The Idiot

35.   See note 22 above. Kolya is thinking of Arbenin insulting Prince Zvezdich (act II, scene iv).

36.   Christ is repeatedly referred to in the Gospels as "the king of the Jews," most often as an accusation during his questioning by Pilate, and this mocking "title" was also attached to his cross. Ganya changes it ironically to mean king of the Jewish financiers. Dostoevsky has in mind The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, a satirical prose text by the poet Heinrich Heine (1797— 1856), in which an ironic parallel is drawn between Christ and the banker Meyer Rothschild (1744-1812). Dostoevsky published a Russian translation of Heine's piece in his magazine Epoch (Nos. 1-3, 1864); in fact, the Russian censors cut the passage about Christ and Rothschild, but Dostoevsky had of course seen the manuscript intact.

37.  The general gives a fantastic interpretation of a real event. The great Russian surgeon N. I. Pirogov (1810-81), who organized medical care for the wounded at the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, left for Petersburg at one point, displeased by the inattention of the high military authorities to problems of medical care. Auguste Nélaton (1807-73), a French surgeon of European repute and member of the Medical Academy of Paris, was the personal surgeon of Garibaldi and Napoleon III; he never set foot in Russia.

38.  The reference is to a case that Dostoevsky himself read about in the newspapers: a nineteen-year-old Moscow University student by the name of Danilov was tried for the murder and robbery of the pawnbroker Popov and his maidservant Nordman in January 1866. Dostoevsky was particularly struck by the similarity to Ras-kolnikov's crime in Crime and Punishment, which he had been at work on for several months. During Danilov's trial it came out that the young man, who wanted to get married, had been advised by his father to stop at nothing, not even crime, to achieve his ends.

39.  The poet Ivan Krylov (1769-1844) was Russia's greatest fabulist; further on, Ferdyshchenko slightly misquotes from "The Lion and the Ass" (the difference is lost in translation).

40.   Provincial marshal of the nobility was the highest elective office in a province before the reforms of Alexander II in 1864.

41.   La Dame aux camélias ("The Lady with the Camellias"), a novel (1848) and five-act play (1852) by Alexandre Dumas fils (1824-95), tells a tragic story of illicit love. The heroine appears at promenades with bouquets of white camellias on certain days of the month and of red camellias on other days; after her death, her lover sees to it that white and red camellias alternate in the same way on her grave.

42.   Marlinsky was the pen name of A. A. Bestuzhev (1795-1837), a Romantic writer popular in military circles, to which many of his characters belonged.

43.   Russian social thought throughout the nineteenth century was dominated by the dispute between the Westernizers, who favored various degrees of liberal reform to bring Russia into line with developments in Europe, and the Slavophiles, proponents of Russian (and generally Slavic) national culture and Orthodoxy.

44.   Dostoevsky drew these details from the case of the Moscow merchant V. F Mazurin, a young man from a well-off family, who killed the jeweler 1.1. Kalmykov with a similarly bound razor. This murder, further details of which will appear later, haunts Nastasya Filippovna throughout the novel.

45.   Ekaterinhof, at that time on the southwest periphery of Petersburg, was named in honor of Catherine I (1684-1727), the wife of the emperor Peter the Great (1682-1725), who built a palace there in 1711. In the early nineteenth century, the park surrounding the palace became one of the finest public gardens in the capital and a favorite place for promenades and picnics.

PART TWO

1.  The original Vauxhall was a seventeenth-century pleasure garden in London. The word entered Russian as a common noun meaning an outdoor space for concerts and entertainment, with a tearoom, tables, and so on. The vauxhall in Pavlovsk, a suburb of Petersburg where much of the novel is set, was built very near the Pavlovsk railway station, one of the first in Russia—so near, in fact, that vokzal also became the Russian word for "railway station."

2.  That is, a supporter of the elder branch of the Bourbon family in France, deposed in 1830 in favor of the younger branch of Orléans.

3.  The zemstvo was an elective provincial council for purposes of local administration, established in 1864 by Alexander II.

4.  Tarasov House was the name of the debtors' prison in Petersburg.

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

6.   Pavlovsk, to the south of Petersburg, is a garden suburb named for the emperor Paul I (1754-1801), who had a magnificent palace there. A number of important meetings in the novel take place in the vast, rambling "English" park surrounding the palace. A dacha is a summer residence outside the city, anything from a large

separate house to part of a house or one or two rented rooms; the word also summons up a certain summer mode of life, with outings, picnics, and a general air of festivity.

7.  The reference is to another notorious murder reported in the newspapers, in which Vitold Gorsky, an eighteen-year-old high-school student from a noble family, killed six members of the merchant Zhemarin's household, including his eleven-year-old son, to whom he gave lessons.

8.  These words come from the imperial ukase of November 24, 1864, which promulgated the new judicial statutes; they were carved in gold on a marble plaque in the Petersburg courthouse; the "lawgiver" is the "tsar-reformer" Alexander II.

9.  Jea

10.   Dostoevsky writes Lebedev's spoken French in Russian transcription, reproducing the speaker's accent. The levée du roi, or "king's levee," was a reception that would take place around the king's rising from bed and morning toilet; Lebedev read about it in Mme. du Barry's memoirs.

11.  The Apocalypse, or Revelation, of St. John the Theologian is the closing book of the New Testament; balancing the book of Genesis at the begi

12.  The various references in this paragraph are to Revelation 6:5-8.

13.   St. Thomas's Sunday, in the Orthodox Church, is the first Sunday after Easter, named for the apostle who refused to believe in the resurrection until he had ocular and tactile evidence of it (John 20: 24-29).

14.   The sect of the castrates (skoptsi) in Russia, a reform of the older sect of the flagellants {khlysti), 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" of the flagellants, he introduced the practice of self-castration. The sect, which for some reason attracted many rich merchants, moneylenders, and goldsmiths, was condemned by the Church and forbidden by law.

15.   Sergei Mikhailovich Solovyov (1820-79), one of the greatest Russian historians, began to publish his History of Russia from Ancient Times in 1851; of its twenty-nine volumes, seventeen had appeared by 1867, when Dostoevsky was writing The Idiot.