39. The poet Ivan Krylov (1769-1844) was Russia's greatest fabulist; further on, Ferdyshchenko slightly misquotes from "The Lion and the Ass" (the difference is lost in translation).
40. Provincial marshal of the nobility was the highest elective office in a province before the reforms of Alexander II in 1864.
41. La Dame aux camélias("The Lady with the Camellias"), a novel (1848) and five-act play (1852) by Alexandre Dumas fils(1824-95), tells a tragic story of illicit love. The heroine appears at promenades with bouquets of white camellias on certain days of the month and of red camellias on other days; after her death, her lover sees to it that white and red camellias alternate in the same way on her grave.
42. Marlinsky was the pen name of A. A. Bestuzhev (1795-1837), a Romantic writer popular in military circles, to which many of his characters belonged.
43. Russian social thought throughout the nineteenth century was dominated by the dispute between the Westernizers, who favored various degrees of liberal reform to bring Russia into line with developments in Europe, and the Slavophiles, proponents of Russian (and generally Slavic) national culture and Orthodoxy.
44. Dostoevsky drew these details from the case of the Moscow merchant V. F Mazurin, a young man from a well-off family, who killed the jeweler 1.1. Kalmykov with a similarly bound razor. This murder, further details of which will appear later, haunts Nastasya Filippovna throughout the novel.
45. Ekaterinhof, at that time on the southwest periphery of Petersburg, was named in honor of Catherine I (1684-1727), the wife of the emperor Peter the Great (1682-1725), who built a palace there in 1711. In the early nineteenth century, the park surrounding the palace became one of the finest public gardens in the capital and a favorite place for promenades and picnics.
PART TWO
1. The original Vauxhall was a seventeenth-century pleasure garden in London. The word entered Russian as a common noun meaning an outdoor space for concerts and entertainment, with a tearoom, tables, and so on. The vauxhall in Pavlovsk, a suburb of Petersburg where much of the novel is set, was built very near the Pavlovsk railway station, one of the first in Russia—so near, in fact, that
vokzalalso
2. That is, a supporter of the elder branch of the Bourbon family in France, deposed in 1830 in favor of the younger branch of Orléans.
3. The zemstvowas an elective provincial council for purposes of local administration, established in 1864 by Alexander II.
4. Tarasov House was the name of the debtors' prison in Petersburg.
5. Holy Week is the week between Palm Sunday and Easter.
6. Pavlovsk, to the south of Petersburg, is a garden suburb named for the emperor Paul I (1754-1801), who had a magnificent palace there. A number of important meetings in the novel take place in the vast, rambling "English" park surrounding the palace. A dachais a summer residence outside the city, anything from a large
separate house to part of a house or one or two rented rooms; the word also summons up a certain summer mode of life, with outings, picnics, and a general air of festivity.
7. The reference is to another notorious murder reported in the newspapers, in which Vitold Gorsky, an eighteen-year-old high-school student from a noble family, killed six members of the merchant Zhemarin's household, including his eleven-year-old son, to whom he gave lessons.
8. These words come from the imperial ukase of November 24, 1864, which promulgated the new judicial statutes; they were carved in gold on a marble plaque in the Petersburg courthouse; the "lawgiver" is the "tsar-reformer" Alexander II.
9. Jeanne Bécu (1743-93), who became the Comtesse du Barry, was the last favorite of Louis XV (1710-74); she was guillotined on the order of the French revolutionary tribunal. The story of her execution and last words is told in the publisher's preface to Mémoires de madame la comtesse du Barry,vol. 1 (Paris, 1829).
10. Dostoevsky writes Lebedev's spoken French in Russian transcription, reproducing the speaker's accent. The levée du roi,or "king's levee," was a reception that would take place around the king's rising from bed and morning toilet; Lebedev read about it in Mme. du Barry's memoirs.
11. The Apocalypse, or Revelation, of St. John the Theologian is the closing book of the New Testament; balancing the book of Genesis at the beginning of the Old Testament, it contains prophecies of the end of this world and of the Last Judgment. Its visionary, symbolic language has made it subject to many interpretations, often tendentious.
12. The various references in this paragraph are to Revelation 6:5-8.
13. St. Thomas's Sunday, in the Orthodox Church, is the first Sunday after Easter, named for the apostle who refused to believe in the resurrection until he had ocular and tactile evidence of it (John 20: 24-29).
14. The sect of the castrates (skoptsi)in Russia, a reform of the older sect of the flagellants {khlysti),was founded in Orlov province in the second half of the eighteenth century by a peasant named Kondraty Selivanov. To combat the promiscuous behavior that generally accompanied the "zeals" of the flagellants, he introduced the practice of self-castration. The sect, which for some reason attracted many rich merchants, moneylenders, and goldsmiths, was condemned by the Church and forbidden by law.
15. Sergei Mikhailovich Solovyov (1820-79), one of the greatest Russian historians, began to publish his History of Russia from Ancient Timesin 1851; of its twenty-nine volumes, seventeen had appeared by 1867, when Dostoevsky was writing The Idiot.
16. In the mid-seventeenth century, the ecclesiastical reforms of the patriarch Nikon caused a schism [raskoï)in the Russian Orthodox Church. Those who rejected the reforms, led by the archpriest Awakum, held to the "old belief" and became known as Old Believers.
17. The poem Nastasya Filippovna reads is "Heinrich," by Hein-rich Heine, which deals with the famous episode in the history of the Holy Roman Empire when Pope Gregory VII (io2o?-no6) forced the emperor Henry IV (1050-1106) to come to the Italian castle of Canossa in 1077 and make humble amends to him. The poem was translated into Russian in 1859 and again in 1862.
18. The prince is referring to the faith of the Old Believers, who did not accept the changes in the church service books instituted in the seventeenth century and made the sign of the cross in the old way, with two fingers, instead of in the three-fingered way introduced by the same reform.
19. See part one, note 26. The painting in question is Christ's Body in the Tomb(1521), which Dostoevsky saw in the Basel museum in August 1867, having made a special stop there for that purpose; he even stood on a chair in the museum in order to study the painting more closely. The prince's words further on, "A man can even lose his faith from that painting!" were Dostoevsky's own words to his wife at the time. The painting, which is of central importance to the novel, will be mentioned again later; Dostoevsky first read a description of it in Letters of a Russian Traveler(1801), by N. M. Karamzin (see part one, note 4).