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The Eternal Husband is a wicked comedy on the subject of adultery and consequences� The novella boasts an inimitably sardonic atmosphere.
The main character is an unprincipled and hollow or even rubbishy man�

Now that he was verging on the forties, the brightness and good-humour were almost extinguished. Those eyes, which were already surrounded by tiny wrinkles, had begun to betray the cynicism of a worn-out man of doubtful morals, a duplicity, an ever-increasing irony and another shade of feeling, which was new: a shade of sadness and of pain � a sort of absent-minded sadness as though about nothing in particular and yet acute.

And once there was a provincial seductress�

She was twenty-eight when Velchaninov first knew her. Though not altogether beautiful, her face was sometimes charmingly animated, but her eyes were not pretty: there was something like an excess of determination in them. She was very thin. On the intellectual side she had not been well educated; her keen intelligence was unmistakable, though she was one-sided in her ideas�
She was faithful to her lover, but only as long as he did not bore her. She was fond of tormenting her lover, but she liked making up for it too. She was of a passionate, cruel and sensual type. She hated depravity and condemned it with exaggerated severity and � was herself depraved.

And of course there is her cuckolded husband�

“Such a man is born and grows up only to be a husband, and, having married, is promptly transformed into a supplement of his wife, even when he happens to have unmistakable character of his own. The chief sign of such a husband is a certain decoration. He can no more escape wearing horns than the sun can help shining; he is not only unaware of the fact, but is bound by the very laws of his nature to be unaware of it.�

The described events are taking place nine years after the love affair was over and they are a bitter aftermath of that amorous escapade.
The world is an immense smithy of unhappiness where everyone is a smith of one’s own misery.