Crime and Punishment

Biblical references in the text and notes are given in the King James Version. Crime and Punishment is abbreviated here as C&P. Our notes are indebted to the extensive commentaries provided in the Soviet Academy of Sciences edition published in 1973.

1

Zimmerman was a famous hatter with a shop on Nevsky Prospect in Petersburg. Dostoevsky owned a Zimmerman hat.

2

There were nine grades of councillors in the Russian civil service; titular councillor was the ninth, or lowest.

3

It was customary for Russians to identify themselves formally by giving their social "rank" as well as their name. "Student"—and thus "former student"—was such a rank. The reader will find mention of ranks throughout C&P. The lowest was "simple person" or peasant; "tradesman" was a bit higher; and so on.

4

The hay barges on the Neva were well known in Petersburg during the 1860s as a place where beggars and bums spent the night.

5

The "yellow pass" was an official certificate issued to prostitutes.

6

See Matthew 10:26: "there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not be known."

7

Pontius Pilate's words about Christ; see John 19:5.

8

Dancing with a shawl was an honor granted to the most successful students of girls' boarding schools at graduation.

9

It was possible to "live in a corner," that is, to rent only part of a room, though Marmeladov turns out to be renting a whole room from Mrs. Lippewechsel.

10

Cyrus the Great (600?-529 b.c.), king of Persia from 550-529, founder of the Persian empire.

11

A Russian translation of The Physiology of Everyday Life, by the English philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes (1817-78), was published in Moscow in 1861. Dostoevsky owned a copy of the second edition. The book, influenced by the thought of the French positivist Auguste Comte (1798-1857), suited the practical-minded tastes of the time and was especially popular among progressive young women.

12

State councillor was the fifth grade of councillors in the civil service; a fairly high position.

13

See Psalm 68:2: "as wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God."

14

"The Little Farm" was a popular Russian song of the mid-nineteenth century, with words by A. V. Koltsov (1809-42), a poet of humble origin.

15

See Luke 7:47.

16

See Revelation 13:15-16.

17

The second petition of the Lord's Prayer; see Matthew 6:10, Luke 11:2.

18

Petersburg, owing to its northern latitude (6o°N), has "white nights" during the summer. In July the sun sets at around 8:30 p.m., with twilight lasting almost until midnight; sunrise is at approximately 4:00 a.m., preceded by a long, pale dawn.

19

Like civil servants, students in Russia wore uniforms, including a visored cap and a greatcoat.

20

The first half of a saying; the second half (obviously) is: "because you may have to drink from it."

21

It was a custom of local people in small towns or villages to smear with tar the gates of someone against whom they wanted to express their moral indignation.

22

Court councillor was the seventh grade of councillors in the civil service.

23

The Russian Senate in Petersburg functioned as the highest court of law as well as a managerial and administrative body; it remained answerable to the tsar.

24

The feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God (the Assumption, in Roman Catholicism), celebrated on August 15. According to the canons of the Orthodox Church, weddings may not be celebrated during periods of fasting. The fast preceding the feast of the Dormition is from August 1 to August 14.

25

The Kazan Mother of God (generally showing just the head and shoulders of the Virgin, with a frontal half-figure of the infant Christ giving a blessing) is perhaps the most widespread icon of the Mother of God in Russia. Its prototype was discovered in Kazan in 1579.

26

Golgotha ("the place of a skull" in Aramaic; latinized as "Calvary") is the name of the place just outside Jerusalem where Christ was crucified. See Matthew 27:33, Mark 15:22, John 19:17.

27

A broad reference to the works and ideas of the German poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), who stood, in Dostoevsky's keyboard of references, for notions of the ideal, the "great and beautiful," and a simplified struggle for freedom, all with a Romantic glow. Having loved Schiller's poetry as a young man, Dostoevsky indulged in a good deal of indirect mockery of him in his later works. Further references to Schiller in C&P are all in the same tone.

28

The Order of St. Anne (the mother of the Virgin; "Anna" in Russian) was a military and civil distinction, awarded by the tsar. It had two degrees, the higher being worn on the breast, the lower around the neck.

29

Schleswig-Holstein, in the north of Germany, bordering on Jutland, was fought over by Denmark and Prussia in the mid-1860s, before being annexed by Prussia in 1866. The struggle was much discussed in the Russian press of the time, by Dostoevsky among others.

30

The situation of Latvians under Russian rule was so bad that even poor Germans of the region considered them as slaves—another issue taken up by the Russian press in the 1860s.

31

The Jesuits (members of the Society of Jesus, a religious order founded by St. Ignatius Loyola in 1534) were popularly considered masters of casuistry.

32

Though Raskolnikov has just heard about Svidrigailov in his mother's letter, for Dostoevsky and his contemporaries the name was not unknown. In several issues of the newspaper Iskra, in 1861, the doings of a wealthy provincial landowner and his minion Svidrigailov had been discussed. The name came to suggest a type of shady dealer and intriguer, and might have been used as Raskolnikov uses it here.

33

Following the publication, in 1865, of a Russian translation of Man and the Development of His Abilities: An Experiment in Social Physics, by the Belgian mathematician and statistician Adolphe Quételet (1796-1874), there was discussion in the press about the percentages of victims destined by nature to crime and prostitution. Quéte-let's followers tried to establish the statistical regularity of human actions in society. Quételet and his German disciple Adolf Wagner (1835-1917) were hailed as pillars of the science of moral statistics.

34

A series of islands (Petrovsky, Krestovsky, Yelagin) in the delta of the Neva west of Petersburg where wealthier people had summer houses.

35

Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), the greatest of Russian poets; Ivan Turgenev (1818-83), novelist, Dostoevsky's contemporary and acquaintance. Dostoevsky had the highest admiration for Pushkin, whose short story "The Queen of Spades" may be considered one of the "sources" of C&P. His relations with Turgenev were often strained, and artistically the two were opposites.

36

The dream that follows contains autobiographical elements; in his notes for the novel, Dostoevsky mentions a broken-winded horse he had seen as a child.

37

Kutya (kootyah) is a special dish offered to people at the end of a memorial service and, in some places, on Christmas Eve, made from rice (or barley, or wheat) and raisins, sweetened with honey.

38

A kichka (foechka) is a headdress with two peaks or "horns" on the sides, worn only by married women.

39

In his poem "Before Evening" from the cycle About the Weather (1859), Nikolai Nekrasov (1821-77) describes a scene of a horse being beaten "on its meek eyes." Dostoevsky seems to have been deeply moved by the poem; it is referred to at some length in The Brothers Karamazov.

40

Collegiate registrar was the fourteenth, or lowest, grade in the Russian civil service.

41

"Thank you" (German). Louisa Ivanovna's speech further on, like Mrs. Lip-pewechsel's later in the novel, is full of German words and Germanisms; these will not be glossed in our notes.

42

The Russian word tsugunder, used in the phrase "to send [someone] to tsu-gunder, " is a borrowing from German of much-disputed etymology. The phrase means generally "to arrest" or "to deal with." Ilya Petrovich obviously uses it for its Germanic ring, and we have altered the spelling accordingly.

43

A molieben (vaolyehhen) is an Orthodox prayer service for a special occasion, commemoration, or thanksgiving. Koch is evidently of German origin, therefore most likely not Orthodox, which is why Nikodim Fomich is so struck.

44

In her memoirs, Dostoevsky's wife, Anna Grigorievna, mentions that in the first weeks of their married life Dostoevsky took her to a certain yard during a walk and showed her the stone under which his Raskolnikov hid the stolen objects. When she asked what he himself had been doing in that deserted yard, Dostoevsky replied, "The same thing as other passers-by."

45

The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78) was translated into Russian in the 1860s. His younger Russian contemporary, Alexander Radishchev (1749-1802), author of A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow, was exiled to Siberia by the empress Catherine the Great because of his outspoken attacks on social abuses.

46

This title is an ironic reference to the controversy surrounding the "woman question" that began in the 1860s.

47

The streets on Vasilievsky Island, called "Lines," were laid out in a grid like the streets of Manhattan, and have numbers in place of names.

48

The Winter Palace, residence of the tsars.

49

The cathedral is St. Isaac's. Designed in a mixed style suggesting a neoclassical interpretation of St. Peter's in Rome, it is heavily ornamented with sculptures, including (as Soviet guides say) "four life-size angels." There was a small chapel of St. Nicholas built on to the Nikolaevsky Bridge; both were made of wood and burned down in 1916.

50

Apparently his real name is Vrazumikhin, derived from the Russian verb meaning "to bring to reason," but is habitually simplified to Razumikhin, from the verb "to reason." Or else he is simply joking.

51

A low-class or poor people's way of sipping tea through a lump of sugar held in the teeth. The aim was to save sugar, it being considered a luxury to dissolve sugar in one's tea.

52

Five Corners, still so called, is an intersection in Petersburg where five streets meet.

53

I. G. Charmeur was a well-known Petersburg tailor; Dostoevsky had his own suits made by Charmeur.

54

The Palais de Cristal (later referred to in C&'P as the Crystal Palace) was a hotel/restaurant, opened in Petersburg in 1862, but not in the area where Dostoevsky locates the establishment described here. His deliberate use of the name was most likely intended to remind his readers of earlier mentions of "the Crystal Palace" in Notes from Underground (1864) and elsewhere, referring to the great glass hall built in London for the International Exposition of 1851. In polemics with his ideological opponent the radical writer N. G. Chernyshevsky (1828-89), who saw this Crystal Palace as an image of the ideal living space for the future communal society (in his 1862 novel What Is to Be Done?), Dostoevsky's man from underground likens it to a chicken coop.

55

Peski ("the Sands") and Kolomna were neighborhoods on the outskirts of Petersburg.

56

Xavier Jouvain, of Grenoble, brought about a revolution in glove-making with his invention, in 1834, of a special mold for shaping gloves.

57

The actual proverb is much terser in Russian; Luzhin bungles it, as if he were making a "literal" translation, something like, "If you throw one stone at two birds, you may not kill either of them."

58

Luzhin's words here echo ideas of the English economist and philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748—1832), which were the subject of great polemics in Russia at the time. They also contain suggestions of Chernyshevsky's theory of "rational egoism."

59

A "band" of forgers, including a university lecturer, was indeed uncovered in Moscow in 1865. At his trial, the lecturer gave explanations similar to those quoted by Razumikhin further on. The murder of the embassy secretary is also an allusion to an actual trial, mentioned in Dostoevsky's notebooks, involving a retired army lieutenant who made an attempt on the life of a Russian embassy secretary in Paris.

60

Raskolnikov read about this "narrow ledge" in Book 11, chapter 2, of Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris (1831), first published in Russian translation in Dostoevsky's short-lived magazine Time in 1862.

61

Ivan Ivanovich Izler was the owner of a man-made suburban spa in Petersburg called "Mineral Waters," very popular in the 1860s. The Petersburg newspapers of 1865 were full of news about the arrival in the city of a young midget couple, Massimo and Bartola, said to be descendants of the ancient Aztecs. The unusual number of fires in Petersburg and then\throughout Russia in 1862 were sometimes blamed on revolutionary students. Dostoevsky tried to oppose these rumors in his magazine, Time, but the articles were not passed by the censors.

62

This account of the nervous accomplice comes from an actual event reported in a Moscow newspaper in 1865.

63

"Enough talk!" (French). According to his wife's memoirs, this was one of Dostoevsky's own favorite phrases. He borrowed it from Vautrin, a character in the novels of Honoré de Balzac (1700-1850). Dostoevsky was a great admirer of Balzac, whose Rastignac is a fictional precursor of Raskolnikov.

64

The civil equivalent of the military rank of colonel.

65

A provincial marshal of nobility was, prior to the reforms of the 1860s, the highest elected officer in a province.

66

The names in Katerina Ivanovna's account are allegorical but plausible: Be/./.e-melny means "landless," and Shchegolskoy means "foppish." This lends an air of fantasy to her memories. "Kammerjunker," borrowed by Russian from the German, was an honorary court title.

67

Consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist, reserved by the priest for .such occasions.

68

Dostoevsky himself underwent such a sentencing and pardon in 1849, after being arrested for subversive activities. He often uses the experience metaphorically.

69

Anton Rubinstein (1829-94), Russian composer and world-famous pianist. He founded the Petersburg Conservatory in 1859.

70

The upper chamber of the Prussian legislature of the time.

71

Marie Antoinette de Lorraine (1755-93), archduchess of Austria, married to Louis XVI of France, was imprisoned during the French Revolution and then guillotined. Dostoevsky mentions her name in his notes for C&P.

72

"Drop dead, dogs, if you don't like it!" (French).

73

The Mitrofanievsky Cemetery, established in 1831 during a cholera epidemic, was considered a cemetery for the poor. A meal, called a "memorial meal" (pominki in Russian), is traditionally served following a funeral.

74

Refers to the beggar Lazarus in the Gospel parable (see Luke 16:19-31), who eats crumbs from the rich man's table. Metaphorically, the common Russian saying "to sing Lazarus" means to complain of one's fate. A song about the poor man Lazarus was often sung by blind beggars asking for alms.

75

The term "phalanstery" was coined by the French Utopian socialist thinker Charles Fourier (1772-1837) to designate the physical and productive arrangements for living in the future communal society. Dostoevsky's interest in "Fourierism" as a young man led to his arrest by the tsar's agents in 1849.

76

"Ivan the Great" is a bell-tower in the Moscow Kremlin.

77

Lycurgus, semilegendary lawgiver of ancient Sparta, is said to have lived in the ninth century b.c. Solon (630?-560? b.c.), lawgiver and reformer of the Athenian state, was one of the "seven sages of Greece." Muhammad and Napoleon, among other things, also codified the laws of their nations.

78

The French phrase means "long live the eternal war." The New Jerusalem appears at the end of Revelation (21:1-3) in St. John's vision of "the holy city ... coming down from God out of heaven." However, the Saint-Simonians, followers of the Utopian socialist Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon (1760-1825), interpreted this vision as foretelling a future paradise on earth and a new golden age. Saint-Simon's thought, a sort of neo-Christianity, was popular in Russia during the 1840s.

79

See John 11:1-45. This is not the beggar Lazarus, but Lazarus the brother of Martha and Mary, whom Jesus raises from the dead. The theme of the raising of Lazarus, central to the novel, is here introduced from an unexpected quarter, and meets an unexpected response.

80

A temperature of 30° on the Reaumur scale is the equivalent of 1oo°F or 80°C.

81

Raskolnikov mentally lists the steps in Napoleon's career. Napoleon (1760-1821) first distinguished himself as an artillery captain in the battle of Toulon in the south of France (1793). In 1795 he used his artillery to suppress a royalist uprising in Paris. After an unfortunate campaign in the Middle Fast, in August 1799 he abandoned his army in Egypt and hastily returned alone to Paris to seize power (the remnants of the army were finally repatriated only two years later). In his disastrous Russian campaign of 1812, he lost all but a few thousand of his 500,000-man army, and most of his artillery. The "pun in Vilno" refers to Napoleon's remark after leaving Russia: "Du sublime au ridicule, il n'y a qu'un pas" ("From the sublime to the ridiculous is only one step"), quoted by Victor Hugo in the preface to his historical drama Cromwell (1827).

82

The phrase, almost a quotation, appears in the writings of Victor Considérant (1808-93), a French Utopian socialist thinker, follower of Fourier.

83

The expression "trembling creature," from the Koran, also appears in Pushkin's cycle of poems Imitations of the Koran (1824), where Dostoevsky may have found it.

84

A misquotation of a famous line from the Roman playwright Terence (190-159 B.C.): homo sum, bumani nihil a me alienum puto ("I am a man, nothing human is alien to me"). Svidrigailov's error is a common one (repeated by the devil in The Brothers Karamazov).

85

"It's honest warfare" (French).

86

"Freedom of expression" in Svidrigailov's ironic phrase is glasnost in the original. The whipping of the German woman, an event that took place in 1860, was widely commented on in the newspapers. The "Outrageous Act of The Age" refers to the title of a polemical article published in the St. Petersburg Gazette (3 March 1861) protesting against an attack on the movement for women's emancipation in the weekly magazine The Age. The article in The Age had denounced an event at which a woman gave a public reading from Pushkin's Egyptian Nights: the reading of Cleopatra's challenge to⁷ men (to spend a night with her in exchange for their lives) was considered an immoral act revealing the true aims of the proponents of women's emancipation. "Those dark eyes" refers to the description of the lady as she was reading.

87

After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, peasants were allotted arable land, which was taken from the landowners; forests and water meadows were not included in such allotments.

88

Dussot owned a famous restaurant in Petersburg frequented by high society. Pointes (French for points or spits of land) here refers to a pleasure garden on Yelagin Island.

89

"Wine doesn't agree with me" (French).

90

Berg was the owner of amusement attractions in Petersburg. Known as "the famous Petersburg aeronaut," he was often mentioned in newspapers during the mid-1860s.

91

"So as to please you" (French).

92

"(Jive rest with thy saints, C) Christ, to the soul of thy servant . . ." is the first phrase of a hymn (kontakion) from the Orthodox funeral service. "The food" refers to the traditional manorial meal following a funeral.

93

Prince Svirbey and Madame Prilukov are not known. Vyazemsky's house was a Petersburg flophouse where the dregs of society spent their nights.

94

Razumikhin has earlier played on the sound of his name (see Part Two, note 10). Here Luzhin is misled by its meaning. "Rassudkin" comes from rassudok: reason, intellect, common sense.

95

A "holy fool" (yurodivyi in Russian) can be a saintly person or ascetic whose saintliness is expressed as "folly." Holy fools of this sort were known early in Christian tradition, but in later common usage "holy fool" also came to mean a crazy person or simpleton.

96

The language of the Russian Orthodox Church is Old Slavonic, not Russian. The Bible was first translated into Russian in the early nineteenth century.

97

See Matthew 5:8: "Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God."

98

Here and further on Sonya reads from John 11:1-45.

99

An imprecise quotation of Matthew 19:14.

100

"Simply" or "without adornments" (French).

101

"It's obligatory" (French).

102

The judicial reforms of 1864 introduced, among many more important changes, a new nomenclature for police and court personnel.

103

During the Crimean War (1853-56), after defeating the Russian army at the Alma River (September 8,1854), the allied forces (England, France, Turkey, the Piedmont) laid siege to Sebastopol, finally taking the city eleven months later.

104

The Hofkriegsrat was the supreme military council of Austria. Field Marshal Karl Mack (1752-1828) was surrounded by the French army at Ulm in 1805 and surrendered his 30,000 men to Napoleon without a fight. Mack's arrival at Russian headquarters after this defeat is described in Tolstoy's War and Peace, in a chapter published in The Russian Herald (1866, No. 2), between the publication in the same magazine of the first and the remaining parts of C&P.

105

Nikolai Gogol (1800-52), prose writer and dramatist, was the greatest of Dostoevsky's predecessors. Dostoevsky was deeply indebted to him as an artist, particularly in his notion of "fantastic realism"; his works are full of references, hidden parodies, and polemical responses to the writings of the great satirist.

106

Knop was the owner of a toiletry shop on Nevsky Prospect in Petersburg. The English Shop also sold imported toiletries, among other things.

107

This passage humorously summarizes some of the issues of concern to radicals of the early 1860s. Communes had begun to appear in Petersburg under the influence of Fourier and of Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done? (there was in fact a commune on Meshchanskaya Street).

108

"Let's distinguish" (French).

109

Nikolai A. Dobrolyubov (1836-61) was a radical literary critic and associate of Chernyshevsky. His career was cut short by consumption. Vissarion Belinsky (1811-1848), a liberal critic of the previous and more idealistic generation, achieved great prominence in his time. He was among the earliest to recognize Gogol's genius, and championed Dostoevsky's first novel, Poor Folk (1846).

110

Lebezyatnikov is alluding to Vera Pavlovna's argument in Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? The question of "freedom of entry into rooms" is also discussed in the same novel.

111

An allusion to arguments about art and usefulness propounded by certain radical critics of the day, particularly D. I. Pisarev (1840-68), a great disparager of Pushkin, who is said to have wept when he read C&P, before hastening to write a critical review of the novel.

112

Pushkin mentions "horns" in at least three poems, "horns" and "hussars" in one of them ("Couplets," 1816).

113

A parody of ideas about love and jealousy in Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done?

114

See Part One, note 37.

115

"Lady cornet's wife" (Polish); an absurd compliment.

116

Panie (pab nyeh) is the respectful term of direct address for a gentleman in Polish, as pani is for a lady.

117

Bread and salt, literal or metaphorical, is a symbol of hospitality in Russia.

118

"In black and white" (French).

119

It was customary in Russia for a corpse to be laid out on a table until it was put in the coffin.

120

"Oh, merciful God!" (German).

121

See Matthew 6:3: "But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth . . ."

122

The General Conclusion of the Positive Method was a collection of articles on various scientific subjects, mainly physiology and psychology, translated from German into Russian and published in 1866. Piederit was a German medical writer; Adolf Wagner, a follower of Quételet, was a proponent of "moral statistics" (see Part One, note 33).

123

"Sir, you are a scoundrel!" (Polish).

124

"Stand up straight!" (French).

125

Petrushka is a Russian clown; shows involving his antics were put on at fairs and in the streets.

126

"A Hussar Leaning on His Sabre" is a well-known song, with words by the poet Konstantin Batyushkov (1787-1855). "Cinq sous" ("Five pennies") is a French popular song. "Malborough s'en va-t-en guerre" ("Malborough's going to war") is a widely known French song about John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722), who led the English forces in the War of the Spanish Succession in the Low Countries. The Duke's name is variously misspelled in French transcriptions as "Malbrough," "Malbrouk," or "Malborough," as Dostoevsky has it here.

127

"Malborough's going to war / Doesn't know when he'll come back . . ." "Five pennies, live pennies / To set up our household . . ."

128

French dance terms: "slide, slide, the Basque step."

129

Lines from the poem "Back in My Native Land" from the Book of Songs, by the German poet Heinrich Heine (1707-1856), set to music by Franz Schubert: "You have diamonds and pearls ... / You have the most beautiful eyes, / Maiden, what more do you want?"

130

A setting of the poem "The Dream" by Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41).

131

A reader reads the responses and assists the priest in the memorial service (pani-khida in Russian).

132

Part of a prayer for the dead: "Give rest, = Lord, to the soul of thy departed servant."

133

An inexact quotation from "Diary of a Madman" by Nikolai Gogol.

134

"In vain!" (German).

135

The word "schismatic" (raskolnik in Russian) rings oddly in the original because of its closeness to the protagonist's name. It refers to the Old Believers, who split off from the Russian Orthodox Church in disagreement over the reforms of the patriarch Nikon in the mid-seventeenth century. "Runners" refers to a sect of the Old Believers that emerged in the eighteenth century; believing that the Orthodox Church and all civil authorities were under the sway of the Antichrist, they fled from every form of obedience to social institutions and "sojourned" in forests and desert places; hence they were first called "sojourners" and later "runners." The institution of elders is a venerable one in Orthodox tradition (there is a short treatise on elders in Book One of The Brothers Karamazov). An elder, generally speaking, is a spiritual director, to whom the one seeking direction owes the strictest obedience.

136

Dostoevsky describes this convict in Notes from the Dead House (1860), a semific-tional account of his own prison experiences.

137

Midshipman Dyrka (dyrka means "hole" in Russian) is mentioned in Gogol's comedy The Wedding, but Porfiry Petrovich has apparently confused him with another character in the play, the easily amused Midshipman Petukhov (petukh means "rooster").

138

"Funeral oration" (French).

139

Svidrigailov has in mind the early persecutions of Christians, and then the life of St. Mary of Egypt, a fifth-century saint greatly venerated in the Orthodox Church, a former prostitute who converted to Christianity and withdrew to the Egyptian desert where she spent more than forty years in solitude.

140

Not necessarily a theological student, but generally a poor scholar, probably from a clerical family. Such families often had names (like Razumikhin) derived from words designating Christian virtues.

141

"Nature and truth" (French). Dostoevsky uses this phrase (compare Thomme de la nature et de la vérité, in Notes from Underground) in ironic reference to the thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (see Part Two, note 5).

142

"Where is virtue going to build her nest?" (French). The playwright Molière (1622-73) is said to have asked this of a beggar who thought he had made a mistake in giving him a gold piece.

143

"Enough talk!" (French). See Part Two, note 23.

144

"Good-bye, my pleasure" (French).

145

"As good a theory as any" (French).

146

Here Dunya suddenly addresses Svidrigailov in the familiar second person singular, which Russians generally use only with family and intimate friends. The shift has a strong effect for the Russian reader, suggesting more to their relationship than has appeared so far.

147

Here again Dunya uses the second person singular.

148

Dunya speaks in the second person singular through "You're lying, slanderer!" Svidrigailov twice responds in kind.

149

The revolver is of the old cap-and-ball variety, midway between a firelock and the later cartridge pistol. The chambers were hand-loaded and fired by a separate percussion cap. In the "misfire" the cap apparently went off but did not fire the charge.

150

Here they both begin to speak in the second person singular, through "ever?"

151

The original Vauxhall was a seventeenth-century pleasure garden in London. Here the term refers to an outdoor space for concerts and entertainment, with a tea-house, tables, and so on. Russian borrowed the word from English; evidently vauxhalls were a new thing in the 1860s.

152

In the Orthodox Church, the Sunday of Pentecost, fifty days after Easter.

153

The Church does not grant suicides Christian burial or offer prayers for them.

154

Cannon shots fired from the Petropavlovsky Fortress in Petersburg served as a flood warning; they also signaled such events as the spring thaw, military victories, fires, or the birth of a son to the imperial household.

155

The brass helmets worn by Russian (and not only Russian) firemen in the nineteenth century were descendants of the crested helmets supposed to have been worn by such Greek heroes as Achilles.

156

Julius Caesar was crowned high priest and military tribune in the temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill in Rome, at the start of his rise to power.

157

Nihil est: "it is nothing" or "nothing is" (Latin).

158

David Livingstone (1813-73), famous Scottish explorer of central and southern Africa, published a book on his travels along the Zambezi River in 1865; it was soon translated into Russian.

159

"Nihilism" was a new movement among the radical Russian youth, emerging just around the time that Dostoevsky was writing C&P, the mentality and consequences of which he partly explores in the novel. The aims of the nihilists, as the name suggests, were essentially negative—the destruction of the existing social order, without stipulating what should replace it. In this they "stepped beyond" the earlier Utopian socialists; they "negated more," as Lebezyatnikov puts it. Their ideology was anti-idealist, concerned with immediate action and practical results.

160

Ilya Petrovich's words reflect common attacks on women who sought higher education. In the 1860s women were allowed education only as teachers or midwives. The Academy he refers to is the medical school.

161

The setting and conditions of Raskolnikov's hard labor are drawn from Dostoevsky's own experiences as a convict. The four years he spent in prison at Omsk, on the Irtysh River, are described in Notes from the Dead House.

162

Special services are held on weekdays during the Great Lent (in the Orthodox Church, the forty-day fast preceding Holy Week, which in turn precedes Easter Sunday). The prisoners probably took turns attending these services because the church was too small to accommodate all of them at once.

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Kalatchi: plural of kalatch, a very fine white bread shaped like a purse with a looped handle.