Demons, p.85
Demons, page 85
[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.
