[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.