The Eternal Husband (1870)

Velchaninov, the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s novel, The Eternal Husband, is haunted by his conscience.  A part of him knows that he has done wrong and has a longing to make it right.  Trusotsky, a man whom Velchaninov had cuckolded, suddenly reappears in Velchaninov’s life.  

Velchaninov is a serial adulterer, and one of the ways he copes with this lifestyle is by seeing the husbands a lesser beings.  He believes that certain men are “eternal husbands”—“only husbands in life and nothing more. . . Such a man is born and develops solely in order to marry, and having married, he immediately turns into an appendage of his wife . . . He cannot help but [be a cuckold].”

But when Velchaninov finds out that Trusotsky’s wife has died and that Velchaninov is the real father of her daughter Liza, Velchaninov finds himself having to interact with Trusotsky.  This causes a great deal of dissonance within Velchaninov.  His ego, in order to justify itself, needs to continue to see Trusotsky as a lesser man.  But his conscience, though deeply buried, has a need to reconcile.

In some ways, Velchaninov’s ego has an easy time of dismissing Trusotsky because much of Trusotsky’s behavior is repulsive.  Trusotsky, tormented by Liza’s parentage, horribly mistreats her; he also has lapsed into a grotesque lifestyle of drinking and soliciting prostitutes, and he is planning to force fifteen-year-old Nadya to marry him by exploiting her family’s financial situation.

Velchaninov has to see Trusotsky as a lesser being—if he doesn’t, he must face that his own behavior betrayed a sensitive soul who cared for him as a friend, and he fears that this admission would make himself a lesser being.  It would be to willingly concede the moral high ground.

Velchaninov and Trusotsky compete against each other in two ways—to hold the position as the more desirable by women, and to hold the moral high ground.  They both fear weakness.

When Velchaninov is actively cheating, he’s unconcerned with moral questions because he thinks dolts like Trusotsky are just asking for it, but once he discovers that Trusotsky is mistreating Liza, he loses his moral indifference.  He then judges Trusotsky as morally inferior—and this allows him to continue to justify his adultery.  What’s adultery, after all, next to child abuse?  Velchaninov tries to tell himself that he no longer needs to apologize.  Who apologizes to a monster?  They’ll only exploit your vulnerability.

But a few things happen that shake Velchaninov’s position on the moral high ground.  First, Trusotsky reveals, with genuine tears, that Velchaninov was his dearest friend.  Second, Velchaninov finds himself impulsively flirting with Nadya, Trusotsky’s fifteen-year-old fiancée.  Velchaninov’s desire to compete for moral advantage still can’t inhibit his desire to compete for sexual advantage.  

Velchaninov sees this and is appalled with himself.  The grotesqueness of Trusotsky’s engagement has now splattered onto Velchaninov.  And after Trusotsky attempts to murder Velchaninov, Velchaninov realizes that he had been welcoming Trusotsky to retaliate in some way so that Velchaninov could reassume the higher moral ground.

When Lobov, Nadya’s true beloved, comes and accuses Trusotsky of injustice, Velchaninov can’t help but feel also accused—and the more he sees Trusotsky’s predatory evil in himself, the less he is able to distance himself from Trusotsky by labeling him as one of “those men,” which in turn means he is less able to justify the pain he caused Trustotsky.

What is it that causes Velchaninov to change?  It’s something subconscious.  The day he went to make amends to Trusotsky, the narrator says he woke up with an “unexpected horror,” that he “would today, himself, of his own volition, put an end to everything by going to see [Trusotsky] . . . Why?  To what purpose?  He knew nothing of this and, in his disgust, did not want to know, but only knew that for some reason he was going to drag himself there.”  Velchaninov seems compelled to make amends by some hidden force within himself, similarly to how he was compelled to flirt with Nadya.

Velchaninov wars against this impulse.  He calls it “madness”; he’s ashamed of it.  Yet it seems to have been present within him the entire novel.  The book opens with guilty memories haunting him.

This is how much of the drama works in the novel.  The conflict is engineered in a way to force that which is latent in Velchaninov to become unmasked.  This can be seen in microcosm in the scene where Trusotsky invites Velchaninov to meet his teenage fiancée.  The conflict of the scene is simple on the surface: Trusotsky wants Velchaninov to go—Velchaninov doesn’t want to go.  But as the argument progresses, the narrator tells us that

“Velchaninov still refused, and all the more stubbornly for sensing inside himself one difficult, malicious sort of thought.  This evil thought had begun to stir inside him already long before, from the very beginning . . . whether it was simple curiosity or some as yet quite unclear attraction—but he felt drawn . . to agree.”

Drama often works in the novel as a A versus B conflict, which is then unexpectedly resolved by a third element, C—something that had been there the whole time but had lain dormant until the conflict forced it forward.  This C element flips the A-vs-B dichotomy on its head and reveals the characters to be more complex than this original clash suggested.  

What’s fascinating about Velchaninov is that he doesn’t have simply one hidden desire in his subconscious that he won’t face.  He has two, and they are at war with each other.  He has a dark desire to prove himself superior to Trusotsky, both morally and sexually.  His dark desire wants the impossibility of being both a predatory power and a moral power. Dark desires are usually contradictory because they’re inherently at odds with Reality. “Purity of heart,” Søren Kierkegaard says, “is to will one thing.” And both sides of this dark desire are perhaps fear-responses to the ego-deflation that his light desire would cost him. His light desire is to have a brotherly reconciliation with Trusotsky.  

Both characters are trapped in a cycle of domination and humiliation, a cycle which can only be broken by a humble admission of wrong.  Both characters are repulsed by this humility, yet at the same time have a buried yearning for it.

But when Velchaninov finally does hold his hand out to Trusotsky, Trusotsky too seems to be asking for forgiveness (albeit in a subtle way).  Admission of wrong—at the point of weakness—is where they are finally able to meet human-to-human.