The Double

22

The Northern Bee was a reactionary newspaper edited by Faddey Bulgarin (1789– 1859) and Nikolai Grech (1787–1867). Bulgarin was also a bad novelist and a police spy who specialized in denouncing literary figures, Pushkin among them.

23

The pen name of O. I. Senkovsky (1800–58), critic and writer, publisher of the collection “Library for Reading.”

24

Grigory (“Grishka”) Otrepyev, known as “the False Dmitri,” was a defrocked monk who claimed the Russian throne by pretending to be the lawful heir, the prince Dmitri, who had been murdered in childhood. He reigned for less than a year.

25

The words about the serpent are a distorted quotation from the opening monologue of the little tragedy Mozart and Salieri, by Alexander Pushkin: “Who will say the proud Salieri was ever…/A crushed serpent, still alive, / Impotently biting the sand and dust…”

26

In Petersburg, owing to its northern latitude, the sun sets in mid-afternoon during the winter.

27

The Adventures of Faublas, a novel by the French writer and Girondist Louvet de Couvrai (1760–97), was translated into Russian in 1792–6.

28

A reference to Pushkin’s comic poem Count Nulin, in which the heroine is said to have been “brought up / Not in the customs of our forefathers, / But in a noble girls’ boarding school / By some emigree Falbala.”

29

The name Basavriuk (Dostoevsky added the second “s”) belongs to the satanic villain in Gogol’s first published story, “St. John’s Eve.”

30

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), one of the most influential writers of the French Enlightenment, favored natural settings and emotions.