The Eternal Husband and Other Stories

beautiful and happy without losing the ability to live on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of people. And they all laugh merely at this belief of mine. But how can I not believe: I saw the truth—it’s not that my mind invented it, but I saw it, I saw it, and its living image filled my soul for all time. I saw it in such fulfilled wholeness that I cannot believe it is impossible for people to have it. And so, how could I get confused? I’ll wander off, of course, even several times, and will maybe even speak in other people’s words, but not for long: the living image of what I saw will always be with me and will always correct and direct me. Oh, I’m hale, I’m fresh, I’m going, going, even if it’s for a thousand years. You know, I even wanted to conceal, at first, that I corrupted them all, but that was a mistake—already the first mistake! But truth whispered to me that I was lying, and guarded and directed me. But how to set up paradise—I don’t know, because I’m unable to put it into words. After my dream, I lost words. At least all the main words, the most necessary ones. But so be it: I’ll go and I’ll keep talking, tirelessly, because after all I saw it with my own eyes, though I can’t recount what I saw. But that is what the scoffers don’t understand: “He had a dream,” they say, “a delirium, a hallucination.” Eh! As if that’s so clever? And how proud they are! A dream? what is a dream? And is our life not a dream? I’ll say more: let it never, let it never come true, and let there be no paradise (that I can understand!)—well, but I will preach all the same. And yet it’s so simple: in one day, in one hour— it could all be set up at once! The main thing is—love others as yourself, that’s the main thing, and it’s everything, there’s no need for anything else at all: it will immediately be discovered how to set things up. And yet this is merely an old truth, repeated and read a billion times, but still it has never taken root! “The consciousness of life is higher than life, the knowledge of the laws of happiness is higher than happiness”—that is what must be fought! And I will. If only everyone wants it, everything can be set up at once.

And I found that little girl… And I’ll go! I’ll go!

NOTES

A NASTY ANECDOTE (1862)

1. The Neva River divides into three main branches as it flows into the Gulf of Finland, marking out the three main areas of the city of St. Petersburg. On the left bank of the Neva is the city center, between the Neva and the Little Neva is Vasilievsky Island, and between the Little Neva and the Nevka is the so-called “Petersburg side,” which is thus some distance from the center.

2. These three gentlemen are all in the civil service, not the military. But civil service ranks had military equivalents, which were sometimes used in social address. The following is a list of the fourteen civil service ranks from highest to lowest, with their approximate military equivalents:

1. Chancellor

Field Marshal

2. Actual Privy Councillor

General

3. Actual State Councillor

Major General

5. State Councillor

Colonel

6. Collegiate Councillor

Lieutenant Colonel

7. Court Councillor

Major

8. Collegiate Assessor

Captain

9. Titular Councillor

Staff Captain

10. Collegiate Secretary

Lieutenant

11. Secretary of Naval Constructions

12. Government Secretary

Sub-lieutenant

13. Provincial Secretary

14. Collegiate Registrar

The rank of titular councillor conferred personal nobility; the rank of actual state councillor made it hereditary. Wives of officials shared their husbands’ rank and were entitled to the same mode of address—“Your Honor,” “Your Excellency,” “Your Supreme Excellency.” Mention of an official’s rank automatically indicates the amount of deference he must be shown, and by whom.

3. The star was the decoration of a number of orders, among them the Polish-Russian Order of St. Stanislas (or Stanislav) and the Swedish Order of the North Star.

4. Certain Russian decorations had two degrees, being worn either on the breast or on a ribbon around the neck.

5. “Botched existence” or “failed life” (French).

6. “Talker” and “phrase-maker” (French).

7. A tax-farmer was a private person authorized by the government to collect taxes in exchange for a fixed fee. The practice was open to abuse, and tax-farmers could become extremely rich, though never quite respectable. Tax-farming was eventually abolished by the economic reforms of the emperor Alexander II in the 1860s, to which reference is made here.

8. A reference to Christ’s teaching: “Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved” (Matthew 9:17).

9. “That’s the word” (French).

10. “Good sense” (French).

11. Pralinsky is mulling over the “problem” of the abolition of corporal punishment with birch rods, then still allowed in the army and in the schools as well as with serfs.

12. The clerk’s name is absurdly close to the Russian psevdonym (“pseudonym”), a fact Pralinsky later mentions himself. Pseldonymov is a collegiate registrar.

13. “Mlekopitaev” is also an absurd, though just plausible, name derived from the Russian word for “mammal.”

14. Clerks in the civil service had to have their superiors’ permission to change departments, to move elsewhere, and even to marry.

15. The leader of the romantic movement in Russian art, K. P. Briullov (1799–1852), was most famous for his enormous historical painting The Last Day of Pompeii, evidently the epitome of turmoil