[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 Punishmentthrough 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 Starin 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 impératricewas 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
[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.
[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 Iand 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 Penséesand 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), mefuture 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 Demonsis 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 Punishmentwe 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 nihilismeto 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 Languageas "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.