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Most definitely an uncomfortable read. The unfinished sentences in dialogues and unbearable silences gave me major anxiety. It is, however, undeniably a master piece; although I don’t think one could fully grasp the importance of the messages conveyed in this literary work without having read René Girard’s Deceit, Desire and the Novel beforehand.
Authors usually clearly depict the good guy and the vilain, which makes it easy for the reader to know where to stand and pick sides, but in “The Eternal Husband“, Dostoevsky completely destabilizes us by making it hard to choose between two characters who are somehow, both equally detestable, but for different reasons: the first one, because of the mediocrity of his temperament that makes us oscillate between utter aversion for his actions and dashes of compassion for the evident hurt he harbors; and the other one, due to the profound sorrow he has caused in his past.
The author describes painstakingly the love/hate relationship between a husband and a man he admires greatly, his wife’s lover. Dostoevsky paints brilliantly, with uncomfortable details, the lowest things a man is capable of doing, under the influence of lack of self-confidence, low self-estime, self-hatred, respect and jealousy of someone’s apparent success or personality (that leads to loving and hating them at the same time and elicits the desire to hurt them just to feel more powerful and superior for once), the desperate search for the object of desire’s love and approval in those areas in which one thinks they excel, which often leads the envious man to deliberately create situations in which he is a victim, situations where he knows he’s going to lose and suffer; situations where he makes a fool of himself.
So what is an Eternal Husband? A man who has devoted his life to being a husband; someone who defines himself and his existence by his marital status; someone whose only source of joy came from his marriage; a lonely man; someone who wanted to be married so much, he ostracized himself from society, did everything his wife wanted and molded his behavior according to her every desire.
When she died, he discovered his wife had had affairs with two men who once were friends of their family. So he goes on a hunt to find those men and the story centres around his reunion with one of them whose culture, social ease and seductive quality the husband had always admired greatly.
It all starts as if his motives were driven by the desire to have closure, to forgive his wife and her lover; his intentions seemed good at first. But the reader quickly realizes that he admires the lover so much he actually physically desires him (asks for a kiss from him), he envies his likable personality and is madly jealous of his ability to seduce any woman without even seemingly making an effort, just by being himself. He venerates the lover for all the qualities previously mentioned and hates himself tremendously for not possessing those attributes. So much so that he seeks to impress him, be loved by him and kill him.
The lover, on the other hand, is far from being the extraordinary human the husband thinks he is. Besides the qualities the husband praises him for, the lover was a cruel and tormented being who ended up reaping the seeds of ill-will he had sowed. However, at the end of the story, the husband remains a “loser” and never manages to fix his low self-estime issues, whereas the lover has the strength of character to find peace and happiness when he feels like he’s paid his dues for his past behaviors.
This book highlights two types of personalities that society perceives as strong and weak and exposes how low one is willing to go under the influence of jealousy.
It is a testimony that the people we admire the most are as great as we put them to be; nothing more and nothing less. It proves that those with weak and strong characters each fight their own battles, but only the strong ones manage to change their lives for the better and find their way back to happiness. Fear holds the weak ones captive of their issues.
How effed up is human nature? I can’t even deal. This book, combined with René Girard’s Deceit, Desire and the Novel will have you think really hard about yourself, your thought process, your behavior and your life.
Morals of the story:
- Check yourself every once in a while to make sure you’re okay and that you’re not slipping on the dark side of human nature.
- Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Find the many things that make you happy and pursue them with all your heart. This way, if one source of happiness fails, you will not feel like your entire life is shattered, which can result in becoming bitter and unhappy.
- Don’t put anyone on a pedestal. People only publicly display what they want you to see, which is generally their good sides; but you don’t know what battles they fight behind closed doors. Seek to be the best version of yourself, that’s all.
You can get this book from Amazon here.
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