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[ccxiii] "you will understand afterwards... We will understand together."
[ccxiv] "Hah, a lake"
[ccxv] "And I shall preach the Gospel ..."
[ccxvi] "She is an angel... She was more than an angel for me"
[ccxvii] "I loved you."
[ccxviii] "I loved you all my life... twenty years!"
[ccxix] "an hour... some bouillon, tea... anyhow, he is so happy."
[ccxx] Yes, my friends... This whole ceremony"
[ccxxi] "My father, I thank you, and you are very kind, but..."
[ccxxii] "There is my profession of faith."
[ccxxiii] "I have lied all my life"
[ccxxiv] "very little"
[1] "Exile" here means internal exile to the provinces, a measure taken in Russia against politically suspect persons.
[2] Pyotr Yakovlevich Chaadaev (1794?-1856) was the author of eight Philosophical Letters, written in French and circulated in manuscript, which among other things were sharply critical of Russia's intellectual isolation and social backwardness. The publication in 1836 of the first letter (the only one published in Chaadaev's lifetime) has been called the "opening shot" of the Westerner-Slavophil controversy which dominated nineteenth-century Russian social thought. Chaadaev's ideas in fact influenced both the Westerners, who favored various degrees of liberal reform to bring Russia into line with developments in Europe, and the Slavophils, proponents of Russian national culture and Orthodoxy.
Vissarion Grigorievich Belinsky (1811-48) was the most influential liberal critic and ideologist of his time, an advocate of socially conscious literature. He championed Dostoevsky's first novel, Poor Folk (1845), but Dostoevsky soon broke with him.
Timofei Nikolaevich Granovsky (1813-55), liberal historian and professor at Moscow University, is generally regarded as the founder of the Westerners. Stepan Trofimovich was first called "Granovsky" in the early drafts of Demons; Dostoevsky has given him Granovsky's general intellectual profile, his love of letter writing and card playing, his taste for champagne, his tearfulness, and his religious position ("Leave me God and art. I yield Christ up to you").
Alexander Ivanovich Herzen (1812-70) was a novelist, publicist, and radical social critic. Self-exiled from Russia in 1847, he lived in London, where he edited the influential journal The Bell (Kolokol). He was one of an unofficial triumvirate of revolutionary émigrés, along with the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1814-76) and the poet and propagandist Nikolai Ogaryov (1813-77).
[3] This phrase is probably a deliberate echo of an even clumsier phrase ("a whirlwind of emerged entanglements") in Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends (1847), the last published work of Nikolai Gogol (1809-52).
[4] "Hanseatic," pertaining to theHansa, a medieval German merchant guild, later a trading league of free German cities. These details of Stepan Trofimovich's career are all ironic allusions to the activities of T. N. Granovsky (see note 2 above).
[5] That is, "lovers of the Slavs" (see note 2 above).
[6] The journal Dostoevsky has in mind is Fatherland Notes, where his own first novel was published, and which in the 1840s, under the editorship of Andrei An-tonovich Kraevsky (1810-89), became a major forum for the Westerners. Kraevsky published the first Russian translations of Charles Dickens (1812-70) and George Sand (pen name of the French writer Aurore Dupin, baro
[7] There were a number of such secret societies in nineteenth-century Russia. Dostoevsky most likely has in mind the Petrashevsky circle, which he himself frequented from 1847 until its suppression in 1849, when he and other members were arrested. The Petrashevists were particularly interested in the ideas of the French Utopian socialist Charles Fourier (1772-1837). His system, known as "Fourierism," envisaged the organization of individuals into "phalansteries," or social-economic groups harmoniously composed with the aim of securing the well-being of each member through the freely accepted labor of all.
[8] The second part of the grand verse drama Faust by the German poet Joha
[9] The poet and liberal journalist Nikolai A. Nekrasov (1821-77), Dostoevsky's sometime friend and frequent ideological opponent, was referred to as a "people's poet" in his own lifetime, by Dostoevsky among others. The quotation here, somewhat rearranged, is from Nekrasov's poem "The Bear Hunt."
[10] The phrase "civic grief," meaning an acute suffering over social ills and inequities, was widely used in the Russia of the 1860s; the disease itself became fashionable in Petersburg, where the deaths of some high-school students and cadets were even ascribed to it.
[11] Rumors of the government's intention to liberate the serfs began to emerge as early as the 1840s. Their emancipation was finally decreed by the emperor Alexander II on 19 February 1861.
[12] In 1836, the famous artist K. P. Briullov (1799-1852), leader of the Russian romantic school, made an engraving of the mediocre poet N. V. Kukolnik (1809-68), which was used as a frontispiece in editions of his poems.
[13] Alexis Clérel de Tocqueville (1805-59), French politician and writer, was the author of two classic works, Democracy in America (1835-40) and The Ancien Régime and the Revolution (1856). The French writer Paul de Kock (1794-1871) was the author of i
[14] Alexander Radishchev (1749-1802), author of A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow, was exiled to Siberia by the empress Catherine the Great because of his outspoken attacks on social abuses.
[15] Protests against "outrageous acts" were symptomatic of the radical press of the 1860s, for instance the polemical article entitled "The Outrageous Act of The Age, " published in the St Petersburg Gazette (3 March 1861), protesting against an attack on the movement for women's emancipation in the journal The Age, referred to by Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment.
[16] All these issues were discussed in the radical press of the 1860s. The apparent hodgepodge of points from "dividing Russia" through "women's rights" was in fact the program spelled out in one of the tracts of the time. "The Passage" was and is a shopping arcade in Petersburg which also housed a public auditorium. For Kraevsky, see note 6 above.
[17] The points Stepan Trofimovich agrees with are some of those listed in the anarchist program of Mikhail Bakunin (see note 2 above), published in the first issue of his journal The People's Cause (Geneva, 1869). However, Stepan Trofimovich vehemently rejects the utilitarianism of such radical critics as D. I. Pisarev (1840-68), for whom poetry was a prime target, particularly that of Russia's greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837).
[18] These are actually the first lines of some doggerel Dostoevsky himself wrote in parody of popular themes in contemporary journalism. Vek (The Age) was a Petersburg weekly; Lev Kambek was a second-rate journalist of the time.