Demons

[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 Punishment we 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 a

[56] Gogol, at the begi

[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 co

[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 a

[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.