12. These words were the motto on the coat of arms of Count A. A. Arakcheev (1769-1834), minister of the interior under the emperors Paul I and Alexander I; they were paraphrased by the poet Alexander Pushkin (1799—1837) in his epigram "On Arakcheev."
13. Open courts and trial by jury were first introduced in Russia by the judicial reforms of Alexander II in 1864 and remained controversial for a long time afterwards.
14. The prince's assertion is not quite accurate. In Russia, capital punishment was abolished in 1753-54 under the empress Elizaveta Petrovna (1709-62), but reintroduced by Catherine II (1729-96) as punishment for state, military, and certain other crimes. In the 1860s, owing to the rise of anarchist and terrorist movements, it was resorted to rather frequently. The commentator in the Academy of Sciences edition suggests that Dostoevsky may have introduced the phrase as a blind to keep the censors from interfering with the prince's later discussion.
15. On December 22, 1849, Dostoevsky himself, along with a number of "co-conspirators" from the radical Petrashevsky circle, was subjected to precisely such a mock execution and last-minute reprieve; he "tells us something" about it in more than one of his later works. The prince's account of the experience of "a certain man" in part one, chapter five, reproduces the actual episode in detail. Dostoevsky also draws here and later from The Last Day of a Man Condemned to Death,by Victor Hugo (1802-85), which he considered a masterpiece.
16. In 1840-41, the historian and archeologist M. P. Pogodin (1800-75) published an album of Samples of Old Slavonic-Russian Calligraphy,containing lithographic reproductions of forty-four samples of handwriting from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries, among them the signature of Pafnuty, a fourteenth-century monk, founder of the Avraamy Monastery, of which he was the hegumen (abbot).
17. Words engraved on a medal awarded by the emperor Nicholas I to Count P. A. Kleinmiechel in 1838, after the reconstruction of the Winter Palace under his supervision.
18. A paraphrase of Romeo andfuliet,III, ii, 73: "O serpent heart, hid with a flow'ring face!" which Dostoevsky knew from the translation published by M. N. Katkov in 1841 (he quotes the same line in his Novel in Nine Letterswritten in 1847).
19. It was a custom among young ladies in the nineteenth century to keep personal albums in which friends and visitors would be asked to write witty or sentimental lines or verses; vers d'album("album verse") reached its high point in the verses of the French symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98).
20. The Mongol empire, known as the Golden Horde, dominated southern Russia from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. To "go to the Horde" meant to petition the Mongol rulers on behalf of the subject Russian people.
21. It happens to a rich Corinthian noblewoman in The Transformations of Lucius,otherwise known as The Golden Ass,by the
Latin writer Apuleius (second century a.d.), and to Titania, the queen of the fairies, in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream—neither case quite belongs to "mythology."
22. An imprecise quotation from the poem "The Journalist, the Reader, and the Writer" (1840), by Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41).
23. Quietism was a form of religious mysticism going back to the writings of the Spanish monk Miguel de Molinos (1628-96), consisting of passive contemplation and a withdrawal from
experiences of the senses; but Aglaya refers more simply to the prince's meekness and passivity.
24. Dostoevsky is probably thinking of "The Beheading of John the Baptist" (1514), by the Swiss painter Hans Fries (c. 1460-1520), in the Basel museum, which portrays the face of St. John just as the sword is swung over him.
25. What Dostoevsky refers to as a "cross with four points" is the standard Roman Catholic and Protestant cross with one crossbar; in part two, mention will be made of the "eight-pointed cross" of Byzantine and Russian tradition, which has three crossbars (and thus eight "points" or tips).
26. Dostoevsky saw a copy of The Madonna with the Family of the Burgomeister Jacob Meyer(1525-26), by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543), in the Dresden Gallery. The original is in the museum of Darmstadt.
27. In a ukase of April 2,1837, the emperor Nicholas I forbade the wearing of both moustaches and beards by civil service employees (military officers were allowed moustaches only).
28. An allusion to act IV, scene iii, of the play Cabal and Love(1784), by the German poet Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), in which Ferdinand, suspecting Louisa of unfaithfulness, challenges his rival to a duel "across a handkerchief."
29. The German title Kammerjunker("gentleman of the bedchamber") was adopted by the Russian imperial court; it was a high distinction for a young man.
30. The name of the Novozemlyansky infantry regiment was invented by the poet, playwright, and diplomat Alexander Griboe-dov (1795-1829) in his comedy Woe from Wit(1824), the first real masterpiece of Russian drama, many lines of which have become proverbial.
31. First half of the Italian phrase: se non è vero e ben trovato("if it's not true, it's well invented").
32. The names of the three musketeers in the novel of Alexandre Dumas père(1802-70). Porthos, whom General Ivolgin identifies with General Epanchin, was the fat epicure of the three.
33. Kars, in the northeast of Turkey, was besieged by the Russians for many months in 1855, during the Crimean War (1853-56).
34. The Independence Beigewas published in Brussels from 1830 to 1937.
35. See note 22 above. Kolya is thinking of Arbenin insulting Prince Zvezdich (act II, scene iv).
36. Christ is repeatedly referred to in the Gospels as "the king of the Jews," most often as an accusation during his questioning by Pilate, and this mocking "title" was also attached to his cross. Ganya changes it ironically to mean king of the Jewish financiers. Dostoevsky has in mind The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany,a satirical prose text by the poet Heinrich Heine (1797— 1856), in which an ironic parallel is drawn between Christ and the banker Meyer Rothschild (1744-1812). Dostoevsky published a Russian translation of Heine's piece in his magazine Epoch(Nos. 1-3, 1864); in fact, the Russian censors cut the passage about Christ and Rothschild, but Dostoevsky had of course seen the manuscript intact.
37. The general gives a fantastic interpretation of a real event. The great Russian surgeon N. I. Pirogov (1810-81), who organized medical care for the wounded at the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, left for Petersburg at one point, displeased by the inattention of the high military authorities to problems of medical care. Auguste Nélaton (1807-73), a French surgeon of European repute and member of the Medical Academy of Paris, was the personal surgeon of Garibaldi and Napoleon III; he never set foot in Russia.
38. The reference is to a case that Dostoevsky himself read about in the newspapers: a nineteen-year-old Moscow University student by the name of Danilov was tried for the murder and robbery of the pawnbroker Popov and his maidservant Nordman in January 1866. Dostoevsky was particularly struck by the similarity to Ras-kolnikov's crime in Crime and Punishment,which he had been at work on for several months. During Danilov's trial it came out that the young man, who wanted to get married, had been advised by his father to stop at nothing, not even crime, to achieve his ends.