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 Dostoevsky's genius. The centerpiece of this collection, the short novel The 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; 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 uncompromising insight into the human condition.
Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, with an Introduction by Richard Pevear
Editorial Reviews
"One finally gets the musical whole of Dostoevsky’s original.” —New York Times Book Review on the translations of PEN Award winners Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
"A fifth translation of Dostoevsky's fiction by the acclaimed husband-and-wife team, whose revisionist English-language versions restore much of the colloquial vigor and rough humor suppressed or glossed over in earlier translations. Four of the five tales included here date from Dostoevsky's last decade, the 1870s (only the satirical "A Nasty Anecdote" is earlier)—the period that Pevear describes in an incisive Preface as a darker and more complex flowering out of Dostoevsky's more "romantic" previous fiction. And indeed these stories variously offer interesting late developments of the great Russian writer's distinctive preoccupations with the permutations of traditional morality ("The Meek One") and with the shadowy borderline between alienation and dementia ("Bobok," "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man"). Best of all is the superb title novella, which unforgettably explores the sadomasochistic relationship between a cuckolded husband and his wife's beleaguered former lover. One of Dostoevsky's strangest and strongest works, it's a rigorous test for Pevear and Volokhonsky, but one that they pass with flying colors." —Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881) was a Russian novelist, journalist, and short-story writer whose novels Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov rank among the greatest of the nineteenth century. Dostoevsky was no stranger to adversity and struggle. Born into a family of nine in October 1821, his mother died when he was sixteen, causing the family split up. After Dostoevsky was sent to a military academy with his brother, their army surgeon father was murdered by his own serfs. Even his first wife (whose traits, critics say, manifest themselves in the character of Katerina Ivanvna) died of tuberculosis. Though his first book, Poor Folk, earned him an invitation into the Natural School of Russian Literature in the 1840s, he was convicted of subversion against Tsar Nicholas I in 1849 and exiled to Siberia. By the time Crime and Punishment was published in 1866, he had returned from exile and prison, and had developed the bleak outlook that pervades the novel.
![When this classic collection of stories first appeared—in 1962, on the author’s thirtieth birthday—Arthur Mizener wrote in The New York Times Book Review: “Updike is a romantic [and] like all American romantics, that is, he has an irresistible impulse to go in memory home again in order to find himself. . . . The precise recollection of his own family-love, parental and marital, is vital to him; it is the matter in which the saving truth is incarnate. . . . Pigeon Feathers is not just a book of very brilliant short stories; it is a demonstration of how the most gifted writer of his generation is coming to maturity; it shows us that Mr. Updike’s fine verbal talent is no longer pirouetting, however gracefully, out of a simple delight in motion, but is beginning to serve his deepest insight.”](https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-ezptpblrxu/images/stencil/500x659/products/1019/1658/PigeonsStories__64020.1660081010.jpg?c=2 "When this classic collection of stories first appeared—in 1962, on the author’s thirtieth birthday—Arthur Mizener wrote in The New York Times Book Review: “Updike is a romantic [and] like all American romantics, that is, he has an irresistible impulse to go in memory home again in order to find himself. . . . The precise recollection of his own family-love, parental and marital, is vital to him; it is the matter in which the saving truth is incarnate. . . . Pigeon Feathers is not just a book of very brilliant short stories; it is a demonstration of how the most gifted writer of his generation is coming to maturity; it shows us that Mr. Updike’s fine verbal talent is no longer pirouetting, however gracefully, out of a simple delight in motion, but is beginning to serve his deepest insight.”")
