Текст книги "Demons"

^[31]Anton Petrov was a peasant from the village of Bezdna ("abyss" in Russian) who was given the task of reading the statutes of the peasant reform of 1861 to the peasants. Up to five thousand people gathered from surrounding villages to hear his explanations of the reform, causing unrest which was severely quashed by the authorities.

^[32]That is, St. Peter's School, a German high school in Petersburg, founded in the eighteenth century.

^[33]Igor Svyatoslavich (1151-1202) was prince of Novgorod-Seversk, a small town near Chernigov, in the period predating the rise of the Muscovite kingdom.

^[34]Stepan Trofimovich means some mythical long-ago.

^[35]See note 6 above. Stepan Trofimovich probably has in mind the novel Lélia(1838), which protests against the constraints put upon women by society and religion and defends freedom of feelings.

^[36]See note 2 above. In a famous letter to Gogol (15 July 1847), Belinsky denounced the "father of Russian prose" for turning reactionary in his last book (see note 3 above), and took the opportunity to condemn Russian tyranny, landowning, and the Church. It was for reading this letter to the Petrashevsky circle that Dostoevsky was arrested and sentenced to prison in 1849 (see note 7 above). The quotation here, however, is not from the same letter.

^[37]Ivan Andreevich Krylov (1769-1844), poet and fabulist, the Russian La Fontaine (whom he translated), wrote a fable entitled "The Inquisitive Man" (1814), which tells of a man who goes to a museum and notices all sorts of tiny things, but fails to notice an elephant. The phrase became proverbial.

^[38]Characters from Shakespeare's history plays Henry the Fourth, Parts Iand II, and, with the exception of the prince, from The Merry Wives of Windsor(1597-1600).

^[39]Victor Considérant (1808-93) was a devoted follower of Fourier (see Chapter One, note 7) who oversaw the publication of his master's writings and himself produced a three-volume systematization of Fourier's ideas entitled La Destinée sociale("Social Destiny," 1834-44), popular among Russian liberals of the 1840s.

^[40]See Chapter One, note 7.

^[41]Otto von Bismarck (1815-98), called "the Iron Chancellor," was a Prussian statesman and one of the main architects of German unity; founder of the Triple Alliance (with Austria and Italy) against France.

^[42]Blaise Pascal (1623-62), French mathematician, physicist, and philosopher, author of the unfinished Penséesand of Letters to a Provincial(1656-57), from which the quoted phrase comes.

^[43]A "magnificent literary masterpiece, half poem, half oration," in the words of Vladimir Nabokov, who translated it into English (1960), discovered around 1790 by Count Alexei Musin-Pushkin in a collection of old manuscripts, but dating back to the year 1187, narrating certain events in the life of Prince Igor (see Chapter One, note 33).

^[44]Before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, Russian estates were evaluated according to the number of "souls" or adult male serfs living on them.

^[45]Badinguet was the name of the stonemason whose identity and clothing Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte (1808-73), ^mefuture emperor Napoléon III, borrowed for his escape from the fortress of Ham in 1846. The name was later mockingly applied to the emperor by his opponents.

^[46]The portrait of Semyon Yegorovich Karmazinov in Demonsis to a considerable extent a caricature of the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev (1818-83), with whom Dostoevsky entertained relations varying from cool friendship to bitter hostility throughout his life. In spirit and art the two writers were opposites, but in 1880, a few months before Dostoevsky's death, on the occasion of his famous speech on Pushkin (8 June), they fell into each other's arms and were briefly reconciled.

^[47]Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (1622-73), known as Molière, poet, playwright, actor, and director, is among the greatest of French writers. François-Marie Arouet (1694-1778), called Voltaire, wrote in many forms and was widely read in his lifetime; his philosophical tale Candide(1759) was one of Dostoevsky's favorite books.

^[48]David Teniers the Elder (1582-1649), or else David Teniers the Younger (1610-90), Flemish painters, father and son; the realistic popular scenes of village weddings and feasts painted by Teniers the Younger are perhaps better known than the works of his father.

^[49] The Man Who Laughs,a novel by Victor Hugo (1802-85), published in 1869, based on the antithesis between moral beauty and physical deformity.

^[50]In Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends,Gogol wrote: "You trusted that I knew Russia like my five fingers; and I know precisely nothing in it." Dostoevsky has Stepan Trofimovich ironically echo these words while claiming the opposite, and with an added distortion of idiom.

^[51]Pechorin is the cold, aloof hero of A Hero of Our Time(1840), a novel by the poet Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41).

^[52]A kalatch is a loaf of very fine white bread shaped like a purse with a looped handle and generously dusted with flour.

^[53]The seaport of Sebastopol in the Crimea was besieged by French and English forces for eleven months in 1854-55, during the Crimean War (1854-56), and was eventually taken by the besiegers.

^[54]Korobochka ("little box") is the name of a lady landowner in Gogol's novel Dead Souls(1843). It became synonymous with a certain type of person—suspicious, stingy, stubborn, stupid.

^[55]Among Dostoevsky's preliminary notes for Crime and Punishmentwe read: "N.B.:Nihilism is lackeyishness of thought. A nihilist is a lackey of thought." The term "nihilism," first used philosophically in German (nibilismus)to signify annihilation, a reduction to nothing (attributed to Buddha), or the rejection of religious beliefs and moral principles, came via the French nihilismeto Russian, where it acquired a political meaning, referring to the doctrine of the younger generation of socialists of the 1860s, who advocated the destruction of the existing social order without specifying what should replace it. The great nineteenth-century Russian lexicographer Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl (1801-72), normally a model of restraint, defines "nihilism" in his Interpretive Dictionary of the Living Russian Languageas "an ugly and immoral doctrine which rejects everything that cannot be palpated." The term became current after it appeared in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons(1862), where it is applied to the hero Bazarov.

^[56]Gogol, at the beginning of the seventh chapter of Dead Souls,says of himself that he is "destined to look at life through laughter visible to the world and tears invisible and unknown to it."

^[57]An altered quotation from travel notes by P. I. Ogorodnikov entitled "From New York to San Francisco and Back to Russia," published in the journal Zarya(1870, No. XI).

^[58]Also from Ogorodnikov's travel notes.

^[59]Mount Athos, at the southern end of the easternmost peninsula of Chalkidiki in Macedonia, is an autonomous region which has been a monastic center since the fifth century A.D.

^[60]"Prophesying" as an ecstatic form of religious behavior might be condoned by the Church as a kind of "folly for Christ's sake" or might be put under penance.

^[61]"Kitty" (kosbechka,diminutive of koshka,"female cat") is an endearing name in Russian. But the refrain "Kitty, come out to me" also occurs in Russian yuletide carols as a marriage motif (see Vladimir Nabokov's commentary to his translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin,abridged edition, Princeton, 1981, volume II, part one, pp. 496-97). Such carols might have been found in Marya Timofeevna's Songbook.

^[62]The subject matter of this stanza, widely known in Russian folklore, is connected with the name of Eudoxia Lopukhin (to whom the words are also ascribed), the first wife of Peter the Great (1672-1725), who had her sent to a convent and made a nun.

^[63]An absurdly distorted but recognizable version of a well-known poem by Afanasy Fet (1820-92), "I Have Come to You with Greeting" (1843).

^[64]Russian banknotes had different colors depending on their denomination. A green banknote was worth three roubles.

^[65]General A. P. Ermolov (1772-1861) was a hero of the Napoleonic war of 1812, a brilliant military commander and diplomat. From 1817 to 1827 he served as commander-in-chief of the Russian army in the Caucasus.

^[66]A misquotation of a line from a poem by N. Kukolnik (see Chapter One, note 12 above), famous as a song with music by M. I. Glinka (1804-57). It should read, "Sleep, hopeless heart!"

^[67]The age of the universe used to be calculated according to biblical chronology. By the Hebrew calendar, creation was 5,631 years old as Lebyadkin was speaking; by the chronology of Bishop James Ussher of Dublin (1581—1656), it was 5,875 years old. Lebyadkin gives a rounded-off figure.

^[68]The Prince de Monbars, or Monbars l'Exterminateur (b. 1646), was a chief of the ftibustres(French for "filibusters"). He terrorized shipping in the West Indies and in 1683 managed to capture Veracruz. Hero of several popular dramas and novels.

^[69]See Chapter One, note 37 above. The monument, a statue of Krylov surrounded by animals from his fables, was set up on the children's playground in the Petersburg Summer Garden in 1855, and is still there. It is known affectionately as "Grandpa Krylov."

^[70]Denis Vasilievich Davydov (1784-1839), himself a hussar and a hero of the Napoleonic war of 1812, wrote energetic, humorous poems which have remained very popular.

^[71]See Chapter Two, note 1 above.

^[72]The "Merchant's Yard" in old Russian, a huge shopping arcade in Petersburg, still so called.

^[73]According to the biblical account (Genesis 19:1-28), God destroyed Sodom because the men of the city practiced "sodomy," but in Russian use "Sodom" means a more generally disordered and outrageous kind of life. Owners of apartments used to rent out not only individual rooms but sectioned-off parts of rooms, or "corners," which inevitably led to a certain communality among the tenants.

^[74]The sudden death of the emperor Alexander I on 19 November 1825 was followed by a period of confusion about the succession. A conspiratorial group of officers and noblemen, opposed to imperial absolutism and favoring a constitutional monarchy or even a republican government, seized the occasion and gathered their forces in the Senate Square of Petersburg on 14 December 1825. Hence the name "Decembrists." The uprising was promptly quelled by loyal contingents of the Imperial Guard; one hundred twenty-one men were arrested, of whom five were executed and the rest exiled to Siberia. M. S. Lunin (1787-1845), one of the exiled Decembrists, was indeed famous for his fearlessness.

^[75]See Chapter Three, note 6. Lermontov had a venomous tongue and a cold, scornful view of life and men; he fought a number of duels and was eventually killed in one.

^[76]The zemstvo was an elective provincial council with powers of local government.

^[77]See Part One, Chapter Four, note 1.

^[78]The English poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), was himself a romantic figure, at least in the minds of his contemporaries—a citizen of the world, a lady-killer, a lover of freedom. Nozdryov, one of the landowners in Gogol's Dead Souls,became proverbial as the type of the feisty, interfering, obnoxious braggart, the carousing gambler, the purposeless liar and babbler. For Bazarov, see Part One, Chapter Four, note 1.

^[79]See Part One, Chapter One, note 20.

^[80]Dostoevsky himself coined the term "omni-man" (obshcbecbelovek);it appears, in the plural, at the very end of Notes from Underground(1864).

^[81]Russian borrowed the word kipsek("keepsake") from English; it was the trade name of a literary annual, finely bound and illustrated, intended for gift-giving.

^[82]The sect of the castrates (skoptsi),a reform of the older sect of the flagellants, 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" (sessions) of the flagellants, he introduced the practice of self-castration. The sect was forbidden by law.

^[83]That is, the International Workingmen's Association, or First Internationale, founded in Geneva by Karl Marx, Bakunin, and others, in 1864.

^[84]Charmeur was a well-known Petersburg tailor. According to his wife's memoirs, Dostoevsky had his own suits made by Charmeur, whom he also advertised in Crime and Punishment.

^[85]Landowners had to supply a quota of recruits for the army from among their serfs, the selection being left to the landowner. Serfs had many ways of evading this hated duty, of which one of the simplest was to buy their way out. Household serfs were exempted from army service, but their masters could send them to fill such gaps in the quota. That is what Stepan Trofimovich did with Fedka.

^[86]Pushkin deliberately used extremely injurious language in his letter of 26 January 1837 to the Dutch diplomat Baron van Heeckeren, provoking the baron's adopted son Georges d'Anthès to a duel. (Baron van Heeckeren, surnamed Jakob Derk Burckardt Anna in family records, is called Louis by most scholars.)

^[87]See Revelation 10:6 (King James Version).

^[88]The "God-man" is Christ, "truly God and truly man," in the definition of the council of Chalcedon (451 a.d.). Notions of anthropotheism, or "man-godhood," arrived at in discussions within the Petrashevsky circle (see Part One, Chapter One, note 7) were drawn ultimately from German idealist philosophy, representing an inversion of Christianity which Kirillov carries to its final conclusion.

^[89]Russian casement windows normally have one pane, or part of a pane, that can be opened for ventilation when the window is sealed shut for the winter.

^[90]The idea of Russia as a "god-bearing" nation can be traced to the thought of the Slavophil Nikolai Yakovlevich Danilevsky (1822-95), an idiosyncratic interpretation of the philosophy of history of the German idealists Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) and Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854). Danilevsky's treatise in the philosophy of history, Russia and Europe,was published in 1871.

^[91]Dostoevsky lends Shatov some of his own ideas about Roman Catholicism. The announcement at the first Vatican council (1870) of the new dogma of papal infallibility deeply shocked him; he saw it as the proclaiming of a "new Christ" who represents earthly power and has thus succumbed to the third temptation of the devil (see Matthew 4:1-11, Luke 4:1—13).

^[92]The thought Shatov here attributes to Stavrogin had in fact been Dostoevsky's own, expressed with slightly different wording in his often-quoted letter of 1854 to N. D. Fonvizin, wife of one of the Decembrists, who had met him in Tobolsk in 1850 on his way to prison and given him a copy of the Gospels which was to be his only reading during his four years at hard labor.

^[93]Shatov seems to confuse two passages from the New Testament: the "rivers of living water" that appear as a metaphor of the Spirit in John 7:38 are not the same as the waters that dry up in Revelation 16:12.

^[94]See note 3 above (Nozdryov claimed that he actually caught a hare by the hind legs with his own hands).

^[95]Stepan Timofeevich ("Stenka") Razin (?—1671), a Don Cossack, led a peasant uprising in Russia (1667-71) for which he became a popular hero.

^[96]Donatien Alphonse François, marquis de Sade (1740-1814), novelist and theorist of the erotic, accused of practicing what he preached, was tried and sentenced to prison for rape; later he was condemned to death for sodomy and poisoning, but the sentence was lifted.

^[97]Fedka's speech throughout is based on Dostoevsky's notes on the language of the convicts he met during his imprisonment in Omsk (1850-54).

^[98]Zossima here is a name for a generic hermit, not an actual person.

^[99]The poet is Pyotr A. Vyazemsky (1792-1878), a friend of Pushkin's; the lines, slightly adjusted by Lebyadkin, come from Vyazemsky's poem "To the Memory of the Painter Orlovsky" (1838).

^[100]In Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends,Gogol refers to an as yet unwritten "Farewell Story" of which he says: "I swear, I did not invent or think it up; it sang itself out of my soul..." The story remained unwritten.

^[101]Gavriil Derzhavin (1743-1816) was one of the greatest Russian poets of the eighteenth century. Lebyadkin refers to his ode "God" (1784), which contains the line: "I am king—I am slave, I am worm—I am god!"

^[102]Grigory ("Grishka") Otrepev, known as "the False Dmitri," was a defrocked monk who claimed the Russian throne by pretending to be the lawful heir, the prince Dmitri, murdered in childhood through the intrigues of Boris Godunov (1551-1605), who thus made himself tsar. In 1605, by order of the patriarch Job, the impostor Grigory Otrepev was anathematized and cursed "in this age and the age to come" in all the churches of Russia. The "seven councils" is a hyperbolic reference to the ecumenical councils of the Church, held between 325 and 787 A.D.

^[103]Dostoevsky wrote down these terms for church objects in his Omsk notebook, but without giving definitions of them. The "swinger" is probably a censer; the second item, which we translate as "swatter," remains mysterious; the "deacon's girth" is no doubt a deacon's stole or orarion, often richly decorated. Icons, as of St. Nicholas the Wonder-worker, are often covered with precious casings of silver or gold ornamented with jewels. "Similor" (originally a French word) is a yellow brass used in making cheap jewelry.

^[104]There is an excellent short treatise on the classical duel à volonté("at will") in Vladimir Nabokov's commentary to his translation of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin(abridged edition, Princeton, 1981, volume II, part two, pp. 43-45).

^[105]Corporal punishment for all ranks of the population, including clergy and boyars (a privileged order of Russian aristocracy), existed in the Muscovite kingdom from its very beginnings in the fourteenth century.

^[106]Dueling was officially outlawed and therefore could be punished by the authorities, though they might choose to overlook it.

^[107]This conversation reflects certain skeptical attitudes towards the new courts established by the legal reform of 1864, which replaced the former courts, separate for each rank of society, with general courts for all ranks, open to the public, allowing for trial by jury, the use of lawyers, and free discussion in the press.

^[108]See Part One, Chapter One, note 20.

^[109]The question of women's equality emerged in Russia at the end of the 1850s. During the 1860s it was much discussed in the press. Dostoevsky saw the emancipation of women as one instance of the restoration of human dignity in general, and regarded it as very important.

^[110]See Part One, Chapter One, note 23.

^[111] Fra Diavolo(1830) is a comic opera by the French composer Esprit Auber (1782-1871), based on the life of an Italian brigand.

^[112]"Foolsbury" (Glupovin Russian) is the subject of The History of a Certain Town,a satirical history of Russia by M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-89).

^[113]In fact, Dostoevsky based this episode with the book-hawker on an actual incident reported in the press.

^[114]The "Marseillaise" (see Part One, Chapter One, note 24) is a marching song, "Mein lieber Augustin" is a beer-hall waltz, in Lyamshin's musical parody symbolizing the triumph of German philistinism over the spirit of the French Revolution. The actual Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) was started and lost by Napoléon III.

^[115]Jules Favre (1809-80), French politician and republican, called for the deposing of Napoléon III in 1870, and negotiated the treaty of Frankfurt (10 May 1871), which ended the Franco-Prussian War. For Bismarck, see Part One, Chapter Two, note 4.

^[116]Properly, Château-Yquem, the greatest of sauternes.

^[117]According to Anna Grigorievna, the visit to Semyon Yakovlevich in Demonsis partly based on Dostoevsky's own visit to a well-known holy fool (yurodivy)in Moscow, Ivan Yakovlevich Koreisha.

^[118]The Russian merchant class was divided in its habits of dress; some retained the long-skirted coat and full beard of the traditional Russian merchant, others adopted so-called German fashions (frock coat, waistcoat, tie) and went clean-shaven.

^[119]The Senate in Petersburg was the highest judicial as well as legislative body in imperial Russia.

^[120]The question "What is the meaning of this dream?" is ultimately a paraphrase of a line from Pushkin's poem "The Bridegroom" (1825). In the 1860s it became a journalistic cliché applied metaphorically to various events of the day. Dostoevsky here restores it to its literal meaning, with very funny effect.

^[121]The "little Cossack" (kazacbok)is a dance imitative of military steps.

^[122]See Genesis 25:29-34. Esau, the elder son of Isaac, sells his birthright to his brother Jacob for "a mess of pottage," that is, a bowl of lentil soup.

^[123]Baptiste Honoré Raymond Capefigue (1802-72) was a French historian and man of letters, author of historical compilations.

^[124]That is, news of the emancipation of the serfs on 19 February 1861.

^[125]Dostoevsky again parodies the utilitarian aesthetics of the nihilists, particularly of N. G. Chernyshevsky (see Part One, Chapter One, note 23), who declared in his university dissertation entitled The Relations of Art to Reality(written in 1853, defended on 10 May 1855): "Artistic creations are lower than the beautiful in reality." The public debate occasioned by Chernyshevsky's defense of his thesis was considered the first manifestation of the "intellectual trend of the sixties."

^[126]"The die is cast!" (Latin); words uttered by Julius Caesar when he defied the Roman Senate by bringing his legions across the Rubicon in 50 b.c. and marching on Rome.

^[127]Lines from Pushkin's poem "Once There Lived a Poor Knight" (1829).

^[128]A quotation from Pushkin's poem "A Hero" (1830).

^[129]Karl Vogt (1817-95), German naturalist, was a defender of the biological theory of transformism (as were Lamarck and Darwin). Jacob Moleschott (1822-93), Dutch physiologist and philosopher, was an advocate of materialism, as was the German philosopher Ludwig Biichner (1824-99), brother of the playwright Georg Buchner. Their writings were a sort of bible of the materialist worldview for young Russians of the 1860s.

^[130]Dostoevsky is thinking of Herzen's account of Pavel A. Bakhmetev, in a chapter on the young generation in his book From My Life and Thoughts(1852-55). Bakhmetev, a wealthy young nobleman of revolutionary sympathies, supplied the émigrés with funds for propaganda, most of which went eventually to the subject of the next note.

^[131]Sergei Gennadievich Nechaev (1847-82), nihilist theoretician and murderer, whose activities together with the court proceedings arising from them were one of Dostoevsky's sources for the writing of Demons,was the founder of a revolutionary society called "The Committee of the People's Summary Justice of 19 February 1870." The society's tracts and documents bore an oval seal showing an axe with the name of the committee written around it.

^[132]"The Shining Light" is Dostoevsky's parody of a poem by Nikolai Ogaryov (see Part One, Chapter One, note 2), entitled "The Student." Ogaryov had originally written the poem for a friend who had died in 1867, but then he met Nechaev in Geneva two years later and was so taken with him that he added the dedication "to young friend Nechaev" when the poem was printed as a tract.

^[133]That is, the imperial secret police.

^[134]Kondraty Ryleev (1795-1826), a leading Decembrist, was one of the five who were hanged after the uprising. His Panderings(1821-23) is a collection of mediocre patriotic poems on historical subjects.

^[135]Collegiate assessor was the eighth of the fourteen ranks in the imperial Russian civil service, equivalent to the military rank of major.

^[136]See Part One, Chapter Three, note 1. Dostoevsky wrote of Turgenev in a letter: "I also don't like his aristocratical and pharisaic embrace, when he comes at you with a kiss, but instead offers you his cheek." He has given Karmazinov other personal traits of Turgenev—his high voice, his manner of speaking, his practice of making multiple copies of his writings.

^[137]A parody of various liberal titles: On the Eve, Who Is to Blame?, What Is to Be Done?, Nowhere to Go.

^[138]This is the apocalyptic Babylon of the Hebrew prophets (Jeremiah 50, 51; Isaiah 13) and Revelation (18:2); see also Matthew 7:27.

^[139]The hut on chicken legs is the traditional dwelling of Baba Yaga, the witch of Russian folktales.

^[140]In the first publication of his new society, Nechaev wrote: "We come from the people, with hides bitten through by the teeth of the present-day setup, guided by hatred for everything not of the people, having no idea of moral obligation or honor with regard to the world that we hate and from which we expect nothing but evil." Dostoevsky later commented on this "right to dishonor" in his Diary of a Writer(March 1876, chapter two, part 4).

^[141]The Feast of the Protective Veil of the Mother of God, commonly referred to as "the Protection" (the Russian pokrovmeans both "protection" and "veil"), is celebrated on 1 October. (Nechaev had a similarly short timetable in mind for the success of his general uprising.)

^[142]Vera Pavlovna, heroine of Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?,habitually addresses her husband Lopukhov as "sweetie." The Russian word immediately calls up this literary context.

^[143]The phrasing and details here come from a song of the Volga robbers. Further on in the song, the beautiful maiden has a dream prophesying a bad end to the robbers' enterprise. Pyotr Stepanovich will refer to it again, as will Liza.

^[144]In 1926, fifty-seven years after the event, Alexei Kuznetsov, a member of Nechaev's society and a participant in the murder of the student Ivanov, wrote in a memoir that there had been no reason for the murder, but that Nechaev had needed it in order "to better weld us together with blood."

^[145]Half of the Italian saying Se non è vero, è ben trovato("If it's not true, it's well invented").

^[146]Many details of this "meeting" at Virginsky's correspond to particulars of the Nechaev circle as they emerged at the trial of the Nechaevists in July-August 1871 (Nechaev himself was eventually arrested abroad and tried in Moscow on 8 January 1873}; for example: the young Miss Virginsky with her bundle of tracts and her concern for the plight of poor students; the silent young artillerist who writes all the time and is meant to be taken for some kind of foreign inspector; the "knower of the people" and expert in pot-houses (the Nechaevist Pryzhov had written a History of Pot-bousesin 1868, and had become an alcoholic in the course of his researches).