Demons

Kraevsky, see note 6 above.

^[17] The points Stepan Trofimovich agrees with are some of those listed in the anarchist program of Mikhail Bakunin (see note 2 above), published in the first issue of his journal The People's Cause (Geneva, 1869). However, Stepan Trofimovich vehemently rejects the utilitarianism of such radical critics as D. I. Pisarev (1840-68), for whom poetry was a prime target, particularly that of Russia's greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837).

^[18] These are actually the first lines of some doggerel Dostoevsky himself wrote in parody of popular themes in contemporary journalism. Vek (The Age) was a Petersburg weekly; Lev Kambek was a second-rate journalist of the time.

^[19] Athenian (or Attic) Nights by the Roman writer Aulus Gellius (second century a.d.) is a collection of dialogues on various branches of knowledge. The title came proverbially to signify 'orgy,' but is used by Stepan Trofimovich in its original sense of a refined evening discussion.

^[20] The Madonna painted for the church of St. Sixtus in Piacenza by Raphael Sanzio (1483- 1520), later acquired by the museum of Dresden. According to the memoirs of his wife, Anna Grigorievna, Dostoevsky placed Raphael above all painters and considered the Sistine Madonna the summit of his art.

^[21] The Russian saying 'where Makar never drove his calves' signifies a remote place. For Stepan Trofimovich and Varvara Petrovna it evidently stood for exile to some far corner of Russia.

^[22] Clergy and wealthier peasants might send their sons to study in seminaries without destining them for a churchly career. Many radical writers of the 1860s were former seminarians, as Joseph Stalin was later. Dostoevsky saw them as a distinct type; in a notebook from that time he wrote: 'These seminarians have introduced a special negation into our literature, too complete, too hostile, too sharp, and therefore too limited.'

^[23] Ironically called 'ancient Roman,' this utterance is actually a parody of the manner of speaking favored among the characters in the novel What Is to Be Done? (1863), by the utilitarian communist writer, and former seminarian, Nikolai G. Cherny-shevsky (1828-89). Dostoevsky parodied this same mannerism in Crime and Punishment through the character of Lebezyatnikov.

^[24] The French national anthem, originally the marching song of the Army of the Rhine in the 1792 war of the young French Republic against Austria. It was composed by a captain from Lons-Ie-Saunier, Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle (1760-1836).

^[25] See note 11 above.

^[26] A paraphrase of an anonymous poem entitled 'Fantasy,' published in the radical almanac North Star in 1861.

^[27] The 'komarinsky' is a Russian dance-song with comical words.

^[28] Elisa Felix (1820-58), whose stage name was Mile. Rachel, contributed to the revival of French classical tragedy in the nineteenth century.

^[29] The perfume 'Bouquet de l'imperatrice' was awarded a gold medal at the World Exposition of 1867 in Paris, and instantly became fashionable. The imperatrice was Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III.

^[30] Title of a novel published in 1847 by Dmitri V. Grigorovich (1822-99), a sentimental depiction of peasant life praised by the critic Belinsky (see note 2 above) for political reasons. Grigorovich was a close friend of Dostoevsky's from their days in the Petersburg Military Engineering Academy.

^[31] Anton Petrov was a peasant from the village of Bezdna ('abyss' in Russian) who was given the task of reading the statutes of the peasant reform of 1861 to the peasants. Up to five thousand people gathered from surrounding villages to hear his explanations of the reform, causing unrest which was severely quashed by the authorities.

^[32] That is, St. Peter's School, a German high school in Petersburg, founded in the eighteenth century.

^[33] Igor Svyatoslavich (1151-1202) was prince of Novgorod-Seversk, a small town near Chernigov, in the period predating the rise of the Muscovite kingdom.

^[34] Stepan Trofimovich means some mythical long-ago.

^[35] See note 6 above. Stepan Trofimovich probably has in mind the novel Lelia (1838), which protests against the constraints put upon women by society and religion and defends freedom of feelings.

^[36] See note 2 above. In a famous letter to Gogol (15 July 1847), Belinsky denounced the 'father of Russian prose' for turning reactionary in his last book (see note 3 above), and took the opportunity to condemn Russian tyranny, landowning, and the Church. It was for reading this letter to the Petrashevsky circle that Dostoevsky was arrested and sentenced to prison in 1849 (see note 7 above). The quotation here, however, is not from the same letter.

^[37] Ivan Andreevich Krylov (1769-1844), poet and fabulist, the Russian La Fontaine (whom he translated), wrote a fable entitled 'The Inquisitive Man' (1814), which tells of a man who goes to a museum and notices all sorts of tiny things, but fails to notice an elephant. The phrase became proverbial.

^[38] Characters from Shakespeare's history plays Henry the Fourth, Parts I and II, and, with the exception of the prince, from The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597-1600).

^[39] Victor Considerant (1808-93) was a devoted follower of Fourier (see Chapter One, note 7) who oversaw the publication of his master's writings and himself produced a three-volume systematization of Fourier's ideas entitled La Destinee sociale ('Social Destiny,' 1834-44), popular among Russian liberals of the 1840s.

^[40] See Chapter One, note 7.

^[41] Otto von Bismarck (1815-98), called 'the Iron Chancellor,' was a Prussian statesman and one of the main architects of German unity; founder of the Triple Alliance (with Austria and Italy) against France.