Demons

ended unhappily for Belshazzar.

^[169] See Part Two, Chapter Two, note 4. Gogol's words have migrated from Lebyad-kin to Karmazinov.

^[170] Karmazinov's Merci is a parody of several pieces by Turgenev,- its beginning and end are suggestive of Turgenev's article 'Apropos of Fathers and Sons' in its address to the reader; its composition calls to mind Turgenev's novella Phantoms, which he himself described as 'a series of rather loosely connected pictures'; the crossing of the Volga in winter and the visit to the hermit's cave have correspondences in Enough, one of Turgenev's farewells to his public.

^[171] Pompey (Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus, 106-48 b.c.), Roman general, lost his dispute with Julius Caesar for absolute power in Rome at the battle of Pharsalia. Gaius Cassius Longinus (d. 42 b.c.), one of the leaders of the conspiracy to assassinate Caesar, was defeated by Mark Antony and Octavius Caesar at Philippi.

^[172] Christoph Willibald Gluck (1714-87), German composer, long resident in France, is best known for his opera Orphee (1774).

^[173] E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776-1822), German musician and writer, was the author of fantastic tales. Frederic Chopin (1810-49), Polish pianist and composer, produced works of a personal, penetrating, and often melancholic character. Ancus Marcius (seventh century b.c.), grandson of Numa Pompilius, was the fourth of the legendary kings of Rome.

^[174] See Matthew 11:28, where the words have quite a different meaning.

^[175] For Byron, see Part Two, Chapter One, note 3; for Pechorin, see Part One, Chapter Three, note 6. Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), German poet, wrote poems of a lively and often biting humor.

^[176] Stepan Trofimovich reformulates the aesthetic controversy over boots and Pushkin (see Part One, Chapter One, note 17), intensifying his opposition to the nihilists. In the journal The Russian Word (1864, No. 3), the nihilist critic B. A. Zaitsev wrote: '... there is no floor-sweeper, no toilet- cleaner, who is not infinitely more useful than Shakespeare.'

^[177] Stepan Trofimovich, though no frequenter of the Gospels, resorts to evangelic language here (see Matthew 10:14, Mark 6:11).

^[178] During the reign of Nicholas I (emperor from 1825 to 1855), a number of writers, quite distinguished ones among them (Aksakov, Vyazemsky, Tyutchev, Goncharov), served for periods as government censors, winning disapproval from many of their contemporaries. In 1835 the emperor, who loved drilling and parades, introduced military order in Moscow University, requiring students to wear uniforms and swords (the latter soon abolished). A more liberal university code was introduced by Alexander II in 1863.

^[179] The speaker refers to the cathedral of St. Sophia in Novgorod. In 1862 a monument by the sculptor M. O. Mikeshin (1836-96) was set up near the cathedral to commemorate the thousandth anniversary of Russia.

^[180] The general is mistaken; in Genesis 18:22-33, Abraham bargains with God for the lives of the righteous men of Sodom, and God finally agrees to spare the city if ten righteous men can be found in it.

^[181] Russian commentators suggest that this 'quadrille of literature' is a parody of a 'literary quadrille' organized by Moscow artistic circles for the costume ball in the halls of the Assembly of Nobility in February 1869.

^[182] See Part One, Chapter Three, note 9.

^[183] 'Uncensored' can have two meanings here: the words to the 'komarinsky' contained unprintable expressions, but several satirical and revolutionary versions of it also appeared in the 1860s.

^[184] Titular councillor was ninth of the fourteen ranks in the imperial civil service, a humble position immortalized by Gogol in the character of Akaky Akakievich, hero of 'The Overcoat' (1842).

^[185] Stavrogin quotes a proverbial line from the play Woe from Wit (1824) by Alexander Griboedov (1795-1829).

^[186] 'The voice of the people [is] the voice of God' (Latin), a saying ultimately drawn from Works and Days by the Boeotian farmer-poet Hesiod (eighth century b.c.).

^[187] A novella by A. V. Druzhinin (1824-64), published in 1847, written under the influence of George Sand and pervaded by the ideas of women's emancipation.

^[188] Voznesensky means 'of the Ascension,' Bogoyavlensky means 'of the Epiphany.' The nihilist Marya Shatov ideologically scorns such 'Orthodox' street names, which in fact were quite common in Russia.

^[189] After the publication of Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done? in 1863, many young radicals attempted to set up co-operative enterprises on socialist principles, following the example of Vera Pavlovna, the novel's heroine. The famous revolutionary Vera Zasulich, a member of Nechaev's circle, who attempted to assassinate the military governor of Petersburg on 24 January 1878, worked briefly with her sisters in a sewing co-operative and also made a try at bookbinding.

^[190] On 2 June 1793, the government of France was handed over to the dictatorship of the Committee of Public Safety, headed by Maximilien de Robespierre (1758-94), and the Reign of Terror began.

^[191] According to his wife's memoirs, Dostoevsky's sensations in the moments preceding an epileptic attack were much like those Kirillov describes here.

^[192] See Genesis 1, where God finds His creation 'good' and even 'very good,' but never calls it 'true.'

^[193] An inexact reference to Matthew 22:30, Mark 12:25, where it is said, 'they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like angels in heaven.'

^[194] According to Muslim tradition, Muhammad 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 heaven where he spoke with angels, prophets, and Allah, visited the fiery Gehenna, and came back in time to keep the jug from spilling.