Notes
For many details in the following notes we are indebted to the commentaries in the Soviet Academy of Sciences edition, volume a (Leningrad, 1975).
[i] "They treated me like an old cotton bonnet!"
[ii] "can break my existence in two"
[iii] "in every land, [even] in the land of Makar and his calves"
[iv] "I am a [mere sponger] and nothing more! Yes, nothing more!"
[v] "among these seminarians"
[vi] "for our holy Russia."
[vii] "but let us distinguish"
[viii] "Just between us"
[ix] "These interminable Russian words!"
[x] "You know, with us ... In a word"
[xi] "in order to show you his power."
[xii] "no, it's very curious"
[xiii] "you know that singing and the book of Job"
[xiv] "and he showed his power"
[xv] "what an idea, red!" or "what a red idea!"
[xvi] "you know"
[xvii] "with such pomposity"
[xviii] "Really?"
[xix] "Charming child!"
[xx] "And then, since one always finds more monks than reason"
[xxi] "My word, dear"
[xxii] "Oh, it's a very stupid story! I was waiting for you, my good friend, in order to tell you..."
[xxiii] "AII men of genius and progress in Russia were, are and always will be [card players] and [drunkards] who drink in zapoï [bouts]"
[xxiv] "But, just between us"
[xxv] "But she's a child!"
[xxvi] "Yes, I mistook one word for another. But... it's all the same"
[xxvii] "Yes, yes, I'm incapable."
[xxviii] "this dear son"
[xxix] "he's such a poor mind!"
[xxx] "he's a poor specimen all the same"
[xxxi] "And finally, the ridicule"
[xxxii] "I am a galley slave, a Badinguet, a"
[xxxiii] "I don't give a damn!"
[xxxiv] “I don't give a damn and I proclaim my freedom. To the devil with Karmazinov! To the devil with the Lembke woman!"
[xxxv] "You will second me, won't you, as friend and witness."
[xxxvi] "that's the word"
[xxxvii] "something of that sort."
[xxxviii] "I remember it. Finally"
[xxxix] "he was like a little idiot."
[xl] "How's that!"
[xli] "of this poor friend"
[xlii] "our irascible friend"
[xliii] "our holy Russia"
[xliv] "But that will pass."
[xlv] "to the accident. You will accompany me, won't you?"
[xlvi] "O God who is so great and so good!"
[xlvii] "and I am beginning to believe."
[xlviii] "In God? In God who is on high and who is so great and so good?"
[xlix] "He does everything I want."
[l] "God! God! ... at last a minute of happiness."
[li] "You and happiness, you arrive at the same time!"
[lii] "I was so nervous and sick and then ..."
[liii] "He's a local dreamer. He's the best and most irascible man in the world..."
[liv] "and you will do a good deed..."
[lv] "Anyhow, it's ridiculous."
[lvi] "a worthy man all the same"
[lvii] "this Liputin, which I do not understand"
[lviii] "I am an ungrateful man!"
[lix] "all has been said... it's terrible."
[lx] "She's an angel"
[lxi] "Twenty years!"
[lxii] "He's a monster; and anyhow"
[lxiii] "These people imagine that nature and human society are otherwise than God made them and than they actually are."
[lxiv] "but let's speak of other things"
[lxv] "it was stupid, but what can be done, all has been said."
[lxvi] "if miracles exist?"
[lxvii] "and let all be said!"
[lxviii] "what is known as the"
[lxix] "leave me, my friend"
[lxx] "you see"
[lxxi] "But what is the matter with you, Liza!"
[lxxii] "But, my dear and excellent friend, in what agitation..."
[lxxiii] "anyhow, he is a depraved man and something like an escaped convict..."
[lxxiv] "He is a dishonest man and I believe he is even an escaped convict or something of the kind"
[lxxv] "And you are right"
[lxxvi] "He laughs."
[lxxvii] "that's it exactly."
[lxxviii] "to cause a sensation around his name"
[lxxix] "He laughs. He laughs a lot, he laughs too much ... He laughs all the time."
[lxxx] "So much the better."
[lxxxi] "I wanted to convert."
[lxxxii] 'This poor [auntie,] she's going to hear some pretty things!"
[lxxxiii] "There's something blind and shifty [or cross-eyed] in him."
[lxxxiv] "They are quite simply lazybones"
[lxxxv] ”You're lazy. Your banner is a rag, an impotence."
[lxxxvi] "some stupidity of the sort."
[lxxxvii] "You don't understand."
[lxxxviii] 'insatiable activity"
[lxxxix] "benevolent curmudgeon"
[xc] "That impure blood should flood our furrows!"
[xci] "Not an inch of our ground, not a stone of our fortresses!"
[xcii] "Yes, the comparison is permissible. It was like a little Don Cossack, jumping upon his own grave."
[xciii] "I've forgotten."
[xciv] "informality"
[xcv] "without letting it show!"
[xcvi] "Reader take notice."
[xcvii] "At last a friend!"
[xcviii] "You understand?"
[xcix] "Excuse me, I've forgotten his name. He's not from around here... something stupid and German in his physiognomy. His name is Rosenthal."
[c] You know him? Something dull and very self-satisfied in his face, but at the same time very severe, stiff, and serious."
[ci] "I know the type."
[cii] "yes, I remember it, he used that word."
[ciii] "He kept his distance"
[civ] "anyhow, he seemed to believe I was going to fall on him at once and start beating him to a pulp. All these low-class people are like that"
[cv] "It's twenty years that I've been preparing for it."
[cvi] "I was dignified and calm."
[cvii] "and, anyhow, all that."
[cviii] "and some of my historical, critical, and political sketches."
[cix] "yes, that's right"
[cx] "He was alone, quite alone"
[cxi] "in the entryway, yes, I remember that, and then"
[cxii] "I was overexcited, you see. He talked, he talked ... a pile of things"
[cxiii] "I was overexcited, but dignified, I assure you of it."
[cxiv] "You know, he uttered the name of Telyatnikov"
[cxv] "'who still owes me fifteen roubles from [pinochle], be it said in passing. Anyhow, I didn't understand very well."
[cxvi] "what do you think? Anyhow, he consented."
[cxvii] "and nothing more"
[cxviii] "my enemies ... and then what good is this prosecutor, our pig of a prosecutor, who has been impolite to me twice and who got such a fine thrashing the other year at that charming and beautiful [Natalia Pavlovna's,] when he hid in her boudoir. And then, my friend"
[cxix] "in a friendly way, I am thoroughly pleased."
[cxx] "When one has such things in one's room and they come to arrest you"
[cxxi] "Send her away"
[cxxii] "and besides it annoys me."
[cxxiii] "One must be ready, you see... every moment"
[cxxiv] "This dates from Petersburg"
[cxxv] "You're putting me in with those people!"
[cxxvi] "with those freethinkers of cowardice!"
[cxxvii] "You know... that I'll make some sort of scandal there."
[cxxviii] "My career is finished as of today, I feel it."
[cxxix] "I swear to you"
[cxxx] "What do you know about it"
[cxxxi] "what will she say"
[cxxxii] "She will suspect me all her life"
[cxxxiii] "it's improbable... and then, women"
[cxxxiv] "One must be dignified and calm with Lembke."
[cxxxv] "Oh, believe me, I will be calm!"
[cxxxvi] "at the height of all that is most sacred"
[cxxxvii] "Everything is for the best in the best of all possible worlds."
[cxxxviii] "my hour has struck."
[cxxxix] "You make nothing but blunders"
[cxl] "and as one finds more monks than reason everywhere"
[cxli] "That's charming, the monks"
[cxlii] "and let's break off there, my dear"
[cxliii] "in full"
[cxliv] "it is stupidity in its purest essence, something like a chemical simple."
[cxlv] "God forgive you, my friend, and God keep you."
[cxlvi] "afterwards"
[cxlvii] "as for me"
[cxlviii] "the sayings of these poor folk are often charming and full of philosophy"
[cxlix] "Oh, they are poor little good-for-nothings and nothing more, little [little fools]— that's the word!"
[cl] "Oh, yesterday he was so witty"
[cli] "what shame!"
[clii] "You will forgive me, charming lady, won't you?"
[cliii] "You are unhappy, aren't you?"
[cliv] "We are all unhappy, but we must forgive them all. Let us forgive, Liza"
[clv] "twenty-two years!"
[clvi] "in this merchant's house, if only this merchant exists"
[clvii] "but do you know what time it is!"
[clviii] "does Russia exist? Hah, it's you, dear captain!"
[clix] "Long live the democratic, social, and universal republic, or death! ... Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death!"
[clx] "de Kirillov, Russian gentleman and citizen of the world."
[clxi] "Russian gentleman-seminarian and citizen of the civilized world!"
[clxii] "that merchant"
[clxiii] "Long live the high road"
[clxiv] "I have forty roubles in all; he will take the roubles and kill me all the same."
[clxv] "this begins to be reassuring... this is very reassuring... this is reassuring to the highest degree."
[clxvi] "I am something else"
[clxvii] "Yes, one could translate it that way."
[clxviii] "That's even better, I have forty roubles in all, but..."
[clxix] "That is to say"
[clxx] "She wanted it"
[clxxi] "a finger of vodka."
[clxxii] “a tiny drop."
[clxxiii] "I am quite sick, but it's not so bad to be sick."
[clxxiv] "a lady and she looked it"
[clxxv] "But I believe this is the Gospel"
[clxxvi] "You are what they call [a book-hawker]"
[clxxvii] "I have nothing against the Gospel, and"
[clxxviii] "It seems to me that everyone is going to Spasov..."
[clxxix] "But she is a lady, and a very respectable one"
[clxxx] "This little lump of sugar is nothing"
[clxxxi] "Pure respectability"
[clxxxii] "you're not thirty years old."
[clxxxiii] "Those worthless fellows, those wretches!"
[clxxxiv] "Bah, I'm turning into an egoist..."
[clxxxv] "But what's gotten into the man"
[clxxxvi] "But, my dear and new friend"
[clxxxvii] "But there's no help for it, and I am delighted!"
[clxxxviii] "won't you?"
[clxxxix] "I love the people, that is indispensable, but it seems to me that I have never seen them up close. Nastasya ... it goes without saying that she is also of the people... but the true people"
[cxc] "Dear and incomparable friend"
[cxci] "dear innocent one. The Gospel... You see, from now on we will preach it together"
[cxcii] "something very new of the sort."
[cxciii] "granted"
[cxciv] "that dear ingrate"
[cxcv] "Dear and incomparable one, for me a woman is all."
[cxcvi] "it's turning too cold. By the way, I have forty roubles in all and here is the money"
[cxcvii] "let's not speak of it any more, because it upsets me"
[cxcviii] "because we have to talk."
[cxcix] "Yes, I have much to say to you, dear friend."
[cc] "What, you already know my name?"
[cci] "Enough, my child ... we have our money, and after that—after that the good Lord... Enough, enough, you're tormenting me"
[ccii] "It's nothing, we shall wait"
[cciii] "You are as noble as a marquise!"
[cciv] "as in your book!"
[ccv] "Enough, enough, my child"
[ccvi] "You know"
[ccvii] "Am I so sick? But it's nothing serious."
[ccviii] "Oh, I remember, yes, the Apocalypse. Read, read"
[ccix] “we will leave together."
[ccx] "those swine"
[ccxi] "Yes, this Russia which I always loved."
[ccxii] "and the others with him"
[ccxiii] "you will understand afterwards... We will understand together."
[ccxiv] "Hah, a lake"
[ccxv] "And I shall preach the Gospel ..."
[ccxvi] "She is an angel... She was more than an angel for me"
[ccxvii] "I loved you."
[ccxviii] "I loved you all my life... twenty years!"
[ccxix] "an hour... some bouillon, tea... anyhow, he is so happy."
[ccxx] Yes, my friends... This whole ceremony"
[ccxxi] "My father, I thank you, and you are very kind, but..."
[ccxxii] "There is my profession of faith."
[ccxxiii] "I have lied all my life"
[ccxxiv] "very little"
[1] "Exile" here means internal exile to the provinces, a measure taken in Russia against politically suspect persons.
[2] Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadaev (1794?-1856) was the author of eight Philosophical Letters, written in French and circulated in manuscript, which among other things were sharply critical of Russia's intellectual isolation and social backwardness. The publication in 1836 of the first letter (the only one published in Chaadaev's lifetime) has been called the "opening shot" of the Westerner-Slavophil controversy which dominated nineteenth-century Russian social thought. Chaadaev's ideas in fact influenced both the Westerners, who favored various degrees of liberal reform to bring Russia into line with developments in Europe, and the Slavophils, proponents of Russian national culture and Orthodoxy.
Vissarion Grigorievich Belinsky (1811-48) was the most influential liberal critic and ideologist of his time, an advocate of socially conscious literature. He championed Dostoevsky's first novel, Poor Folk (1845), but Dostoevsky soon broke with him.
Timofei Nikolaevich Granovsky (1813-55), liberal historian and professor at Moscow University, is generally regarded as the founder of the Westerners. Stepan Trofimovich was first called "Granovsky" in the early drafts of Demons; Dostoevsky has given him Granovsky's general intellectual profile, his love of letter writing and card playing, his taste for champagne, his tearfulness, and his religious position ("Leave me God and art. I yield Christ up to you").
Alexander Ivanovich Herzen (1812-70) was a novelist, publicist, and radical social critic. Self-exiled from Russia in 1847, he lived in London, where he edited the influential journal The Bell (Kolokol). He was one of an unofficial triumvirate of revolutionary émigrés, along with the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1814-76) and the poet and propagandist Nikolai Ogaryov (1813-77).
[3] This phrase is probably a deliberate echo of an even clumsier phrase ("a whirlwind of emerged entanglements") in Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1847), the last published work of Nikolai Gogol (1809-52).
[4] "Hanseatic," pertaining to the Hansa, a medieval German merchant guild, later a trading league of free German cities. These details of Stepan Trofimovich's career are all ironic allusions to the activities of T. N. Granovsky (see note 2 above).
[5] That is, "lovers of the Slavs" (see note 2 above).
[6] The journal Dostoevsky has in mind is Fatherland Notes, where his own first novel was published, and which in the 1840s, under the editorship of Andrei An-tonovich Kraevsky (1810-89), became a major forum for the Westerners. Kraevsky published the first Russian translations of Charles Dickens (1812-70) and George Sand (pen name of the French writer Aurore Dupin, baronne Dudevant, 1804-76).
[7] There were a number of such secret societies in nineteenth-century Russia. Dostoevsky most likely has in mind the Petrashevsky circle, which he himself frequented from 1847 until its suppression in 1849, when he and other members were arrested. The Petrashevists were particularly interested in the ideas of the French Utopian socialist Charles Fourier (1772-1837). His system, known as "Fourierism," envisaged the organization of individuals into "phalansteries," or social-economic groups harmoniously composed with the aim of securing the well-being of each member through the freely accepted labor of all.
[8] The second part of the grand verse drama Faust by the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1740-1832) is characterized by its mystical and allegorical choruses.
[9] The poet and liberal journalist Nikolai A. Nekrasov (1821-77), Dostoevsky's sometime friend and frequent ideological opponent, was referred to as a "people's poet" in his own lifetime, by Dostoevsky among others. The quotation here, somewhat rearranged, is from Nekrasov's poem "The Bear Hunt."
[10] The phrase "civic grief," meaning an acute suffering over social ills and inequities, was widely used in the Russia of the 1860s; the disease itself became fashionable in Petersburg, where the deaths of some high-school students and cadets were even ascribed to it.
[11] Rumors of the government's intention to liberate the serfs began to emerge as early as the 1840s. Their emancipation was finally decreed by the emperor Alexander II on 19 February 1861.
[12] In 1836, the famous artist K. P. Briullov (1799-1852), leader of the Russian romantic school, made an engraving of the mediocre poet N. V. Kukolnik (1809-68), which was used as a frontispiece in editions of his poems.
[13] Alexis Clérel de Tocqueville (1805-59), French politician and writer, was the author of two classic works, Democracy in America (1835-40) and The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856). The French writer Paul de Kock (1794-1871) was the author of innumerable novels depicting petit bourgeois life, some of them considered risqué.
[14] 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.
[15] Protests against "outrageous acts" were symptomatic of the radical press of the 1860s, for instance the polemical article entitled "The Outrageous Act of The Age, " published in the St Petersburg Gazette (3 March 1861), protesting against an attack on the movement for women's emancipation in the journal The Age, referred to by Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment.
[16] All these issues were discussed in the radical press of the 1860s. The apparent hodgepodge of points from "dividing Russia" through "women's rights" was in fact the program spelled out in one of the tracts of the time. "The Passage" was and is a shopping arcade in Petersburg which also housed a public auditorium. For Kraevsky, see note 6 above.
[17] The points Stepan Trofimovich agrees with are some of those listed in the anarchist program of Mikhail Bakunin (see note 2 above), published in the first issue of his journal The People's Cause (Geneva, 1869). However, Stepan Trofimovich vehemently rejects the utilitarianism of such radical critics as D. I. Pisarev (1840-68), for whom poetry was a prime target, particularly that of Russia's greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837).
[18] These are actually the first lines of some doggerel Dostoevsky himself wrote in parody of popular themes in contemporary journalism. Vek (The Age) was a Petersburg weekly; Lev Kambek was a second-rate journalist of the time.
[19] Athenian (or Attic) Nights by the Roman writer Aulus Gellius (second century a.d.) is a collection of dialogues on various branches of knowledge. The title came proverbially to signify "orgy," but is used by Stepan Trofimovich in its original sense of a refined evening discussion.
[20] The Madonna painted for the church of St. Sixtus in Piacenza by Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520), later acquired by the museum of Dresden. According to the memoirs of his wife, Anna Grigorievna, Dostoevsky placed Raphael above all painters and considered the Sistine Madonna the summit of his art.
[21] The Russian saying "where Makar never drove his calves" signifies a remote place. For Stepan Trofimovich and Varvara Petrovna it evidently stood for exile to some far corner of Russia.
[22] Clergy and wealthier peasants might send their sons to study in seminaries without destining them for a churchly career. Many radical writers of the 1860s were former seminarians, as Joseph Stalin was later. Dostoevsky saw them as a distinct type; in a notebook from that time he wrote: "These seminarians have introduced a special negation into our literature, too complete, too hostile, too sharp, and therefore too limited."
[23] Ironically called "ancient Roman," this utterance is actually a parody of the manner of speaking favored among the characters in the novel What Is to Be Done? (1863), by the utilitarian communist writer, and former seminarian, Nikolai G. Cherny-shevsky (1828-89). Dostoevsky parodied this same mannerism in Crime and Punishment through the character of Lebezyatnikov.
[24] The French national anthem, originally the marching song of the Army of the Rhine in the 1792 war of the young French Republic against Austria. It was composed by a captain from Lons-Ie-Saunier, Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle (1760-1836).
[25] See note 11 above.
[26] A paraphrase of an anonymous poem entitled "Fantasy," published in the radical almanac North Star in 1861.
[27] The "komarinsky" is a Russian dance-song with comical words.
[28] Elisa Felix (1820-58), whose stage name was Mile. Rachel, contributed to the revival of French classical tragedy in the nineteenth century.
[29] The perfume "Bouquet de l'impératrice" was awarded a gold medal at the World Exposition of 1867 in Paris, and instantly became fashionable. The impératrice was Eugénie, wife of Napoléon III.
[30] Title of a novel published in 1847 by Dmitri V. Grigorovich (1822-99), a sentimental depiction of peasant life praised by the critic Belinsky (see note 2 above) for political reasons. Grigorovich was a close friend of Dostoevsky's from their days in the Petersburg Military Engineering Academy.
[31] Anton Petrov was a peasant from the village of Bezdna ("abyss" in Russian) who was given the task of reading the statutes of the peasant reform of 1861 to the peasants. Up to five thousand people gathered from surrounding villages to hear his explanations of the reform, causing unrest which was severely quashed by the authorities.
[32] That is, St. Peter's School, a German high school in Petersburg, founded in the eighteenth century.
[33] Igor Svyatoslavich (1151-1202) was prince of Novgorod-Seversk, a small town near Chernigov, in the period predating the rise of the Muscovite kingdom.
[34] Stepan Trofimovich means some mythical long-ago.
[35] See note 6 above. Stepan Trofimovich probably has in mind the novel Lélia (1838), which protests against the constraints put upon women by society and religion and defends freedom of feelings.
[36] See note 2 above. In a famous letter to Gogol (15 July 1847), Belinsky denounced the "father of Russian prose" for turning reactionary in his last book (see note 3 above), and took the opportunity to condemn Russian tyranny, landowning, and the Church. It was for reading this letter to the Petrashevsky circle that Dostoevsky was arrested and sentenced to prison in 1849 (see note 7 above). The quotation here, however, is not from the same letter.
[37] Ivan Andreevich Krylov (1769-1844), poet and fabulist, the Russian La Fontaine (whom he translated), wrote a fable entitled "The Inquisitive Man" (1814), which tells of a man who goes to a museum and notices all sorts of tiny things, but fails to notice an elephant. The phrase became proverbial.
[38] Characters from Shakespeare's history plays Henry the Fourth, Parts I and II, and, with the exception of the prince, from The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597-1600).
[39] Victor Considérant (1808-93) was a devoted follower of Fourier (see Chapter One, note 7) who oversaw the publication of his master's writings and himself produced a three-volume systematization of Fourier's ideas entitled La Destinée sociale ("Social Destiny," 1834-44), popular among Russian liberals of the 1840s.
[40] See Chapter One, note 7.
[41] Otto von Bismarck (1815-98), called "the Iron Chancellor," was a Prussian statesman and one of the main architects of German unity; founder of the Triple Alliance (with Austria and Italy) against France.
[42] Blaise Pascal (1623-62), French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher, author of the unfinished Pensées and of Letters to a Provincial (1656-57), from which the quoted phrase comes.
[43] A "magnificent literary masterpiece, half poem, half oration," in the words of Vladimir Nabokov, who translated it into English (1960), discovered around 1790 by Count Alexei Musin-Pushkin in a collection of old manuscripts, but dating back to the year 1187, narrating certain events in the life of Prince Igor (see Chapter One, note 33).
[44] Before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, Russian estates were evaluated according to the number of "souls" or adult male serfs living on them.
[45] Badinguet was the name of the stonemason whose identity and clothing Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (1808-73), me future emperor Napoléon III, borrowed for his escape from the fortress of Ham in 1846. The name was later mockingly applied to the emperor by his opponents.
[46] The portrait of Semyon Yegorovich Karmazinov in Demons is to a considerable extent a caricature of the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev (1818-83), with whom Dostoevsky entertained relations varying from cool friendship to bitter hostility throughout his life. In spirit and art the two writers were opposites, but in 1880, a few months before Dostoevsky's death, on the occasion of his famous speech on Pushkin (8 June), they fell into each other's arms and were briefly reconciled.
[47] Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622-73), known as Molière, poet, playwright, actor, and director, is among the greatest of French writers. François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), called Voltaire, wrote in many forms and was widely read in his lifetime; his philosophical tale Candide (1759) was one of Dostoevsky's favorite books.
[48] David Teniers the Elder (1582-1649), or else David Teniers the Younger (1610-90), Flemish painters, father and son; the realistic popular scenes of village weddings and feasts painted by Teniers the Younger are perhaps better known than the works of his father.
[49] The Man Who Laughs, a novel by Victor Hugo (1802-85), published in 1869, based on the antithesis between moral beauty and physical deformity.
[50] In Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, Gogol wrote: "You trusted that I knew Russia like my five fingers; and I know precisely nothing in it." Dostoevsky has Stepan Trofimovich ironically echo these words while claiming the opposite, and with an added distortion of idiom.
[51] Pechorin is the cold, aloof hero of A Hero of Our Time (1840), a novel by the poet Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41).
[52] A kalatch is a loaf of very fine white bread shaped like a purse with a looped handle and generously dusted with flour.
[53] The seaport of Sebastopol in the Crimea was besieged by French and English forces for eleven months in 1854-55, during the Crimean War (1854-56), and was eventually taken by the besiegers.
[54] Korobochka ("little box") is the name of a lady landowner in Gogol's novel Dead Souls (1843). It became synonymous with a certain type of person—suspicious, stingy, stubborn, stupid.
[55] Among Dostoevsky's preliminary notes for Crime and Punishment we read: "N.B.: Nihilism is lackeyishness of thought. A nihilist is a lackey of thought." The term "nihilism," first used philosophically in German (nibilismus) to signify annihilation, a reduction to nothing (attributed to Buddha), or the rejection of religious beliefs and moral principles, came via the French nihilisme to Russian, where it acquired a political meaning, referring to the doctrine of the younger generation of socialists of the 1860s, who advocated the destruction of the existing social order without specifying what should replace it. The great nineteenth-century Russian lexicographer Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl (1801-72), normally a model of restraint, defines "nihilism" in his Interpretive Dictionary of the Living Russian Language as "an ugly and immoral doctrine which rejects everything that cannot be palpated." The term became current after it appeared in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (1862), where it is applied to the hero Bazarov.
[56] Gogol, at the beginning of the seventh chapter of Dead Souls, says of himself that he is "destined to look at life through laughter visible to the world and tears invisible and unknown to it."
[57] An altered quotation from travel notes by P. I. Ogorodnikov entitled "From New York to San Francisco and Back to Russia," published in the journal Zarya (1870, No. XI).
[58] Also from Ogorodnikov's travel notes.
[59] Mount Athos, at the southern end of the easternmost peninsula of Chalkidiki in Macedonia, is an autonomous region which has been a monastic center since the fifth century A.D.
[60] "Prophesying" as an ecstatic form of religious behavior might be condoned by the Church as a kind of "folly for Christ's sake" or might be put under penance.
[61] "Kitty" (kosbechka, diminutive of koshka, "female cat") is an endearing name in Russian. But the refrain "Kitty, come out to me" also occurs in Russian yuletide carols as a marriage motif (see Vladimir Nabokov's commentary to his translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, abridged edition, Princeton, 1981, volume II, part one, pp. 496-97). Such carols might have been found in Marya Timofeevna's Songbook.
[62] The subject matter of this stanza, widely known in Russian folklore, is connected with the name of Eudoxia Lopukhin (to whom the words are also ascribed), the first wife of Peter the Great (1672-1725), who had her sent to a convent and made a nun.
[63] An absurdly distorted but recognizable version of a well-known poem by Afanasy Fet (1820-92), "I Have Come to You with Greeting" (1843).
[64] Russian banknotes had different colors depending on their denomination. A green banknote was worth three roubles.
[65] General A. P. Ermolov (1772-1861) was a hero of the Napoleonic war of 1812, a brilliant military commander and diplomat. From 1817 to 1827 he served as commander-in-chief of the Russian army in the Caucasus.
[66] A misquotation of a line from a poem by N. Kukolnik (see Chapter One, note 12 above), famous as a song with music by M. I. Glinka (1804-57). It should read, "Sleep, hopeless heart!"
[67] The age of the universe used to be calculated according to biblical chronology. By the Hebrew calendar, creation was 5,631 years old as Lebyadkin was speaking; by the chronology of Bishop James Ussher of Dublin (1581—1656), it was 5,875 years old. Lebyadkin gives a rounded-off figure.
[68] The Prince de Monbars, or Monbars l'Exterminateur (b. 1646), was a chief of the ftibustres (French for "filibusters"). He terrorized shipping in the West Indies and in 1683 managed to capture Veracruz. Hero of several popular dramas and novels.
[69] See Chapter One, note 37 above. The monument, a statue of Krylov surrounded by animals from his fables, was set up on the children's playground in the Petersburg Summer Garden in 1855, and is still there. It is known affectionately as "Grandpa Krylov."
[70] Denis Vasilievich Davydov (1784-1839), himself a hussar and a hero of the Napoleonic war of 1812, wrote energetic, humorous poems which have remained very popular.
[71] See Chapter Two, note 1 above.
[72] The "Merchant's Yard" in old Russian, a huge shopping arcade in Petersburg, still so called.
[73] According to the biblical account (Genesis 19:1-28), God destroyed Sodom because the men of the city practiced "sodomy," but in Russian use "Sodom" means a more generally disordered and outrageous kind of life. Owners of apartments used to rent out not only individual rooms but sectioned-off parts of rooms, or "corners," which inevitably led to a certain communality among the tenants.
[74] The sudden death of the emperor Alexander I on 19 November 1825 was followed by a period of confusion about the succession. A conspiratorial group of officers and noblemen, opposed to imperial absolutism and favoring a constitutional monarchy or even a republican government, seized the occasion and gathered their forces in the Senate Square of Petersburg on 14 December 1825. Hence the name "Decembrists." The uprising was promptly quelled by loyal contingents of the Imperial Guard; one hundred twenty-one men were arrested, of whom five were executed and the rest exiled to Siberia. M. S. Lunin (1787-1845), one of the exiled Decembrists, was indeed famous for his fearlessness.
[75] See Chapter Three, note 6. Lermontov had a venomous tongue and a cold, scornful view of life and men; he fought a number of duels and was eventually killed in one.
[76] The zemstvo was an elective provincial council with powers of local government.
[77] See Part One, Chapter Four, note 1.
[78] The English poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), was himself a romantic figure, at least in the minds of his contemporaries—a citizen of the world, a lady-killer, a lover of freedom. Nozdryov, one of the landowners in Gogol's Dead Souls, became proverbial as the type of the feisty, interfering, obnoxious braggart, the carousing gambler, the purposeless liar and babbler. For Bazarov, see Part One, Chapter Four, note 1.
[79] See Part One, Chapter One, note 20.
[80] Dostoevsky himself coined the term "omni-man" (obshcbecbelovek); it appears, in the plural, at the very end of Notes from Underground (1864).
[81] Russian borrowed the word kipsek ("keepsake") from English; it was the trade name of a literary annual, finely bound and illustrated, intended for gift-giving.
[82] The sect of the castrates (skoptsi), a reform of the older sect of the flagellants, was founded in Orlov province in the second half of the eighteenth century by a peasant named Kondraty Selivanov. To combat the promiscuous behavior that generally accompanied the "zeals" (sessions) of the flagellants, he introduced the practice of self-castration. The sect was forbidden by law.
[83] That is, the International Workingmen's Association, or First Internationale, founded in Geneva by Karl Marx, Bakunin, and others, in 1864.
[84] Charmeur was a well-known Petersburg tailor. According to his wife's memoirs, Dostoevsky had his own suits made by Charmeur, whom he also advertised in Crime and Punishment.
[85] Landowners had to supply a quota of recruits for the army from among their serfs, the selection being left to the landowner. Serfs had many ways of evading this hated duty, of which one of the simplest was to buy their way out. Household serfs were exempted from army service, but their masters could send them to fill such gaps in the quota. That is what Stepan Trofimovich did with Fedka.
[86] Pushkin deliberately used extremely injurious language in his letter of 26 January 1837 to the Dutch diplomat Baron van Heeckeren, provoking the baron's adopted son Georges d'Anthès to a duel. (Baron van Heeckeren, surnamed Jakob Derk Burckardt Anna in family records, is called Louis by most scholars.)
[87] See Revelation 10:6 (King James Version).
[88] The "God-man" is Christ, "truly God and truly man," in the definition of the council of Chalcedon (451 a.d.). Notions of anthropotheism, or "man-godhood," arrived at in discussions within the Petrashevsky circle (see Part One, Chapter One, note 7) were drawn ultimately from German idealist philosophy, representing an inversion of Christianity which Kirillov carries to its final conclusion.
[89] Russian casement windows normally have one pane, or part of a pane, that can be opened for ventilation when the window is sealed shut for the winter.
[90] The idea of Russia as a "god-bearing" nation can be traced to the thought of the Slavophil Nikolai Yakovlevich Danilevsky (1822-95), an idiosyncratic interpretation of the philosophy of history of the German idealists Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) and Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854). Danilevsky's treatise in the philosophy of history, Russia and Europe, was published in 1871.
[91] Dostoevsky lends Shatov some of his own ideas about Roman Catholicism. The announcement at the first Vatican council (1870) of the new dogma of papal infallibility deeply shocked him; he saw it as the proclaiming of a "new Christ" who represents earthly power and has thus succumbed to the third temptation of the devil (see Matthew 4:1-11, Luke 4:1—13).
[92] The thought Shatov here attributes to Stavrogin had in fact been Dostoevsky's own, expressed with slightly different wording in his often-quoted letter of 1854 to N. D. Fonvizin, wife of one of the Decembrists, who had met him in Tobolsk in 1850 on his way to prison and given him a copy of the Gospels which was to be his only reading during his four years at hard labor.
[93] Shatov seems to confuse two passages from the New Testament: the "rivers of living water" that appear as a metaphor of the Spirit in John 7:38 are not the same as the waters that dry up in Revelation 16:12.
[94] See note 3 above (Nozdryov claimed that he actually caught a hare by the hind legs with his own hands).
[95] Stepan Timofeevich ("Stenka") Razin (?—1671), a Don Cossack, led a peasant uprising in Russia (1667-71) for which he became a popular hero.
[96] Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de Sade (1740-1814), novelist and theorist of the erotic, accused of practicing what he preached, was tried and sentenced to prison for rape; later he was condemned to death for sodomy and poisoning, but the sentence was lifted.
[97] Fedka's speech throughout is based on Dostoevsky's notes on the language of the convicts he met during his imprisonment in Omsk (1850-54).
[98] Zossima here is a name for a generic hermit, not an actual person.
[99] The poet is Pyotr A. Vyazemsky (1792-1878), a friend of Pushkin's; the lines, slightly adjusted by Lebyadkin, come from Vyazemsky's poem "To the Memory of the Painter Orlovsky" (1838).
[100] In Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, Gogol refers to an as yet unwritten "Farewell Story" of which he says: "I swear, I did not invent or think it up; it sang itself out of my soul..." The story remained unwritten.
[101] Gavriil Derzhavin (1743-1816) was one of the greatest Russian poets of the eighteenth century. Lebyadkin refers to his ode "God" (1784), which contains the line: "I am king—I am slave, I am worm—I am god!"
[102] Grigory ("Grishka") Otrepev, known as "the False Dmitri," was a defrocked monk who claimed the Russian throne by pretending to be the lawful heir, the prince Dmitri, murdered in childhood through the intrigues of Boris Godunov (1551-1605), who thus made himself tsar. In 1605, by order of the patriarch Job, the impostor Grigory Otrepev was anathematized and cursed "in this age and the age to come" in all the churches of Russia. The "seven councils" is a hyperbolic reference to the ecumenical councils of the Church, held between 325 and 787 A.D.
[103] Dostoevsky wrote down these terms for church objects in his Omsk notebook, but without giving definitions of them. The "swinger" is probably a censer; the second item, which we translate as "swatter," remains mysterious; the "deacon's girth" is no doubt a deacon's stole or orarion, often richly decorated. Icons, as of St. Nicholas the Wonder-worker, are often covered with precious casings of silver or gold ornamented with jewels. "Similor" (originally a French word) is a yellow brass used in making cheap jewelry.
[104] There is an excellent short treatise on the classical duel à volonté ("at will") in Vladimir Nabokov's commentary to his translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (abridged edition, Princeton, 1981, volume II, part two, pp. 43-45).
[105] Corporal punishment for all ranks of the population, including clergy and boyars (a privileged order of Russian aristocracy), existed in the Muscovite kingdom from its very beginnings in the fourteenth century.
[106] Dueling was officially outlawed and therefore could be punished by the authorities, though they might choose to overlook it.
[107] This conversation reflects certain skeptical attitudes towards the new courts established by the legal reform of 1864, which replaced the former courts, separate for each rank of society, with general courts for all ranks, open to the public, allowing for trial by jury, the use of lawyers, and free discussion in the press.
[108] See Part One, Chapter One, note 20.
[109] The question of women's equality emerged in Russia at the end of the 1850s. During the 1860s it was much discussed in the press. Dostoevsky saw the emancipation of women as one instance of the restoration of human dignity in general, and regarded it as very important.
[110] See Part One, Chapter One, note 23.
[111] Fra Diavolo (1830) is a comic opera by the French composer Esprit Auber (1782-1871), based on the life of an Italian brigand.
[112] "Foolsbury" (Glupov in Russian) is the subject of The History of a Certain Town, a satirical history of Russia by M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-89).
[113] In fact, Dostoevsky based this episode with the book-hawker on an actual incident reported in the press.
[114] The "Marseillaise" (see Part One, Chapter One, note 24) is a marching song, "Mein lieber Augustin" is a beer-hall waltz, in Lyamshin's musical parody symbolizing the triumph of German philistinism over the spirit of the French Revolution. The actual Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) was started and lost by Napoléon III.
[115] Jules Favre (1809-80), French politician and republican, called for the deposing of Napoléon III in 1870, and negotiated the treaty of Frankfurt (10 May 1871), which ended the Franco-Prussian War. For Bismarck, see Part One, Chapter Two, note 4.
[116] Properly, Château-Yquem, the greatest of sauternes.
[117] According to Anna Grigorievna, the visit to Semyon Yakovlevich in Demons is partly based on Dostoevsky's own visit to a well-known holy fool (yurodivy) in Moscow, Ivan Yakovlevich Koreisha.
[118] The Russian merchant class was divided in its habits of dress; some retained the long-skirted coat and full beard of the traditional Russian merchant, others adopted so-called German fashions (frock coat, waistcoat, tie) and went clean-shaven.
[119] The Senate in Petersburg was the highest judicial as well as legislative body in imperial Russia.
[120] The question "What is the meaning of this dream?" is ultimately a paraphrase of a line from Pushkin's poem "The Bridegroom" (1825). In the 1860s it became a journalistic cliché applied metaphorically to various events of the day. Dostoevsky here restores it to its literal meaning, with very funny effect.
[121] The "little Cossack" (kazacbok) is a dance imitative of military steps.
[122] See Genesis 25:29-34. Esau, the elder son of Isaac, sells his birthright to his brother Jacob for "a mess of pottage," that is, a bowl of lentil soup.
[123] Baptiste Honoré Raymond Capefigue (1802-72) was a French historian and man of letters, author of historical compilations.
[124] That is, news of the emancipation of the serfs on 19 February 1861.
[125] Dostoevsky again parodies the utilitarian aesthetics of the nihilists, particularly of N. G. Chernyshevsky (see Part One, Chapter One, note 23), who declared in his university dissertation entitled The Relations of Art to Reality (written in 1853, defended on 10 May 1855): "Artistic creations are lower than the beautiful in reality." The public debate occasioned by Chernyshevsky's defense of his thesis was considered the first manifestation of the "intellectual trend of the sixties."
[126] "The die is cast!" (Latin); words uttered by Julius Caesar when he defied the Roman Senate by bringing his legions across the Rubicon in 50 b.c. and marching on Rome.
[127] Lines from Pushkin's poem "Once There Lived a Poor Knight" (1829).
[128] A quotation from Pushkin's poem "A Hero" (1830).
[129] Karl Vogt (1817-95), German naturalist, was a defender of the biological theory of transformism (as were Lamarck and Darwin). Jacob Moleschott (1822-93), Dutch physiologist and philosopher, was an advocate of materialism, as was the German philosopher Ludwig Biichner (1824-99), brother of the playwright Georg Buchner. Their writings were a sort of bible of the materialist worldview for young Russians of the 1860s.
[130] Dostoevsky is thinking of Herzen's account of Pavel A. Bakhmetev, in a chapter on the young generation in his book From My Life and Thoughts (1852-55). Bakhmetev, a wealthy young nobleman of revolutionary sympathies, supplied the émigrés with funds for propaganda, most of which went eventually to the subject of the next note.
[131] Sergei Gennadievich Nechaev (1847-82), nihilist theoretician and murderer, whose activities together with the court proceedings arising from them were one of Dostoevsky's sources for the writing of Demons, was the founder of a revolutionary society called "The Committee of the People's Summary Justice of 19 February 1870." The society's tracts and documents bore an oval seal showing an axe with the name of the committee written around it.
[132] "The Shining Light" is Dostoevsky's parody of a poem by Nikolai Ogaryov (see Part One, Chapter One, note 2), entitled "The Student." Ogaryov had originally written the poem for a friend who had died in 1867, but then he met Nechaev in Geneva two years later and was so taken with him that he added the dedication "to young friend Nechaev" when the poem was printed as a tract.
[133] That is, the imperial secret police.
[134] Kondraty Ryleev (1795-1826), a leading Decembrist, was one of the five who were hanged after the uprising. His Panderings (1821-23) is a collection of mediocre patriotic poems on historical subjects.
[135] Collegiate assessor was the eighth of the fourteen ranks in the imperial Russian civil service, equivalent to the military rank of major.
[136] See Part One, Chapter Three, note 1. Dostoevsky wrote of Turgenev in a letter: "I also don't like his aristocratical and pharisaic embrace, when he comes at you with a kiss, but instead offers you his cheek." He has given Karmazinov other personal traits of Turgenev—his high voice, his manner of speaking, his practice of making multiple copies of his writings.
[137] A parody of various liberal titles: On the Eve, Who Is to Blame?, What Is to Be Done?, Nowhere to Go.
[138] This is the apocalyptic Babylon of the Hebrew prophets (Jeremiah 50, 51; Isaiah 13) and Revelation (18:2); see also Matthew 7:27.
[139] The hut on chicken legs is the traditional dwelling of Baba Yaga, the witch of Russian folktales.
[140] In the first publication of his new society, Nechaev wrote: "We come from the people, with hides bitten through by the teeth of the present-day setup, guided by hatred for everything not of the people, having no idea of moral obligation or honor with regard to the world that we hate and from which we expect nothing but evil." Dostoevsky later commented on this "right to dishonor" in his Diary of a Writer (March 1876, chapter two, part 4).
[141] The Feast of the Protective Veil of the Mother of God, commonly referred to as "the Protection" (the Russian pokrov means both "protection" and "veil"), is celebrated on 1 October. (Nechaev had a similarly short timetable in mind for the success of his general uprising.)
[142] Vera Pavlovna, heroine of Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?, habitually addresses her husband Lopukhov as "sweetie." The Russian word immediately calls up this literary context.
[143] The phrasing and details here come from a song of the Volga robbers. Further on in the song, the beautiful maiden has a dream prophesying a bad end to the robbers' enterprise. Pyotr Stepanovich will refer to it again, as will Liza.
[144] In 1926, fifty-seven years after the event, Alexei Kuznetsov, a member of Nechaev's society and a participant in the murder of the student Ivanov, wrote in a memoir that there had been no reason for the murder, but that Nechaev had needed it in order "to better weld us together with blood."
[145] Half of the Italian saying Se non è vero, è ben trovato ("If it's not true, it's well invented").
[146] Many details of this "meeting" at Virginsky's correspond to particulars of the Nechaev circle as they emerged at the trial of the Nechaevists in July-August 1871 (Nechaev himself was eventually arrested abroad and tried in Moscow on 8 January 1873}; for example: the young Miss Virginsky with her bundle of tracts and her concern for the plight of poor students; the silent young artillerist who writes all the time and is meant to be taken for some kind of foreign inspector; the "knower of the people" and expert in pot-houses (the Nechaevist Pryzhov had written a History of Pot-bouses in 1868, and had become an alcoholic in the course of his researches).
[147] See Part One, Chapter One, note 2.
[148] See Exodus 20:1-17. Miss Virginsky misquotes the fifth commandment, which reads: "Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you."
[149] Shigalyov scornfully lumps together three very unlike authors of Utopian systems: the Athenian philosopher Plato (428-347 b.c.), author of the Republic; the French writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), author of On the Social Contract (1762); and Charles Fourier (see Part One, Chapter One, note 7). The aluminum columns come from yet another Utopian vision, the "Fourth Dream of Vera Pavlovna" in Cherny-shevsky's What Is to Be Done?, where they adorn the crystal palace of the future phalanstery.
[150] In his Diary of a Writer for January 1876 (chapter three, section 1), Dostoevsky strongly attacks the notion of enlightening one tenth of the people "while the remaining nine tenths serve only as the material and means to that end, continuing to dwell in darkness." Similar proportions appear in Raskolnikov's article on crime in Crime and Punishment (1866) and Ivan Fyodorovich's "poem" about the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov (1880).
[151] Lyamshin's suggestion may owe something in spirit to the tract "Principles of Revolution" written by Nechaev in 1869, with its celebration of total destruction.
[152] Etienne Cabet (1788-1856), French publicist, wrote a well-known Utopian communist novel, Voyage to Icaria (1840). Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-65), French philosopher, was one of the principal socialist theorists of the nineteenth century, advocate of a libertarian socialism opposed to Marxism; to him we owe the phrase "Property is theft."
[153] The word "Shigalyovism" (sbigalyovshcbina) entered the Russian language; it denotes a form of socio-political demagogy and posturing with a tendency to propose extreme measures and total solutions.
[154] Pyotr Stepanovich echoes some of the points outlined in Nechaev's article "The Basic Principles of the Future Social Organization" (1869), which gives the scheme for a kind of "barracks communism" that Marx, among others, found appalling.
[155] Emile Littré (1801-81), French lexicographer and positivist philosopher, is erroneously mentioned here; the idea that "crime is madness," very popular in Russia in the 1860s, came from the Belgian mathematician and statistician Adolphe Quételet (1706-1874). Dostoevsky repeatedly opposed attempts to justify crime statistically or by appeals to necessity, heredity, the environment, because they deny human freedom and dignity.
[156] The period of the Jews' wandering in the desert after Moses led them out of Egypt; proverbially a period of trial and purification.
[157] Ivan the Tsarevich is a figure in Russian folktales: generally the third and youngest of the tsar's sons, it is he who does the work, endures the tests, and wins throne and princess in the end.
[158] The theme of the impostor has already emerged once in connection with Stavrogin (see Part Two, Chapter Two, note 6). In fact, possibly owing to the extent of the country and the unfamiliarity of the tsar's person, impostors were not unusual in Russia. There were, for instance, three other "False Dmitris" around the time of Grishka Otrepev. As recently as 1845, an impostor appeared in the Orenburg region claiming to be the grand duke Konstantin Pavlovich (brother of the emperor Alexander I, who declined the throne in November 1825, stepping aside for his younger brother Nikolai, and who died in 1831). The impostor promised to defend the peasants against oppression by nobles and officials and was greeted with great enthusiasm.
[159] See Part Two, Chapter One, note 7. The castrates had many legends, among them a messianic tale of a progenitor coming from the East, mounted on "a white, spiritually reasonable horse," to unite the tribes of the castrates and "spread their teaching even to French lands in the West." In his further mythographying, Pyotr Stepanovich combines two figures from the sect of the flagellants—one who called himself Danila Filippovich God-Sabaoth, the other Ivan Timofeevich Suslov, who proclaimed himself Christ.
[160] See 1 Kings 3:16-28.
[161] This well-known sentence from Voltaire's Candide (see Part One, Chapter Three, note 2) is uttered by the hero's teacher, Dr. Pangloss, representative of the optimistic (German) philosophy Voltaire makes fun of in his "philosophical tale."
[162] See Part One, Chapter One, note 2.
[163] Dostoevsky naturalizes the German word for "joke" with a Russian plural ending; we follow suit.
[164] See Part One, Chapter Two, note 5. Stepan Trofimovich repeats himself verbatim, this time with success.
[165] See Part Two, Chapter One, note 8.
[166] The landowner Tentetnikov appears in the unfinished second part of Gogol's Dead Souls; he is an enlightened young man, full of good intentions, who gradually falls into mental and moral lethargy and becomes an indolent sluggard. For Radi-shchev, see Part One, Chapter One, note 14.
[167] That is, wearing the decoration of the Polish civil order of St. Stanislas ("Stani-slav" in Russian). Founded in Poland in 1792, the order began to be awarded in Russia in 1831.
[168] This feast, described in Daniel 5, became proverbial for its sumptuousness, though it ended unhappily for Belshazzar.
[169] See Part Two, Chapter Two, note 4. Gogol's words have migrated from Lebyad-kin to Karmazinov.
[170] Karmazinov's Merci is a parody of several pieces by Turgenev,- its beginning and end are suggestive of Turgenev's article "Apropos of Fathers and Sons" in its address to the reader; its composition calls to mind Turgenev's novella Phantoms, which he himself described as "a series of rather loosely connected pictures"; the crossing of the Volga in winter and the visit to the hermit's cave have correspondences in Enough, one of Turgenev's farewells to his public.
[171] Pompey (Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, 106-48 b.c.), Roman general, lost his dispute with Julius Caesar for absolute power in Rome at the battle of Pharsalia. Gaius Cassius Longinus (d. 42 b.c.), one of the leaders of the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar, was defeated by Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar at Philippi.
[172] Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-87), German composer, long resident in France, is best known for his opera Orphée (1774).
[173] E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), German musician and writer, was the author of fantastic tales. Frédéric Chopin (1810-49), Polish pianist and composer, produced works of a personal, penetrating, and often melancholic character. Ancus Marcius (seventh century b.c.), grandson of Numa Pompilius, was the fourth of the legendary kings of Rome.
[174] See Matthew 11:28, where the words have quite a different meaning.
[175] For Byron, see Part Two, Chapter One, note 3; for Pechorin, see Part One, Chapter Three, note 6. Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), German poet, wrote poems of a lively and often biting humor.
[176] Stepan Trofimovich reformulates the aesthetic controversy over boots and Pushkin (see Part One, Chapter One, note 17), intensifying his opposition to the nihilists. In the journal The Russian Word (1864, No. 3), the nihilist critic B. A. Zaitsev wrote: "... there is no floor-sweeper, no toilet-cleaner, who is not infinitely more useful than Shakespeare."
[177] Stepan Trofimovich, though no frequenter of the Gospels, resorts to evangelic language here (see Matthew 10:14, Mark 6:11).
[178] During the reign of Nicholas I (emperor from 1825 to 1855), a number of writers, quite distinguished ones among them (Aksakov, Vyazemsky, Tyutchev, Goncharov), served for periods as government censors, winning disapproval from many of their contemporaries. In 1835 the emperor, who loved drilling and parades, introduced military order in Moscow University, requiring students to wear uniforms and swords (the latter soon abolished). A more liberal university code was introduced by Alexander II in 1863.
[179] The speaker refers to the cathedral of St. Sophia in Novgorod. In 1862 a monument by the sculptor M. O. Mikeshin (1836-96) was set up near the cathedral to commemorate the thousandth anniversary of Russia.
[180] The general is mistaken; in Genesis 18:22-33, Abraham bargains with God for the lives of the righteous men of Sodom, and God finally agrees to spare the city if ten righteous men can be found in it.
[181] Russian commentators suggest that this "quadrille of literature" is a parody of a "literary quadrille" organized by Moscow artistic circles for the costume ball in the halls of the Assembly of Nobility in February 1869.
[182] See Part One, Chapter Three, note 9.
[183] "Uncensored" can have two meanings here: the words to the "komarinsky" contained unprintable expressions, but several satirical and revolutionary versions of it also appeared in the 1860s.
[184] Titular councillor was ninth of the fourteen ranks in the imperial civil service, a humble position immortalized by Gogol in the character of Akaky Akakievich, hero of "The Overcoat" (1842).
[185] Stavrogin quotes a proverbial line from the play Woe from Wit (1824) by Alexander Griboedov (1795-1829).
[186] "The voice of the people [is] the voice of God" (Latin), a saying ultimately drawn from Works and Days by the Boeotian farmer-poet Hesiod (eighth century b.c.).
[187] A novella by A. V. Druzhinin (1824-64), published in 1847, written under the influence of George Sand and pervaded by the ideas of women's emancipation.
[188] Voznesensky means "of the Ascension," Bogoyavlensky means "of the Epiphany." The nihilist Marya Shatov ideologically scorns such "Orthodox" street names, which in fact were quite common in Russia.
[189] After the publication of Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? in 1863, many young radicals attempted to set up co-operative enterprises on socialist principles, following the example of Vera Pavlovna, the novel's heroine. The famous revolutionary Vera Zasulich, a member of Nechaev's circle, who attempted to assassinate the military governor of Petersburg on 24 January 1878, worked briefly with her sisters in a sewing co-operative and also made a try at bookbinding.
[190] On 2 June 1793, the government of France was handed over to the dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety, headed by Maximilien de Robespierre (1758-94), and the Reign of Terror began.
[191] According to his wife's memoirs, Dostoevsky's sensations in the moments preceding an epileptic attack were much like those Kirillov describes here.
[192] See Genesis 1, where God finds His creation "good" and even "very good," but never calls it "true."
[193] An inexact reference to Matthew 22:30, Mark 12:25, where it is said, "they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven."
[194] According to Muslim tradition, Muhammad was awakened one night by the archangel Gabriel, who in the process brushed against a jug of water with his wing. Muhammad then traveled to Jerusalem, from there rose into heaven where he spoke with angels, prophets, and Allah, visited the fiery Gehenna, and came back in time to keep the jug from spilling.
[195] An inexact quotation of Matthew 10:26, Luke 12:2, which will later be misquoted in a different way. Kirillov unwittingly prophesies the novel's denouement.
[196] Christ's words to the good thief crucified with him (Luke 23:43).
[197] Kirillov's conflicting attitudes become quite incoherent in their final expression here. French, the "republican" language, was also the language of Russian aristocrats. After quoting the motto of the French republic ("Liberty, equality, fraternity" to which he adds "or death!"), Kirillov proceeds to give himself the de of a French nobleman in his signature.
[198] See Part One, Chapter One, note 11.
[199] The Life of Jesus by Ernest Renan (1823-92), lapsed Catholic and rationalist religious historian, indeed appeared about seven years before the events described in Demons, in 1863.
[200] A low-class way of drinking tea by sipping it through a lump of sugar.
[201] See Part One, Chapter Three, note 8.
[202] Small folding icons cast in bronze.
[203] See Matthew 5:39, Luke 6:29.
[204] The Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-6) gives the essential commandments of the Christian life.
[205] See Revelation 3:14-17, which Sofya Matveevna goes on to read in a moment, and which we give in the Revised Standard Version.
[206] Earlier (Part Three, Chapter Two, section II) Pyotr Stepanovich and the narrator both allude to rumors that "some senator" had been sent from Petersburg to replace the Lembkes.
[207] After the murder of the student Ivanov by Nechaev and his fivesome, Nechaev himself was flustered enough to put on Ivanov's cap and leave his own at the scene of the crime.
[208] That is, in internal exile.
[209] See Part One, Chapter One, note 3.
[210] One of the cantons (territorial subdivisions, or states) of the Swiss Confederation.
[211] A fuller version of the name of this fictional monastery than Shatov uses at the end of Part Two, Chapter One. Monasteries were named for their patron saint, their churches, and their locale, in various combinations: this is the monastery of the Savior and St. Euphemius in Bogorodsk.
[212] A monk of a higher rank in the Orthodox Church, usually the superior of a monastery.
[213] "Holy folly" (yurodstvo in Russian) might be a kind of harmless mental infirmity or simplicity; it can also be a form of saintliness expressing itself as "folly."
[214] The Crimean War (1854-56), fought in the Crimea by Russia against an alliance of France, England, Turkey, and the Piedmont.
[215] See Matthew 17:20, 21:21; Mark 11:23.
[216] Dostoevsky expanded on this anecdote later in his "Story of Father Nilus" (1873), describing how the archbishop of Paris during the French Revolution came out to the people and openly renounced his old, pernicious ways now that la raison ("reason") had come, throwing down his vestments, crosses, chalices, Gospels.”‘Do you believe in God?' one worker with a bare sword in his hand shouted to the archbishop. 'Très peu, ' said the archbishop, hoping to mollify the crowd. 'Then you're a scoundrel and have been deceiving us up to now,' the worker cried and promptly cut the archbishop down with his sword."
[217] Tikhon recites from memory in a mixture of Russian and Old Slavonic (the language used in the Russian Orthodox Church), which makes his version somewhat different from the version read by Sofya Matveevna (see Part Three, Chapter Seven, note 8). We give the King James Version here.
[218] Stavrogin specifies Russian tradespeople because many of the tradespeople living in Petersburg at that time were German.
[219] That is, masturbation; see Book Three of Rousseau's posthumously published Confessions (1782).
[220] A section of Petersburg between the Little Neva and the Nevka rivers, opposite the main part of the city, which is on the south bank of the Neva.
[221] See Part One, Chapter Four, note 5.
[222] Claude Gellée, called Le Lorrain (1600-1682), a master of sun and light, is one of the greatest French painters of landscape. Acis was a Sicilian shepherd who was loved by the nymph Galatea and whom the Cyclops Polyphemus, out of jealousy, crushed under a huge rock. The Cyclops in the picture makes it a bit less "golden" than Stavrogin thinks.
[223] This formula occurs in all Orthodox prayers for the forgiveness of sins.
[224] Treatment suffered by Christ at the hands of the high priest Caiaphas and the scribes and elders of Jerusalem, and/or from the Roman soldiers, before his crucifixion (see Matthew 26:67, 27:30; Mark 15:19).
[225] Christ's words in Matthew 18:6 (King James Version): "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."
[226] No source for these words is known; they sound like a paraphrase from Revelation.