29. The French writer Paul de Kock (1794–1871) was the author of innumerable novels depicting petit-bourgeois life, some of them considered risqué.
30. Alexei Mikhailovich Romanov (1629–1676), tsar of Russia, was the father of Peter the Great.
31. Holy Week is the week between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday.
PART THREE
1. In Petersburg, owing to its northern latitude, the sun sets in midafternoon during the winter.
2. The two-week fast preceding the feast of Saints Peter and Paul on June 29.
3. Kutya(accented on the last syllable) is a special dish offered to people in church at the end of a memorial service, and in some places on Christmas Eve, made from rice, barley, or wheat and raisins, sweetened with honey.
4. This day of commemoration of the dead, also known as Krasnaya gorka(“Pretty Little Hill”), falls on the Tuesday following Saint Thomas’s Sunday, the first Sunday after Easter. The Russian name probably comes from the custom of decorating the graves (“little hills”) for the occasion.
5. In Part Three of both editions of The Adolescentpublished during Dostoevsky’s lifetime, the name of this character changes from Darya Onisimovna to Nastasya Egorovna. The same shift occurs in the notebooks for the novel, and evidently slipped from there into the final draft and hence into print. We follow the definitive Russian edition in preserving the change.
6. See Part Two, note 5.
7. Saint Mary of Egypt, a fifth-century saint greatly venerated in Orthodoxy, was a prostitute who was miraculously converted and spent the last forty-seven years of her life in the desert, in prayer and repentance.
8. The merchant’s name, though a plausible one in Russian, is suggestive of his character: it means “cattle slaughterer.”
9. There are twelve great feasts in the Orthodox liturgical year.
10. A “holy fool” (or “fool in God,” or “fool for Christ’s sake”— yurodivyin Russian) is a saintly person or ascetic whose saintliness is expressed in a certain “folly” of behavior. Holy fools were known early in Christian tradition. However, the term may also be applied to a harmless village idiot.
11. A distorted quotation of the Epistle of Jude: “hating even the garment spotted by the flesh” (Jude 23).
12. Cenobitic order means a life in common (from the Greek koinobion, “common life”) for all the monks in a monastery, as opposed to the “idiorhythmic” life in which each monk is responsible for his own maintenance.
13. In the Orthodox Church, young children are allowed to take communion without prior preparation, but after a certain age they are expected to prepare, like adults, by attendance at services, confession, and fasting.
14. In Orthodox piety, the “gift of tears” is a sign of profound spiritual development. In The Brothers Karamazovthe elder Zosima will say: “Water the earth with the tears of your joy, and love those tears.”
15. In the Book of Job, God in his wager with Satan allows him to destroy Job’s seven sons and three daughters. Having won the wager by proving Job’s righteousness, God gives him another seven sons and three daughters. It is never said, however, that Job “forgot the former ones.”
16. A nobleman convicted of a crime would be stripped of his legal and hereditary rights, but it was possible to have them restored in return for service to the state, for instance, in one of the new Russian “colonies” in Turkestan, which was being settled at the time.
17. Arkhangelsk is in the northwest of Russia on the White Sea; Kholmogory is a small village about fifty miles south of Arkhangelsk on the Dvina River.
18. The German title Kammerjunker(“gentleman of the bedchamber”) was adopted by the Russian court. It was a high distinction for a young man.
19. This is an example of the long fellow’s (or Dostoevsky’s) absurd humor: the French often substitute a wfor a vin writing German or Russian names, but the wis still pronounced as a v. However, Arkady’s name transliterated into French would be “Dolgorouky,” not “Dolgorowky.” What’s more, the long fellow obviously pronounces his fanciful version “Dolgorovky,” which is why Arkady thinks he has said “Korovkin.”
20. The Journal des débatswas a French daily newspaper founded in 1789 and continuously published until 1944, always with a moderate liberal tendency; the Indépendance belgewas published in Brussels from 1830 to 1937.
21. In Russian, the German Junker, meaning “young lord,” referred to a lower officer’s rank open only to the nobility.
22. That is, Bolshaya Morskaya Street, which runs from Palace Square to Senate Square in Petersburg, parallel to the Moyka River. It was a wealthy street with many fine houses on it, including the mansion belonging to Vladimir Nabokov’s family.
23. Noël-François-Alfred Madier de Montjau (1814–1892) was a French lawyer who became a people’s representative after the establishment of the Second Republic in 1848. Banished following Napoleon III’s coup d’état in 1852, his name became news again in 1874, when his election as a deputy of the extreme left caused a considerable stir. The “current Parisian events” were the declaration of the Third Republic, the elections, and the drafting of a new constitution. The Poles, who had been under Russian domination since the partition of Poland in 1772, were often ardent republican sympathizers.
24. An imprecise quotation from the poem “I feel dull and sad . . .” by the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841).
25. The monumental two-part drama by the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1852), based on the much older legend of the philosopher Faust, who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for earthly power. Gretchen is a young girl seduced and abandoned by Faust.
26. The first words (and title) of the great hymn from the missa pro defunctis(requiem mass): Dies irae, dies illa / solvet saeclum in favilla, / teste David cum Sibylla(“Day of wrath, day that will / dissolve the world to burning coals, / as witnessed David and the Sibyl”), a meditation on the Last Judgment attributed to Tommaso da Celano (1190–1260), one of the first disciples and also the first biographer of Saint Francis of Assisi.
27. Alessandro Stradella (1644–1682) was an Italian singer and composer of cantatas, operas, oratorios, and instrumental music.
28. In the Orthodox liturgy, these words are sung by the choir at the end of the Cherubic Hymn, which accompanies the entrance of the priest bearing the bread and wine of the eucharist: “Let us lay aside all earthly cares . . . That we may receive the King of all, who comes invisibly upborne by the angelic hosts. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!” Trishatov recites the scene in the cathedral from the opera Faust, by French composer Charles Gounod (1818–1893), but adds his own uplifting “hosanna” at the end.
29. This famous phrase comes from the book What Is Property?(1840), by the French socialist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865).
30. Alexander Herzen (1812–1870), a radical publicist and an acquaintance of Dostoevsky’s in the 1840s, went into self-imposed exile in 1847. In London, from 1857 to 1869, he published a revolutionary Russian-language weekly called The Bell, and also wrote two important books: From the Other Shore, a series of letters on socialism, and My Past and Thoughts.
31. See Part One, note 21.
32. Dostoevsky first intended this dream for the chapter entitled “At Tikhon’s” in his previous novel, Demons(1871–1872). That chapter was suppressed by his publisher, and the dream was then reincorporated into The Adolescentwith modifications. Dostoevsky knew this painting from his own visits to the Dresden Pinakothek. Claude Gellée, called Le Lorrain (1600–1682), was a master of sun and light, and one of the greatest French painters of landscape. The Sicilian shepherd Acis, who was loved by the nymph Galatea, was crushed under a huge rock by the jealous cyclops Polyphemus. The cyclops in the picture makes the age a little less golden than Versilov likes to think.