Demons

the murder, but that Nechaev had needed it in order 'to better weld us together with blood.'

^[145] Half of the Italian saying Se non e vero, e ben trovato ('If it's not true, it's well invented').

^[146] Many details of this 'meeting' at Virginsky's correspond to particulars of the Nechaev circle as they emerged at the trial of the Nechaevists in July-August 1871 (Nechaev himself was eventually arrested abroad and tried in Moscow on 8 January 1873}; for example: the young Miss Virginsky with her bundle of tracts and her concern for the plight of poor students; the silent young artillerist who writes all the time and is meant to be taken for some kind of foreign inspector; the 'knower of the people' and expert in pot-houses (the Nechaevist Pryzhov had written a History of Pot-bouses in 1868, and had become an alcoholic in the course of his researches).

^[147] See Part One, Chapter One, note 2.

^[148] See Exodus 20:1-17. Miss Virginsky misquotes the fifth commandment, which reads: 'Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which the Lord your God gives you.'

^[149] Shigalyov scornfully lumps together three very unlike authors of Utopian systems: the Athenian philosopher Plato (428-347 b.c.), author of the Republic; the French writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), author of On the Social Contract (1762); and Charles Fourier (see Part One, Chapter One, note 7). The aluminum columns come from yet another Utopian vision, the 'Fourth Dream of Vera Pavlovna' in Cherny-shevsky's What Is to Be Done?, where they adorn the crystal palace of the future phalanstery.

^[150] In his Diary of a Writer for January 1876 (chapter three, section 1), Dostoevsky strongly attacks the notion of enlightening one tenth of the people 'while the remaining nine tenths serve only as the material and means to that end, continuing to dwell in darkness.' Similar proportions appear in Raskolnikov's article on crime in Crime and Punishment (1866) and Ivan Fyodorovich's 'poem' about the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov (1880).

^[151] Lyamshin's suggestion may owe something in spirit to the tract 'Principles of Revolution' written by Nechaev in 1869, with its celebration of total destruction.

^[152] Etienne Cabet (1788-1856), French publicist, wrote a well-known Utopian communist novel, Voyage to Icaria (1840). Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-65), French philosopher, was one of the principal socialist theorists of the nineteenth century, advocate of a libertarian socialism opposed to Marxism; to him we owe the phrase 'Property is theft.'

^[153] The word 'Shigalyovism' (sbigalyovshcbina) entered the Russian language; it denotes a form of socio-political demagogy and posturing with a tendency to propose extreme measures and total solutions.

^[154] Pyotr Stepanovich echoes some of the points outlined in Nechaev's article 'The Basic Principles of the Future Social Organization' (1869), which gives the scheme for a kind of 'barracks communism' that Marx, among others, found appalling.

^[155] Emile Littre (1801-81), French lexicographer and positivist philosopher, is erroneously mentioned here; the idea that 'crime is madness,' very popular in Russia in the 1860s, came from the Belgian mathematician and statistician Adolphe Quetelet (1706-1874). Dostoevsky repeatedly opposed attempts to justify crime statistically or by appeals to necessity, heredity, the environment, because they deny human freedom and dignity.

^[156] The period of the Jews' wandering in the desert after Moses led them out of Egypt; proverbially a period of trial and purification.

^[157] Ivan the Tsarevich is a figure in Russian folktales: generally the third and youngest of the tsar's sons, it is he who does the work, endures the tests, and wins throne and princess in the end.

^[158] The theme of the impostor has already emerged once in connection with Stavrogin (see Part Two, Chapter Two, note 6). In fact, possibly owing to the extent of the country and the unfamiliarity of the tsar's person, impostors were not unusual in Russia. There were, for instance, three other 'False Dmitris' around the time of Grishka Otrepev. As recently as 1845, an impostor appeared in the Orenburg region claiming to be the grand duke Konstantin Pavlovich (brother of the emperor Alexander I, who declined the throne in November 1825, stepping aside for his younger brother Nikolai, and who died in 1831). The impostor promised to defend the peasants against oppression by nobles and officials and was greeted with great enthusiasm.

^[159] See Part Two, Chapter One, note 7. The castrates had many legends, among them a messianic tale of a progenitor coming from the East, mounted on 'a white, spiritually reasonable horse,' to unite the tribes of the castrates and 'spread their teaching even to French lands in the West.' In his further mythographying, Pyotr Stepanovich combines two figures from the sect of the flagellants—one who called himself Danila Filippovich God-Sabaoth, the other Ivan Timofeevich Suslov, who proclaimed himself Christ.

^[160] See 1 Kings 3:16-28.

^[161] This well-known sentence from Voltaire's Candide (see Part One, Chapter Three, note 2) is uttered by the hero's teacher, Dr. Pangloss, representative of the optimistic (German) philosophy Voltaire makes fun of in his 'philosophical tale.'

^[162] See Part One, Chapter One, note 2.

^[163] Dostoevsky naturalizes the German word for 'joke' with a Russian plural ending; we follow suit.

^[164] See Part One, Chapter Two, note 5. Stepan Trofimovich repeats himself verbatim, this time with success.

^[165] See Part Two, Chapter One, note 8.

^[166] The landowner Tentetnikov appears in the unfinished second part of Gogol's Dead Souls; he is an enlightened young man, full of good intentions, who gradually falls into mental and moral lethargy and becomes an indolent sluggard. For Radi-shchev, see Part One, Chapter One, note 14.

^[167] That is, wearing the decoration of the Polish civil order of St. Stanislas ('Stani-slav' in Russian). Founded in Poland in 1792, the order began to be awarded in Russia in 1831.

^[168] This feast, described in Daniel 5, became proverbial for its sumptuousness, though it