of Art in 1863. Dostoevsky detested the painting, and here takes advantage of the fact that the artist's name (pronounced almost like the English word 'gay') sounds the same as the first letter - often used as a genteel euphemism - of the Russian word govno, 'shit.' Hence the odd structure of the sentence.
10. Dostoevsky's ideological opponent M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-89) published an article with this title in the liberal monthly The Contemporary (1863, no. 7). Dostoevsky pokes fun at him by taking the title literally. Saltykov-Shchedrin had written an article praising Ge's Last Supper for the same journal (1863, no. 11).
11. The English historian Henry Thomas Buckle (1821-62), in his History of Civilization in England (1807-61), formulated the idea that the development of civilization leads to the cessation of war between nations.
12. The wars of the 'great' Napoleon (1769-1821) are well known. His nephew Napoleon III (1808-73; emperor 1852-70) started the Crimean War against Russia (1854-56), took Cochin China for France (1859-62), intervened in Mexico on the losing side of the emperor Maximilian, and finally declared war on Prussia (1870), which led to his capitulation and removal from power. At the time that Dostoevsky was writing Notes from Underground, the North American union was enduring the test of the Civil War, and Prussia was at war with Denmark over possession of the province of Schleswig-Holstein, which had been under Danish hegemony since 1773.
13. Attila (406?-53), 'the Scourge of God,' king of the Huns, led devastating military campaigns against the Eastern Roman Empire, Persia, and Gaul, before he was defeated near Chalons in 451 and driven back across the Danube. Stepan Timofeevich ('Stenka') Razin (?-1671), a Don Cossack, led a peasant uprising in Russia (1667-71), which made him a popular hero.
14. The metaphor of the piano key may go back to the French materialist philosopher and writer Denis Diderot (1713-84), who wrote in his Conversation Between D'Alembert and Diderot (1769): 'We are instruments endowed with sense and memory. Our senses are piano keys upon which surrounding nature plays, and which often play upon themselves.'
15. The 'crystal palace' is an allusion to 'The Fourth Dream of Vera Pavlovna' from the novel What Is to Be Done? (1863), by N. G. Chernyshevsky (1828-89), one of Dostoevsky's main ideological enemies and the target of much of the satire in Notes from Underground. Chernyshevsky's thought combined the humanitarian socialism of the 1840s with the utilitarianism of the 1860s. This chapter of Notes attacks the theory of 'rational egoism' set forth in Chernyshevsky's The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy (1860); the episodes of the 'bumped officer' and the 'rescued prostitute' in Part Two of Notes are to some extent reversed parodies of episodes from What Is to Be Done? Chernyshevsky's 'crystal palace,' a vision of the ideal living space for the future Utopian communist society, based on the 'phalanstery' defined by the French Utopian socialist Charles Fourier (1772-1837), drew its physical details from the cast-iron and glass pavilion designed by Sir Joseph Paxton for the London Exposition of 1851.
16. Dostoevsky first heard of the bird Kagan, a folkloric bringer of happiness, during his imprisonment in Omsk (1849-53).
17. The Colossus of Rhodes, a 100-foot-high statue of Helios, the sun god, made in 280 B.C., stood in the harbor of the Greek island of Rhodes; it was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. A. E. Anaevsky (1788- 1866), a hackwriter, was the object of much mockery in the press of the 1840S-60S.
18. 'To domestic animals' (French).
19. The 'fig' (referred to in chapter VIII by the narrator's supposed listeners) is a rude gesture made by inserting the thumb between the closed fingers of the fist. The 'fig in the pocket' is a covert form of the same gesture, widely used in Russia, especially by intellectuals during the Soviet period, as an expression of dissent.
20. See Psalm 137:5: 'If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither!' (Revised Standard Version).
21. In his book On Germany, the German poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) wrote: 'The composition of one's own character description would be not only an awkward task but quite simply impossible… However strong his wish to be sincere, no man is capable of telling the truth about himself.' In the same book, Heine insists that Rousseau, in his Confessions, 'makes false avowals, in order to hide his real doings behind them.'
22. In his Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860-1865, Joseph Frank, drawing attention to an 1849 article in which the Russian critic P. V. Annenkov points to 'wet snow' as a common meteorological condition in descriptions of Petersburg by writers of the natural school, suggests that Dostoevsky uses the same 'wet snow' here to evoke both the atmosphere of the period he is going to write about (the late 1840s) and the naive assumptions of its literature, which he himself had shared. part two: apropos of the wet snow
1. Dostoevsky's relations with N. A. Nekrasov (1821-78), poet, liberal social critic, and editor of The Contemporary, were respectful but often strained. The poem quoted here, written in 1845, tells the story of a rescued prostitute.
2. Kostanzhoglo, an exemplary manager and landowner, appears in the unfinished second part of Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol (1809-52). Pyotr Ivanovich Aduyev, from the novel
An Ordinary Story (1847) by Ivan Goncharov (1812-91), is distinguished by his common sense and practicality.
3. Weimar, in the German province of Thuringia, became an important intellectual center in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries owing to the influence of its most famous citizen, the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-183 2). The Schwarzwald, or Black Forest, in southwestern Germany, is a 'romantic' region of hills and woodlands separated from France by the Rhine valley.
4. Poprishchin, hero of Gogol's Diary of a Madman (1835), is a petty clerk who finally goes mad and imagines he is the king of Spain.
5. Lieutenant Pirogov, one of the heroes of Gogol's Nevsky Prospect (1835), after being whipped by an irate German husband, wants to complain against him to the authorities.
6. The expose (Dostoevsky ironically distorts the spelling here) became a common journalistic phenomenon only in the 1860s; thus the narrator was somewhat precocious in his wish to 'expose' his officer. Fatherland Notes, a liberal monthly founded in Petersburg in 1818, published during the sixty-six years of its existence some of the most important writers of the age, including Lermontov, Nekrasov, Ostrovsky, and Dostoevsky himself.
7. The French superfu, meaning 'in excess,' 'unnecessary,' or 'useless,' is here taken to mean 'ultra-refined.' Nozdryov in Gogol's Dead Souls uses the word in the same sense.
8. A covered shopping area in the center of Petersburg, still in existence and still so called.
9. That is, suggestive of the gloomy, proud, world-weary hero of the verse drama Manfred (1817) by George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824).
