Fyodorovich, who, on account of business, stays in Petersburg) and Prince Shch. The meeting was strange: they all greeted Evgeny Pavlovich with some sort of rapture; Adelaida and Alexandra even decided for some reason that they were grateful to him for his "angelic care of the unfortunate prince." Lizaveta Prokofyevna, seeing the prince in his sick and humiliated condition, wept with all her heart. Apparently everything was forgiven him. Prince Shch. voiced several happy and intelligent truths on the occasion. It seemed to Evgeny Pavlovich that he and Adelaida had not yet become completely close with each other; but the future seemed to promise a completely willing and heartfelt submission of the ardent Adelaida to the intelligence and experience of Prince Shch. Besides, the lessons endured by the family had affected her terribly and, above all, the last incident with Aglaya and the émigré count. Everything that had made the family tremble as they gave Aglaya up to this count, everything had come true within half a year, with the addition of such surprises as they had never even thought of. It turned out that this count was not even a count, and if he was actually an émigré, he had some obscure and ambiguous story. He had captivated Aglaya with the extraordinary nobility of his soul, tormented by sufferings over his fatherland, and had captivated her to such an extent that, even before marrying him, she had become a member of some foreign committee for the restoration of Poland and on top of that had ended up in the Catholic confessional of some famous padre, who had taken possession of her mind to the point of frenzy. The count's colossal fortune, of which he had presented nearly irrefutable information to Lizaveta Prokofyevna and Prince Shch., had turned out to be completely nonexistent. What's more, some six years after the marriage, the count and his friend, the famous confessor, had managed to bring about a complete quarrel between Aglaya and her family, so that they had not seen her for several months already ... In short, there was a lot to tell, but Lizaveta Prokofyevna, her daughters, and even Prince Shch. had been so struck by all this "terror" that they were even afraid to mention certain things in conversation with Evgeny Pavlovich, though they knew that even without that, he was well acquainted with the story of Aglaya Ivanovna's latest passions. Poor Lizaveta Prokofyevna wanted to be in Russia and, as Evgeny Pavlovich testified, she bitterly and unfairly criticized everything abroad: "They can't bake good bread anywhere, in the winter they freeze like mice in the cellar," she said. "But here at least I've had
a good Russian cry over this poor man," she added, pointing with emotion to the prince, who did not recognize her at all. "Enough of these passions, it's time to serve reason. And all this, and all these foreign lands, and all this Europe of yours, it's all one big fantasy, and all of us abroad are one big fantasy . . . remember my words, you'll see for yourself!" she concluded all but wrathfully, parting from Evgeny Pavlovich.
NOTES
For many details in the following notes we are indebted to the commentaries in volume 9 of the Soviet Academy of Sciences edition (Leningrad, 1974).
PART ONE
1. Eydkuhnen is a railway station on the border between Prussia and what was then Russian-occupied Poland.
2. Popular names for various gold coins: "napoleondors" (Napoléons d'or)were French coins equal to twenty francs; "friedrichsdors" were Prussian coins equal to five silver thalers; "Dutch yellow boys" (arapchiki)were Russian coins, the so-called Dutch chervonets,resembling the Dutch ducat, minted in Petersburg.
3. Before the emancipation of 1861, Russian estates were evaluated by the number of adult male serfs ("souls") living on them; they were bound to the land and thus were the property of the landowner.
4. Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin (1766-1826) wrote a monumental twelve-volume History of the Russian State,the first eight volumes of which were published in 1818, and the remaining four later, the last (reaching the year 1612) appearing posthumously. There is indeed a Myshkin mentioned in the History;however, he was not a prince but an architect, who, in 1472, together with a certain Krivtsov, was entrusted by Filipp, the first metropolitan of Moscow, with the construction of a new stone cathedral in Moscow, the Cathedral of the Dormition of the Mother of God; after two years of work, when the vaults were nearly completed, the cathedral collapsed, owing to poor-quality mortar and architectural misjudgment. With Lebedev's strange insistence here, Dostoevsky may have wanted to point readers to that fact.
5. In Russian, the German word Junker,meaning "young lord," referred to a lower officer's rank open only to the nobility.
6. The title of "hereditary honorary citizen" was awarded to merchants or other persons not of noble rank for services to the city or the state.
7.A hymn on the words "memory eternal" comes at the end of the Orthodox funeral and memorial services; the prayer is for the person to remain eternally in God's memory.
8. Menaions(Greek for "monthly readings") were collections of old Russian spiritual literature, the materials organized day by day and month by month; they contained saints' lives, homilies, explanations of the various feasts, and were often the only reading matter of the uneducated classes.
9. A holy fool (a "fool for God" or "fool in Christ"— yurodivyin Russian) might be a harmless village idiot; but there are also saintly persons or ascetics whose saintliness expresses itself as "folly."
10. The Bolshoi (i.e. "Big") Theater in Petersburg, not to be confused with the still-extant Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, stood on Theatralnaya Square from 1783 until 1892, when it was demolished and replaced by the Petersburg Conservatory. The French Theater was a French-language company that performed in the Mikhailov-sky Theater (now the Maly, or "Small," Opera Theater). Incidentally, through this company, news from Paris reached Petersburg extraordinarily quickly.
11. A tax farmer was a private person authorized by the government to collect various taxes in exchange for a fixed fee. The practice was obviously open to abuse, and tax farmers could become very rich, though never quite respectable. The practice was abolished by the reforms of the emperor Alexander II in the 1860s.