wingmanning for Trusotsky in his attempts to woo a fifteen-year-old girl, the daughter of one of his friends, whose contempt for Trusotsky is obvious to absolutely everybody else.
The central question of "Does he or doesn't he know?" turns all these otherwise fairly mundane dramas of life into a high-tension mystery, and Dostoevsky's masterfully specific dialogue, tight plotting, dry humor, and deliberate pacing make the work not just a good story that happens to be a little too short for a novel, but a really compact, powerful gem of a story--precisely what a novella ought to be.
It has also had the happy side effect of making me much less scared than I previously was about tackling a full classic Russian novel one of these days. Will I regret it? Stay tuned!
