[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.