Demons, p.84
Demons, page 84
[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.
