Demons, p.86
Demons, page 86
[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.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky
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Larissa Volokhonsky
Joseph Frank
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Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons
