Demons

[147] See Part One, Chapter One, note 2.

[148] See Exodus 20:1-17. Miss Virginsky misquotes the fifth commandment, which reads: "Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you."

[149] Shigalyov scornfully lumps together three very unlike authors of Utopian systems: the Athenian philosopher Plato (428-347 b.c.), author of the Republic; the French writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), author of On the Social Contract (1762); and Charles Fourier (see Part One, Chapter One, note 7). The aluminum columns come from yet another Utopian vision, the "Fourth Dream of Vera Pavlovna" in Cherny-shevsky's What Is to Be Done?, where they adorn the crystal palace of the future phalanstery.

[150] In his Diary of a Writer for January 1876 (chapter three, section 1), Dostoevsky strongly attacks the notion of enlightening one tenth of the people "while the remaining nine tenths serve only as the material and means to that end, continuing to dwell in darkness." Similar proportions appear in Raskolnikov's article on crime in Crime and Punishment (1866) and Ivan Fyodorovich's "poem" about the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov (1880).

[151] Lyamshin's suggestion may owe something in spirit to the tract "Principles of Revolution" written by Nechaev in 1869, with its celebration of total destruction.

[152] Etie

[153] The word "Shigalyovism" (sbigalyovshcbina) entered the Russian language; it denotes a form of socio-political demagogy and posturing with a tendency to propose extreme measures and total solutions.

[154] Pyotr Stepanovich echoes some of the points outlined in Nechaev's article "The Basic Principles of the Future Social Organization" (1869), which gives the scheme for a kind of "barracks communism" that Marx, among others, found appalling.

[155] Emile Littré (1801-81), French lexicographer and positivist philosopher, is erroneously mentioned here; the idea that "crime is madness," very popular in Russia in the 1860s, came from the Belgian mathematician and statistician Adolphe Quételet (1706-1874). Dostoevsky repeatedly opposed attempts to justify crime statistically or by appeals to necessity, heredity, the environment, because they deny human freedom and dignity.

[156] The period of the Jews' wandering in the desert after Moses led them out of Egypt; proverbially a period of trial and purification.

[157] Ivan the Tsarevich is a figure in Russian folktales: generally the third and youngest of the tsar's sons, it is he who does the work, endures the tests, and wins throne and princess in the end.

[158] The theme of the impostor has already emerged once in co

[159] See Part Two, Chapter One, note 7. The castrates had many legends, among them a messianic tale of a progenitor coming from the East, mounted on "a white, spiritually reasonable horse," to unite the tribes of the castrates and "spread their teaching even to French lands in the West." In his further mythographying, Pyotr Stepanovich combines two figures from the sect of the flagellants—one who called himself Danila Filippovich God-Sabaoth, the other Ivan Timofeevich Suslov, who proclaimed himself Christ.

[160] See 1 Kings 3:16-28.

[161] This well-known sentence from Voltaire's Candide (see Part One, Chapter Three, note 2) is uttered by the hero's teacher, Dr. Pangloss, representative of the optimistic (German) philosophy Voltaire makes fun of in his "philosophical tale."

[162] See Part One, Chapter One, note 2.

[163] Dostoevsky naturalizes the German word for "joke" with a Russian plural ending; we follow suit.

[164] See Part One, Chapter Two, note 5. Stepan Trofimovich repeats himself verbatim, this time with success.

[165] See Part Two, Chapter One, note 8.

[166] The landowner Tentetnikov appears in the unfinished second part of Gogol's Dead Souls; he is an enlightened young man, full of good intentions, who gradually falls into mental and moral lethargy and becomes an indolent sluggard. For Radi-shchev, see Part One, Chapter One, note 14.

[167] That is, wearing the decoration of the Polish civil order of St. Stanislas ("Stani-slav" in Russian). Founded in Poland in 1792, the order began to be awarded in Russia in 1831.

[168] This feast, described in Daniel 5, became proverbial for its sumptuousness, though it ended unhappily for Belshazzar.

[169] See Part Two, Chapter Two, note 4. Gogol's words have migrated from Lebyad-kin to Karmazinov.

[170] Karmazinov's Merci is a parody of several pieces by Turgenev,- its begi

[171] Pompey (Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, 106-48 b.c.), Roman general, lost his dispute with Julius Caesar for absolute power in Rome at the battle of Pharsalia. Gaius Cassius Longinus (d. 42 b.c.), one of the leaders of the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar, was defeated by Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar at Philippi.

[172] Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-87), German composer, long resident in France, is best known for his opera Orphée (1774).

[173] E. T. A. Hoffma

[174] See Matthew 11:28, where the words have quite a different meaning.

[175] For Byron, see Part Two, Chapter One, note 3; for Pechorin, see Part One, Chapter Three, note 6. Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), German poet, wrote poems of a lively and often biting humor.

[176] Stepan Trofimovich reformulates the aesthetic controversy over boots and Pushkin (see Part One, Chapter One, note 17), intensifying his opposition to the nihilists. In the journal The Russian Word (1864, No. 3), the nihilist critic B. A. Zaitsev wrote: "... there is no floor-sweeper, no toilet-cleaner, who is not infinitely more useful than Shakespeare."