The Adolescent

19. Bolshaya Millio

20. See Part One, note 47.

21. The period of Tartar occupation of Russia, known as the “Tartar Yoke,” in fact lasted from the conquest of 1237–1240 to around 1480, when Prince Ivan III of Moscow removed the last traces of Muscovite dependence on the khanate of the Golden Horde.

22. That is, from Lucia di Lammermoor, an opera by Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848).

23. According to the Gospels, the court of the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem convicted Christ of blasphemy, which carried a sentence of death, and turned him over to the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate for sentencing. Pilate, who found no fault in him, washed his hands of the guilt and, yielding to the demands of the crowd, gave him over to be crucified.

24. The princely family of Rohan, one of the most ancient and illustrious in France, has as its motto, Premier ne puis, second ne daigne, Rohan suis (“I ca

25. In 1720, Peter the Great abolished the position of patriarch, the administrative head of the Orthodox Church, chosen by and from the clergy, and established a standing council to administer Church affairs, presided over by a lay procurator appointed by the emperor himself. The term “schismatic” (raskolnik) refers to the so-called Old Believers, who split off from the Orthodox Church in disagreement over the reforms of the patriarch Nikon in the mid-seventeenth century.

26. Russian borrowed the word “keepsake” (kipsek) from English. It was the trade name of a literary a

27. Soden is a German watering-place at the foot of the Taunus Mountains, ten miles west of Frankfurt-am-Main. Bad-Gastein is a watering-place near Salzburg in Austria.

28. The biblical Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs, is a collection of mystical-erotic bridal poems written down in about the third century B.C. The opening of the first Book of Kings tells how King David in his old age took a young virgin, Abishag the Shunammite, to his bed to keep him warm and minister to him, though he “knew her not” (I Kings 1:1–15).

29. The French writer Paul de Kock (1794–1871) was the author of i

30. Alexei Mikhailovich Romanov (1629–1676), tsar of Russia, was the father of Peter the Great.

31. Holy Week is the week between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday.

PART THREE

1. In Petersburg, owing to its northern latitude, the sun sets in midafternoon during the winter.

2. The two-week fast preceding the feast of Saints Peter and Paul on June 29.

3.Kutya (accented on the last syllable) is a special dish offered to people in church at the end of a memorial service, and in some places on Christmas Eve, made from rice, barley, or wheat and raisins, sweetened with honey.

4. This day of commemoration of the dead, also known as Krasnaya gorka (“Pretty Little Hill”), falls on the Tuesday following Saint Thomas’s Sunday, the first Sunday after Easter. The Russian name probably comes from the custom of decorating the graves (“little hills”) for the occasion.

5. In Part Three of both editions of The Adolescent published during Dostoevsky’s lifetime, the name of this character changes from Darya Onisimovna to Nastasya Egorovna. The same shift occurs in the notebooks for the novel, and evidently slipped from there into the final draft and hence into print. We follow the definitive Russian edition in preserving the change.

6. See Part Two, note 5.

7. Saint Mary of Egypt, a fifth-century saint greatly venerated in Orthodoxy, was a prostitute who was miraculously converted and spent the last forty-seven years of her life in the desert, in prayer and repentance.

8. The merchant’s name, though a plausible one in Russian, is suggestive of his character: it means “cattle slaughterer.”

9. There are twelve great feasts in the Orthodox liturgical year.

10. A “holy fool” (or “fool in God,” or “fool for Christ’s sake”—yurodivy in Russian) is a saintly person or ascetic whose saintliness is expressed in a certain “folly” of behavior. Holy fools were known early in Christian tradition. However, the term may also be applied to a harmless village idiot.

11. A distorted quotation of the Epistle of Jude: “hating even the garment spotted by the flesh” (Jude 23).

12. Cenobitic order means a life in common (from the Greek koinobion, “common life”) for all the monks in a monastery, as opposed to the “idiorhythmic” life in which each monk is responsible for his own maintenance.

13. In the Orthodox Church, young children are allowed to take communion without prior preparation, but after a certain age they are expected to prepare, like adults, by attendance at services, confession, and fasting.

14. In Orthodox piety, the “gift of tears” is a sign of profound spiritual development. In The Brothers Karamazov the elder Zosima will say: “Water the earth with the tears of your joy, and love those tears.”

15. In the Book of Job, God in his wager with Satan allows him to destroy Job’s seven sons and three daughters. Having won the wager by proving Job’s righteousness, God gives him another seven sons and three daughters. It is never said, however, that Job “forgot the former ones.”

16. A nobleman convicted of a crime would be stripped of his legal and hereditary rights, but it was possible to have them restored in return for service to the state, for instance, in one of the new Russian “colonies” in Turkestan, which was being settled at the time.

17. Arkhangelsk is in the northwest of Russia on the White Sea; Kholmogory is a small village about fifty miles south of Arkhangelsk on the Dvina River.

18. The German title Kammerjunker (“gentleman of the bedchamber”) was adopted by the Russian court. It was a high distinction for a young man.

19. This is an example of the long fellow’s (or Dostoevsky’s) absurd humor: the French often substitute a w for a v in writing German or Russian names, but the w is still pronounced as a v. However, Arkady’s name transliterated into French would be “Dolgorouky,” not “Dolgorowky.” What’s more, the long fellow obviously pronounces his fanciful version “Dolgorovky,” which is why Arkady thinks he has said “Korovkin.”

20. The Journal des débats was a French daily newspaper founded in 1789 and continuously published until 1944, always with a moderate liberal tendency; the Indépendance belge was published in Brussels from 1830 to 1937.

21. In Russian, the German Junker, meaning “young lord,” referred to a lower officer’s rank open only to the nobility.

22. That is, Bolshaya Morskaya Street, which runs from Palace Square to Senate Square in Petersburg, parallel to the Moyka River. It was a wealthy street with many fine houses on it, including the mansion belonging to Vladimir Nabokov’s family.

23. Noël-François-Alfred Madier de Montjau (1814–1892) was a French lawyer who became a people’s representative after the establishment of the Second Republic in 1848. Banished following Napoleon III’s coup d’état in 1852, his name became news again in 1874, when his election as a deputy of the extreme left caused a considerable stir. The “current Parisian events” were the declaration of the Third Republic, the elections, and the drafting of a new constitution. The Poles, who had been under Russian domination since the partition of Poland in 1772, were often ardent republican sympathizers.

24. An imprecise quotation from the poem “I feel dull and sad . . .” by the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841).