The Idiot

5.   In Russian, the German word Junker, meaning "young lord," referred to a lower officer's rank open only to the nobility.

6.  The title of "hereditary honorary citizen" was awarded to merchants or other persons not of noble rank for services to the city or the state.

7. A hymn on the words "memory eternal" comes at the end of the Orthodox funeral and memorial services; the prayer is for the person to remain eternally in God's memory.

8.   Menaions (Greek for "monthly readings") were collections of old Russian spiritual literature, the materials organized day by day and month by month; they contained saints' lives, homilies, explanations of the various feasts, and were often the only reading matter of the uneducated classes.

9.   A holy fool (a "fool for God" or "fool in Christ"—yurodivy in Russian) might be a harmless village idiot; but there are also saintly persons or ascetics whose saintliness expresses itself as "folly."

10.   The Bolshoi (i.e. "Big") Theater in Petersburg, not to be confused with the still-extant Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, stood on Theatralnaya Square from 1783 until 1892, when it was demolished and replaced by the Petersburg Conservatory. The French Theater was a French-language company that performed in the Mikhailov-sky Theater (now the Maly, or "Small," Opera Theater). Incidentally, through this company, news from Paris reached Petersburg extraordinarily quickly.

11.  A tax farmer was a private person authorized by the government to collect various taxes in exchange for a fixed fee. The practice was obviously open to abuse, and tax farmers could become very rich, though never quite respectable. The practice was abolished by the reforms of the emperor Alexander II in the 1860s.

12.  These words were the motto on the coat of arms of Count A. A. Arakcheev (1769-1834), minister of the interior under the emperors Paul I and Alexander I; they were paraphrased by the poet Alexander Pushkin (1799—1837) in his epigram "On Arakcheev."

13.   Open courts and trial by jury were first introduced in Russia by the judicial reforms of Alexander II in 1864 and remained controversial for a long time afterwards.

14.  The prince's assertion is not quite accurate. In Russia, capital punishment was abolished in 1753-54 under the empress Elizaveta Petrovna (1709-62), but reintroduced by Catherine II (1729-96) as punishment for state, military, and certain other crimes. In the 1860s, owing to the rise of anarchist and terrorist movements, it was resorted to rather frequently. The commentator in the Academy of Sciences edition suggests that Dostoevsky may have introduced the phrase as a blind to keep the censors from interfering with the prince's later discussion.

15.   On December 22, 1849, Dostoevsky himself, along with a number of "co-conspirators" from the radical Petrashevsky circle, was subjected to precisely such a mock execution and last-minute reprieve; he "tells us something" about it in more than one of his later works. The prince's account of the experience of "a certain man" in part one, chapter five, reproduces the actual episode in detail. Dostoevsky also draws here and later from The Last Day of a Man Condemned to Death, by Victor Hugo (1802-85), which he considered a masterpiece.

16.   In 1840-41, the historian and archeologist M. P. Pogodin (1800-75) published an album of Samples of Old Slavonic-Russian Calligraphy, containing lithographic reproductions of forty-four samples of handwriting from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries, among them the signature of Pafnuty, a fourteenth-century monk, founder of the Avraamy Monastery, of which he was the hegumen (abbot).

17.  Words engraved on a medal awarded by the emperor Nicholas I to Count P. A. Kleinmiechel in 1838, after the reconstruction of the Winter Palace under his supervision.

18.   A paraphrase of Romeo andfuliet, III, ii, 73: "O serpent heart, hid with a flow'ring face!" which Dostoevsky knew from the translation published by M. N. Katkov in 1841 (he quotes the same line in his Novel in Nine Letters written in 1847).

19.   It was a custom among young ladies in the nineteenth century to keep personal albums in which friends and visitors would be asked to write witty or sentimental lines or verses; vers d'album ("album verse") reached its high point in the verses of the French symbolist Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98).

20.  The Mongol empire, known as the Golden Horde, dominated southern Russia from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century. To "go to the Horde" meant to petition the Mongol rulers on behalf of the subject Russian people.

21.   It happens to a rich Corinthian noblewoman in The Transformations of Lucius, otherwise known as The Golden Ass, by the

Latin writer Apuleius (second century a.d.), and to Titania, the queen of the fairies, in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream—neither case quite belongs to "mythology."

22.   An imprecise quotation from the poem "The Journalist, the Reader, and the Writer" (1840), by Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41).

23.   Quietism was a form of religious mysticism going back to the writings of the Spanish monk Miguel de Molinos (1628-96), consisting of passive contemplation and a withdrawal from

experiences of the senses; but Aglaya refers more simply to the prince's meekness and passivity.

24.   Dostoevsky is probably thinking of "The Beheading of John the Baptist" (1514), by the Swiss painter Hans Fries (c. 1460-1520), in the Basel museum, which portrays the face of St. John just as the sword is swung over him.

25.  What Dostoevsky refers to as a "cross with four points" is the standard Roman Catholic and Protestant cross with one crossbar; in part two, mention will be made of the "eight-pointed cross" of Byzantine and Russian tradition, which has three crossbars (and thus eight "points" or tips).

26.   Dostoevsky saw a copy of The Mado