10. In 1805, Napoleon defeated a joint Austrian-Russian army at Austerlitz in Moravia. However, in Voyage to Icaria (1840), a Utopian communist novel by the French publicist Etienne Cabet (1788-1856), a philanthropic reformer also defeats a coalition of retrograde kings at Austerlitz.
11. The narrator's further imaginings also have Napoleonic touches: Pope Pius VII excommunicated Napoleon in 1809, after which the emperor held him virtually captive until 1814; the Villa Borghese, built by Scipione Borghese in 1615 as a summer house on the outskirts of Rome, belonged in 1806 to Camillo Borghese, who married Napoleon's sister Paulina. Lake Como is normally situated in the Italian Alps, near the Swiss border.
12. An intersection in Petersburg, still so called, where four streets come together to form five corners.
13. Before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, Russian estates were evaluated in terms of the number of 'souls' (adult male serfs) living on them.
14. 'Right as a lord' (French), referring to the right of the feudal lord, when one of his serfs married, to spend the first night with the bride.
15. Silvio, hero of 'The Shot' (1830), a short story by the poet Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), devotes his life to the idea of revenge and finally triumphs over his adversary. A similar role is played by the character Incognito in Masquerade, a drama by Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41).
16. In his enthusiasm, the narrator begins to speak in the words of the biblical Creator: 'Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, after our likeness'' (Genesis 1:26).
17. In the 1840s, the French novelist George Sand (1804-76) was particularly admired in Russia for her social and humanitarian concerns.
18. The last lines of the Nekrasov poem quoted as epigraph to Part Two.
19. 'Furnished rooms' (French), which, while making a servant unnecessary, would expose the narrator to the presence of other lodgers.
Table of Contents
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND CONTENTS
NOTES FROM UNDERGROUND
INTRODUCTION
LEV SHESTOV
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
CHRONOLOGY
1821
1823-31
1825 1830
1831
1833-7
1834
1835
1836
1837
1839
1840
1841
1842
1843). 1844
1845
1846
1847
1848
1849
1850
1851 1852
1853-6 1854
1855 1856
1857
1859
1860
