“Thankless work and lacking in beautiful forms. And these types in any case are still a current matter, and therefore cannot be artistically finished. Major mistakes are possible, exaggerations, oversights. In any case, one would have to do too much guessing. What, though, is the writer to do who has no wish to write only in the historical genre and is possessed by a yearning for what is current? To guess . . . and be mistaken.
“But ‘Notes’ such as yours could, it seems to me, serve as material for a future artistic work, for a future picture—of a disorderly but already bygone epoch. Oh, when the evil of the day is past and the future comes, then the future artist will find beautiful forms even for portraying the past disorder and chaos. It is then that ‘Notes’ like yours will be needed and will provide material—as long as they are sincere, even despite all that is chaotic and accidental about them . . . They will preserve at least certain faithful features by which to guess what might have been hidden in the soul of some adolescent of that troubled time—a not-entirely-insignificant knowledge, for the generations are made up of adolescents . . .”
NOTES
PART ONE
1. The princely family of Dolgoruky belonged to the oldest Russian nobility. Yuri Dolgoruky founded the princedom of Suzdal in the twelfth century.
2. At that time there were seven classes in the Russian gymnasium (high school), the seventh being the last. Graduates would generally be between nineteen and twenty years old.
3. Anton the Wretch, a novella by Dostoevsky’s old school friend D. V. Grigorovich (1822–1899), and Polinka Sachs, a novella by A. V. Druzhinin (1824–1864), were both published in the journal The Contemporaryin 1847. The former portrays peasant life in the darkest colors; the latter, written under the influence of George Sand, tells of a loving husband who, when betrayed by his wife, grants her the freedom to marry his rival. Both are sentimental tales in the liberal taste of the period.
4. The Semyonovsky quarter in Petersburg was named for the illustrious Semyonovsky Guards regiment, which was stationed there.
5. In the table of fourteen civil ranks established by the emperor Peter the Great, the rank of privy councillor was third, equivalent to the military rank of lieutenant general.
6. Dostoevsky himself was sent to a boarding school run (in K. Mochulsky’s phrase) by “a poorly enough educated Frenchman” named Souchard. He stayed there for only a year, but the experience clearly left its mark on him. In his notes for the novel, he first uses the name Souchard and later alters it to Touchard.
7. The Senate in Petersburg also served as the highest Russian court; hence the opportunities for bribery.
8. The German romantic poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) stood, in Dostoevsky’s keyboard of references, for notions of the ideal, the “great and beautiful,” and a simplified struggle for freedom. Having loved Schiller’s works as a young man, Dostoevsky indulged in a good deal of indirect mockery of him in his later works.
9. The Summer Garden in Petersburg is on the left bank of the Neva, a short distance from the imperial Winter Palace. Copies of antique sculptures were placed in it, on the orders of the tsar Peter the Great (1672–1725), for the edification of the public that went strolling there.
10. Lambert, being French, is a Catholic. In the Catholic Church at that time, first communion followed and was directly connected with confirmation in the faith, and was received at the age of ten or twelve, usually accompanied by a family celebration. (In the Orthodox Church, communion is given immediately after baptism to infants as well as adults.)
11. The relics of a saint are “revealed” when they start producing miracles of one sort or another—giving off a sweet fragrance, healing the sick, and so on.
12. One form of mortification of the flesh among ascetics was (and perhaps still is) the wearing of heavy iron chains wrapped about the waist under one’s clothing.
13. Baron James Rothschild (1792–1868), the “moneylender to kings,” died a few years before the events described in the novel. His “coup” had to do, however, with advance knowledge of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, not of the assassination of the Duc de Berry in 1820.
14. Dostoevsky modeled Dergachev and his associates on an actual conspiratorial group of some ten members, led by an engineer named Dolgushin, which called for the overthrow of the landowners and the tsar, the extermination of the bourgeoisie, and the redistribution of the land under an elected government. Dostoevsky closely followed their trial in July 1874. Among Dolgushin’s people there was a Kramer and a Vasnin, corresponding to the Kraft and Vasin of the novel. Kraft’s fate exactly parallels Kramer’s, as described in the memoirs of Dostoevsky’s friend, the famous jurist A. F. Koni.
15. The police found several inscriptions in Dolgushin’s house, in English, French, Italian, and among them this one in Latin; they also found a large wooden cross with Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité carved on it.
16. One slogan of the Dolgushin group was: “Man should live according to truth and nature.” The words have a long history both in enlightened social thought and in Dostoevsky’s work, where they go back to the narrator’s sarcastic play in Notes from Undergroundon the prefatory note to the Confessionsof Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), in which Rousseau claims to offer his readers “the only portrait of a man, painted exactly from nature and in all its truth, that exists and probably ever will exist.”
17. The “calendars” published in Russia at that time, like the American Farmer’s Almanac, included stories, lore, advice, and statistics.
18. The term “phalanstery” ( phalanstèrein French) was coined by the French utopian socialist thinker Charles Fourier (1772–1837) to designate the physical and productive arrangements of the future communal life. “Barracks communism” is another term for the same idea. Here and further on, Arkady Makarovich plays ironically on various radical notions of the time, including the “rational egoism” of the radical ideologist N. G. Chernyshevsky (1828–1889) and the social structures envisioned in his novel What Is to Be Done?Dostoevsky’s interest in “Fourierism” as a young man led to his arrest by the tsar’s agents in 1849.
19. The Kalmyks are a nomadic Buddhist Mongol people, originally from Dzungaria in western China, who migrated to the steppes between the Don and the Volga, and also to Siberia.
20. The Crimean War (1854–1856) was fought by Russia against an alliance of Turkey, England, France, and the Piedmont.
21. Arbiter of the peace was one of the government posts established in Russia after the emancipation of the serfs by the “tsarliberator” Alexander II in 1861. Arbiters of the peace were elected by the nobility from among local landowners and were mainly responsible for questions of land division between peasants and landowners. The function, taken earnestly at first, later became subject to abuses and was finally abolished in 1874.
22. Harpagon and Plyushkin are both famous misers, the former from the comedy L’Avare (“The Miser”) by Molière (1622–1673), the latter from the novel Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852).
23. Historically, Russia had two capitals: Moscow, dating back to the thirteenth century, and St. Petersburg, founded by Peter the Great in 1703. Dostoevsky later refers to the period following 1703 as “the Petersburg period of Russian history.”
24. Names of well-known Russian tycoons of the period following the abolition of serfdom in 1861, when mining, industry, railroads, and banking developed at a great pace. Polyakov and Gubonin were mainly builders of railroads.
25. John Law (1671–1729), a Scottish financier, became comptroller general of French finances, created the French Indies Company, and in 1719, having offered the plan unsuccessfully to Scotland, England, and Savoy, managed to persuade the Regency government to create a Banque Générale of France, based on the selling of shares and the issuing of paper money. Extremely popular and successful at first, the system soon led to runaway inflation and ended in a catastrophic bankruptcy. Law was forced to flee France, and died in poverty in Venice.