The Eternal Husband

Description

THE ART OF THE NOVELLA SERIES This remarkably edgy and suspenseful tale shows that, despite being better known for his voluminous and sprawling novels, Fyodor Dostoevsky was a master of the more tightly-focused form of the novella. The Eternal Husband may, in fact, constitute his most classically-shaped composition, with his most devilish plot- a man answers a late-night knock on the door to find himself in a tense and puzzling confrontation with the husband of a former lover-but it isn't clear if the husband knows about the affair. What follows is one of the most beautiful and piercing considerations ever written about the dualities of love- a dazzling psychological duel between the two men over knowledge they may or may not share, bringing them both to a shattering conclusion.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's life was as dark and dramatic as the great novels he wrote. He was born in Moscow in 1821, the son of a former army surgeon. A short first novel brought him instant success, but his writing career was cut short by his arrest for alleged subversion against Tsar Nicholas I in 1849. Sentenced to a firing squad, dressed in a death shroud, he faced an open grave and awaited his execution when, suddenly, an order arrived commuting his sentence. He then spent four years at hard labor in a Siberian prison, where he began to suffer from epilepsy, and he only returned to St. Petersburg a fall ten years after he had left in chains. His prison experiences coupled with his conversion to a conservative and profoundly religious philosophy formed the basis for his great novels. His marriage to Anna Snitkina, following a period of destitution brought about by gambling, gave Dostoevsky the emotional stability to complete CRIME AND PUNISHMENT. THE IDIOT, THE POSSESSED, and THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV. He died in 1881.

"I wanted them all, even those I'd already read." -Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer "Small wonders." -Time Out London "[F]irst-rate...astutely selected and attractively packaged...indisputably great works." -Adam Begley, The New York Observer "I've always been haunted by Bartleby, the proto-slacker. But it's the handsomely minimalist cover of the Melville House edition that gets me here, one of many in the small publisher's fine 'Art of the Novella' series." -The New Yorker "The Art of the Novella series is sort of an anti-Kindle. What these singular, distinctive titles celebrate is book-ness. They're slim enough to be portable but showy enough to be conspicuously consumed-tiny little objects that demand to be loved for the commodities they are." -KQED (NPR San Francisco) "Some like it short, and if you're one of them, Melville House, an independent publisher based in Brooklyn, has a line of books for you... elegant-looking paperback editions ...a good read in a small package." -The Wall Street Journal