The Idiot

16.   In the mid-seventeenth century, the ecclesiastical reforms of the patriarch Nikon caused a schism [raskoï) in the Russian Orthodox Church. Those who rejected the reforms, led by the archpriest Awakum, held to the "old belief" and became known as Old Believers.

17.  The poem Nastasya Filippovna reads is "Heinrich," by Hein-rich Heine, which deals with the famous episode in the history of the Holy Roman Empire when Pope Gregory VII (io2o?-no6) forced the emperor Henry IV (1050-1106) to come to the Italian castle of Canossa in 1077 and make humble amends to him. The poem was translated into Russian in 1859 and again in 1862.

18.  The prince is referring to the faith of the Old Believers, who did not accept the changes in the church service books instituted in the seventeenth century and made the sign of the cross in the old way, with two fingers, instead of in the three-fingered way introduced by the same reform.

19.   See part one, note 26. The painting in question is Christ's Body in the Tomb (1521), which Dostoevsky saw in the Basel museum in August 1867, having made a special stop there for that purpose; he even stood on a chair in the museum in order to study the painting more closely. The prince's words further on, "A man can even lose his faith from that painting!" were Dostoevsky's own words to his wife at the time. The painting, which is of central importance to the novel, will be mentioned again later; Dostoevsky first read a description of it in Letters of a Russian Traveler (1801), by N. M. Karamzin (see part one, note 4).

20.  The details of this murder are again drawn from an actual incident reported in the newspapers—the murder of the tradesman Suslov by a peasant named Balabanov, who repeated the same prayer before taking Suslov's silver watch.

21.  The exchanging of crosses was a custom symbolizing spiritual brotherhood.

22.   Dostoevsky, who suffered from epilepsy himself, sometimes experienced moments of such "illumination" just before a fit and said that they were "worth a whole life."

23.   Cf. Revelation 10: 6: "that there should be time no longer" (King James version).

24- According to Muslim tradition, Muhammad (c. 570-632) was awakened one night by the archangel Gabriel, who in the process brushed against a jug of water with his wing. Muhammad then traveled to Jerusalem, from there rose into the seven heavens where he spoke with angels, prophets, and Allah, visited the fiery Gehe

25.  These confused thoughts are co

26.   The terrace of Lebedev's dacha, as of many country houses, is something between a room and an open veranda: a large, unheated space with many windows, with a door leading to the i

27.  The first Russian state was founded at Novgorod by Rurik, chief of the Scandinavian rovers known as Varangians, in 862, on the invitation of the local Slavic populace. The mille

28.   The poem in question is by Pushkin. The version Dostoevsky quotes is untitled and appears in "Scenes from Knightly Life" (1835), one of Pushkin's "little tragedies." It is Pushkin's revision of a longer version written in 1829.

29.   A misquotation from Pushkin's poem "To ***" (1825); it should read "like a genius of pure beauty."

30.   "A.N.D." is also incorrect, as we shall see further on. The knight wrote "A.M.D." on his shield, which stood for Ave Mater Dei ("Hail Mother of God").

31.  The phrase "there's no need to go breaking chairs," which is proverbial in Russia, comes from The Inspector General (1836), the famous comedy by Nikolai Gogol (1809-52), in which the mayor says of the schoolteacher, "Of course Alexander the Great is a hero, but why go breaking chairs?"

32.   P. V. A

33.  The term "nihilism," first used philosophically in German (Nihilismus) to signify a

younger generation of socialists of the 1860s, who advocated the destruction of the existing social order without specifying what should replace it. The great nineteenth-century Russian lexicographer Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl (1801-72), normally a model of restraint, defines "nihilism" in his Interpretive Dictionary of the Living Russian Language as "an ugly and immoral doctrine which rejects everything that ca

34.   See part two, note 7, and part one, note 38.

35.  The opening words in Latin of Psalm 130: "Out of the depths have I cried unto thee,  Lord," sung in Catholic funeral services; the meaning here is "May they rest in peace."

36.  The quotation is from Act II, scene ii, of Griboedov's Woe from Wit (see part one, note 30).

37.   See part one, note 30. "The Stormcloud" was written in 1815.

38.  The commentator in the Academy of Sciences edition has established that this epigram is a takeoff on "Self-assured Fedya," by M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-89), a satirical epigram on Dostoevsky himself, published in The Whistle, No. 9 (1863).

39.  The quoted phrase is an allusion to Vera Pavlovna's farewell to her mother, in the radical novel What Is to Be Done"? (1863), by N. G. Chernyshevsky (1828-89).

40.   Probably a reference to the famous doctor S. P. Botkin (1832-89), physician to Alexander II and to Dostoevsky himself.

41.   Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-65) was one of the principal French socialist theorists of the nineteenth century, author of the memorable phrase "Property is theft." His libertarian socialism was opposed to Marxism.

42.  The line about Princess Marya Alexeevna is a paraphrase of the final line of Famusov's last monologue, in act IV, scene xv, of Griboedov's Woe from Wit (see part one, note 30).

43.   Ippolit is thinking of Christ.

44.   Cf. Revelation 8:10-11.

45.   Keller is referring to a real man: Louis Bourdaloue (1632-1704), a Jesuit and a famous preacher in the age of Louis XIV, though never an archbishop. In the first case, however, he is actually making a pun on bordeaux wine and the Russian word burda, which

means "swill"; only in the second case does he come to the more appropriate question of "confession."

PART THREE

1. Russian seminary education was open to the lower classes and was often subsidized by state scholarships. Seminarians were thus not necessarily preparing for the priesthood. Many Russian radicals of the 1860s were former seminarians, like Joseph Stalin later. Dostoevsky wrote in a notebook around this time: "These seminarians have introduced a special negation into our literature, too complete, too hostile, too sharp, and therefore too limited."