Demons

Caucasus.

^[66] A misquotation of a line from a poem by N. Kukolnik (see Chapter One, note 12 above), famous as a song with music by M. I. Glinka (1804-57). It should read, 'Sleep, hopeless heart!'

^[67] The age of the universe used to be calculated according to biblical chronology. By the Hebrew calendar, creation was 5,631 years old as Lebyadkin was speaking; by the chronology of Bishop James Ussher of Dublin (1581—1656), it was 5,875 years old. Lebyadkin gives a rounded-off figure.

^[68] The Prince de Monbars, or Monbars l'Exterminateur (b. 1646), was a chief of the ftibustres (French for 'filibusters'). He terrorized shipping in the West Indies and in 1683 managed to capture Veracruz. Hero of several popular dramas and novels.

^[69] See Chapter One, note 37 above. The monument, a statue of Krylov surrounded by animals from his fables, was set up on the children's playground in the Petersburg Summer Garden in 1855, and is still there. It is known affectionately as 'Grandpa Krylov.'

^[70] Denis Vasilievich Davydov (1784-1839), himself a hussar and a hero of the Napoleonic war of 1812, wrote energetic, humorous poems which have remained very popular.

^[71] See Chapter Two, note 1 above.

^[72] The 'Merchant's Yard' in old Russian, a huge shopping arcade in Petersburg, still so called.

^[73] According to the biblical account (Genesis 19:1-28), God destroyed Sodom because the men of the city practiced 'sodomy,' but in Russian use 'Sodom' means a more generally disordered and outrageous kind of life. Owners of apartments used to rent out not only individual rooms but sectioned-off parts of rooms, or 'corners,' which inevitably led to a certain communality among the tenants.

^[74] The sudden death of the emperor Alexander I on 19 November 1825 was followed by a period of confusion about the succession. A conspiratorial group of officers and noblemen, opposed to imperial absolutism and favoring a constitutional monarchy or even a republican government, seized the occasion and gathered their forces in the Senate Square of Petersburg on 14 December 1825. Hence the name 'Decembrists.' The uprising was promptly quelled by loyal contingents of the Imperial Guard; one hundred twenty-one men were arrested, of whom five were executed and the rest exiled to Siberia. M. S. Lunin (1787-1845), one of the exiled Decembrists, was indeed famous for his fearlessness.

^[75] See Chapter Three, note 6. Lermontov had a venomous tongue and a cold, scornful view of life and men; he fought a number of duels and was eventually killed in one.

^[76] The zemstvo was an elective provincial council with powers of local government.

^[77] See Part One, Chapter Four, note 1.

^[78] The English poet George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), was himself a romantic figure, at least in the minds of his contemporaries—a citizen of the world, a lady-killer, a lover of freedom. Nozdryov, one of the landowners in Gogol's Dead Souls, became proverbial as the type of the feisty, interfering, obnoxious braggart, the carousing gambler, the purposeless liar and babbler. For Bazarov, see Part One, Chapter Four, note 1.

^[79] See Part One, Chapter One, note 20.

^[80] Dostoevsky himself coined the term 'omni-man' (obshcbecbelovek); it appears, in the plural, at the very end of Notes from Underground (1864).

^[81] Russian borrowed the word kipsek ('keepsake') from English; it was the trade name of a literary annual, finely bound and illustrated, intended for gift-giving.

^[82] The sect of the castrates (skoptsi), a reform of the older sect of the flagellants, 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' (sessions) of the flagellants, he introduced the practice of self-castration. The sect was forbidden by law.

^[83] That is, the International Workingmen's Association, or First Internationale, founded in Geneva by Karl Marx, Bakunin, and others, in 1864.

^[84] Charmeur was a well-known Petersburg tailor. According to his wife's memoirs, Dostoevsky had his own suits made by Charmeur, whom he also advertised in Crime and Punishment.

^[85] Landowners had to supply a quota of recruits for the army from among their serfs, the selection being left to the landowner. Serfs had many ways of evading this hated duty, of which one of the simplest was to buy their way out. Household serfs were exempted from army service, but their masters could send them to fill such gaps in the quota. That is what Stepan Trofimovich did with Fedka.

^[86] Pushkin deliberately used extremely injurious language in his letter of 26 January 1837 to the Dutch diplomat Baron van Heeckeren, provoking the baron's adopted son Georges d'Anthes to a duel. (Baron van Heeckeren, surnamed Jakob Derk Burckardt Anna in family records, is called Louis by most scholars.)

^[87] See Revelation 10:6 (King James Version).

^[88] The 'God-man' is Christ, 'truly God and truly man,' in the definition of the council of Chalcedon (451 a.d.). Notions of anthropotheism, or 'man-godhood,' arrived at in discussions within the Petrashevsky circle (see Part One, Chapter One, note 7) were drawn ultimately from German idealist philosophy, representing an inversion of Christianity which Kirillov carries to its final conclusion.

^[89] Russian casement windows normally have one pane, or part of a pane, that can be opened for ventilation when the window is sealed shut for the winter.

^[90] The idea of Russia as a 'god-bearing' nation can be traced to the thought of the Slavophil Nikolai Yakovlevich Danilevsky (1822-95), an idiosyncratic interpretation of the philosophy of history of the German idealists Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) and Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854). Danilevsky's treatise in the philosophy of history, Russia and Europe, was published in 1871.

^[91] Dostoevsky lends Shatov some of his own ideas about Roman Catholicism. The announcement at the first Vatican council (1870) of the new dogma of papal infallibility deeply shocked him; he saw it as the proclaiming of a 'new Christ' who represents earthly power and has thus succumbed to the third