[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.
[160]See 1 Kings 3:16-28.
[161]This well-known sentence from Voltaire's Candide(see Part One, Chapter Three, note 2) is uttered by the hero's teacher, Dr. Pangloss, representative of the optimistic (German) philosophy Voltaire makes fun of in his "philosophical tale."
[162]See Part One, Chapter One, note 2.
[163]Dostoevsky naturalizes the German word for "joke" with a Russian plural ending; we follow suit.
[164]See Part One, Chapter Two, note 5. Stepan Trofimovich repeats himself verbatim, this time with success.
[165]See Part Two, Chapter One, note 8.
[166]The landowner Tentetnikov appears in the unfinished second part of Gogol's Dead Souls;he is an enlightened young man, full of good intentions, who gradually falls into mental and moral lethargy and becomes an indolent sluggard. For Radi-shchev, see Part One, Chapter One, note 14.
[167]That is, wearing the decoration of the Polish civil order of St. Stanislas ("Stani-slav" in Russian). Founded in Poland in 1792, the order began to be awarded in Russia in 1831.
[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 Merciis 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.