The Adolescent

representative after the establishment of the Second Republic in 1848. Banished following Napoleon III’s coup d’etat in 1852, his name became news again in 1874, when his election as a deputy of the extreme left caused a considerable stir. The “current Parisian events” were the declaration of the Third Republic, the elections, and the drafting of a new constitution. The Poles, who had been under Russian domination since the partition of Poland in 1772, were often ardent republican sympathizers.

24. An imprecise quotation from the poem “I feel dull and sad . . .” by the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841).

25. The monumental two-part drama by the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1852), based on the much older legend of the philosopher Faust, who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for earthly power. Gretchen is a young girl seduced and abandoned by Faust.

26. The first words (and title) of the great hymn from the missa pro defunctis (requiem mass): Dies irae, dies illa / solvet saeclum in favilla, / teste David cum Sibylla (“Day of wrath, day that will / dissolve the world to burning coals, / as witnessed David and the Sibyl”), a meditation on the Last Judgment attributed to Tommaso da Celano (1190–1260), one of the first disciples and also the first biographer of Saint Francis of Assisi.

27. Alessandro Stradella (1644–1682) was an Italian singer and composer of cantatas, operas, oratorios, and instrumental music.

28. In the Orthodox liturgy, these words are sung by the choir at the end of the Cherubic Hymn, which accompanies the entrance of the priest bearing the bread and wine of the eucharist: “Let us lay aside all earthly cares . . . That we may receive the King of all, who comes invisibly upborne by the angelic hosts. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!” Trishatov recites the scene in the cathedral from the opera Faust, by French composer Charles Gounod (1818–1893), but adds his own uplifting “hosanna” at the end.

29. This famous phrase comes from the book What Is Property? (1840), by the French socialist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865).

30. Alexander Herzen (1812–1870), a radical publicist and an acquaintance of Dostoevsky’s in the 1840s, went into self-imposed exile in 1847. In London, from 1857 to 1869, he published a revolutionary Russian-language weekly called The Bell, and also wrote two important books: From the Other Shore , a series of letters on socialism, and My Past and Thoughts.

31. See Part One, note 21.

32. Dostoevsky first intended this dream for the chapter entitled “At Tikhon’s” in his previous novel, Demons (1871–1872). That chapter was suppressed by his publisher, and the dream was then reincorporated into The Adolescent with modifications. Dostoevsky knew this painting from his own visits to the Dresden Pinakothek. Claude Gellee, called Le Lorrain (1600–1682), was a master of sun and light, and one of the greatest French painters of landscape. The Sicilian shepherd Acis, who was loved by the nymph Galatea, was crushed under a huge rock by the jealous cyclops Polyphemus. The cyclops in the picture makes the age a little less golden than Versilov likes to think.

33. The allusions are to the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) and the burning of the Tuileries (and much of the Louvre) in Paris under the Commune (1871).

34. Petroleurs were incendiaries who used oil or kerosene (petrole) to start fires.

35. The reference is to the poem “Frieden” (“Peace”), from the cycle Die Nordsee (“The North Sea”) in Das Buch der Lieder (“The Book of Songs”), by the German poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), which describes Christ’s return to earth and the regeneration of people under his love. Versilov (or Dostoevsky) changes the North Sea to the Baltic.

36. Versilov is probably referring to the soliloquy that opens Act V, Scene ii of Othello (“It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul”), not Othello’s last speech in lines 338–56 of the same scene (“Soft you! A word or two before you go”). “Evgeny at Tatyana’s feet ” refers to stanza XLI in the eighth and final chapter of Pushkin’s novel in verse Evgeny Onegin. The episode from Les Miserables (Part Two, Book Three) describes the meeting of the little girl Cosette with the escaped convict Jean Valjean.

37. It was customary in Russia to lay a dead person out on a table while waiting for the coffin to be prepared.

38. A panikhida is a memorial service for the dead, which may be held before as well as after the actual burial service.

39. See Part Two, note 25. The Old Believers, in their wish to hold on to all that had characterized the Russian Orthodox Church before the reforms of the patriarch Nikon, managed to preserve some of the finest old Russian icons.

40. See Part Two, note 28. As is often the case with Arkady’s allusions, the story of Abishag has no relation at all to what he is describing here.

41. A vogue for spiritualism, or spiritism, as it was originally called, swept through upper-class Europe, including the courts, in the late 1860s and early 1870s, when mediums and table-rapping seances became socially respectable. Tolstoy also refers mockingly to the vogue for spiritism in Anna Karenina, which was written at the same period as The Adolescent.

42. The von Sohn murder trial caused a stir in Petersburg in 1869– 1870. The elderly von Sohn was murdered in a brothel to the dancing and singing of the prostitutes; he was then put in a trunk and shipped to Moscow as baggage. Dostoevsky refers to the case again in The Brothers Karamazov.

43. An imprecise quotation of a line spoken apropos of Chatsky by the old lady Khlyostova in Woe from Wit (see Part One, notes 38 and 39).

44. Militrisa is the daughter of King Kirbit in The Tale of Prince Bova, a sixteenth- century Russian version of Beuves d’Hanstone, a thirteenth-century French chanson de geste that was widely spread in Europe. Dostoevsky refers to the same tale again in The Brothers Karamazov.

45. In the Orthodox Church, Great Lent is the forty-day period of fast that precedes Holy Week (see Part Two, note 31). Preparation for communion at Easter would include eating lenten meals (no meat, eggs, or dairy products), confessing, and attending the services of Lent and Holy Week.

46. During the Bridegroom services that fall on the first three days of Holy Week, the hymn is sung which gives