[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.