Crime and Punishment

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  20. the pas de chale: According to R. M. Kirsanova, a historian of dress, the 'dance with the shawl became popular in Russian schools for young ladies at the beginning of the nineteenth century, coinciding with the fashion for Persian shawls; its popularity, as a demonstration of grace and elegance, continued for some time thereafter' (BT).

  21. Cyrus the Great: King of Persia in the sixth century BC. Cyrus's conquests included the Median, Lydian and Neo-Babylonian empires.

  22. Lewes's Physiology: George Henry Lewes's Physiology of Common Life (1859) appeared in Russian translation in 1861—2 and rapidly gained popularity among young readers of a materialist bent and young female nihilists in particular (PSS). This reference was found provocative by one nigilistka, who saw in it an attempt on the author's part to blame 'liberal ideas and the natural sciences' for Sonya's descent into prostitution. Dostoyevsky had Lewes's book in his library in the early 1860s and later bought a second copy after he lost the first (BT).

  23. drap de dames: 'A very fine type of fabric, which is only half-milled', according to the Bibliotheque universelle des sciences, belles-lettres et arts (Volume 11, 1826, p. 30).

  24. as wax melteth: A compliment that becomes decidedly equivocal when set against its biblical origin (Psalm 68:2): 'As smoke is driven away, so drive them away: as wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God' (BT).

  25. 'Little Farm': Based on a poem (1839) by Alexei Koltsov (1809-42), this song became especially popular in the 1860s (SB). Performed here by a child, the poem treats, in a seemingly naive way, the bawdy theme of a young widow being visited by three admirers: a fisherman, a merchant and a dashing young gallant, who, it seems, burns down the farm in a fit of jealousy.

  26. like a thief in the night: Another double-edged biblical allusion: 'But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up' (2 Peter 3:10).

  27. immaculate: Prostitutes on the 'yellow ticket' had to present themselves for weekly medical check-ups (BT).

  28. Thy kingdom come: This invocation of the Lord's Prayer follows echoes of starkly contrasting biblical passages, notably Jesus' comments about a fallen woman saved by her faith ('Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much', Luke 7:47) and Revelation 14:9-10: 'And the third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice, If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand, The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb'. The latter quotation suggests some of the rich symbolism of alcohol in this chapter.

  29. papirosi: The humble papirosa (plural, papirosi) appears in the OED as, accurately enough, 'A type of Russian unfiltered cigarette consisting of a tube of paper or cardboard, a short section at one end of which is filled with tobacco.' I have kept the word throughout this translation.

  30. monomaniacs: Monomania, writes J. L. Rice, was seen at the time as 'a fluctuating disorder, equivalent to manic psychosis in the present terminology' (Dostoevsky and the Healing Art, p. 116). It was of great interest to the French school of psychiatry with whose ideas Dostoyevsky would have been familiar. 'Esquirol wrote that in monomania the ill person might suffer from loss of will, perhaps only briefly, perhaps under the intermittent influence of hallucinatory voices. Persons thus afflicted became "the homo duplex of Saint Paul and Buffon: impelled to evil by one motive and restrained by another"' (ibid., pp. 115-16). Jacques-Joseph Moreau (1804-84), a student of Jean-Etienne Dominique Esquirol (1772-1840), 'saw the monomaniac as the most salient modern type [...] because in monomania the individual retains consciousness of the mental disorder' (ibid., p. 157).

  31. R---- province: The province of Ryazan, located about one hundred miles south-east of Moscow. M. S. Altman argued that this must be Ryazan Province, 'not only because there was no other province in Russia at the time beginning with R, but also because Dostoyevsky had particular grounds for linking Raskolnikov's original place of residence with a province teeming with raskolniki [religious dissenters; see List of Characters]' (SB). The relevance of this connection will grow in the course of the novel.

  32. unable to support yourself: University students were expected to pay fees of fifty roubles a year (BT).

  33. smearing . . . with tar: According to the ethnographer Pavel Melnikov (1818-83; pen name Andrei Pechersky), 'this was considered the greatest insult for the whole family and for the girl in particular. A girl whose gates had been tarred would never be taken in marriage' (BT).

  34. convictions of our newest generations: A reference to the 'nihilists' of the time who denied the soul, God and traditional values, hence the contrast with Luzhin's 'positive' features. The sentence might suggest an endemic paradox: 'nihilism' could also be referred to as 'positivism', on account of its allegedly scientific method and principles. In a letter to his publisher Katkov of April 1866 (during work on this novel, and in the wake of the repressions following Dmitry Karakozov's failed attempt to assassinate the Tsar), Dostoyevsky wrote: 'if they, the Nihilists, were given freedom of speech . . . they would make all Russia laugh by the positive explanation of their teachings. While now they are given the appearance of sphinxes'; see the discussion in Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 464-7.

  35. private attorney: An entirely new profession in Russia, made possible by the legal reforms of 1864. It is characteristic of Luzhin, a man on the make with modest education, to want to take advantage of this opportunity without delay.

  36. the Senate: The Governing Senate in St Petersburg was Imperial Russia's highest judicial body, supervising the activity of all legal institutions and serving as the highest court of appeal (SB).

  37. the Feast of Our Lady: The popular term for the Feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God (15 August), preceded in the Orthodox calendar by two weeks of fasting.

  38. V---- Prospect: Voznesensky Prospect.

  39. Avdotya Romanovna: A strikingly formal use of his sister Dunya's full first name and patronymic. See Note on Names.

  40. beautiful souls steeped in Schiller: Schillerian idealism is a constant butt of irony in Dostoyevsky's fiction, yet the German Romantic Johann Schiller (1759-1805) was a writer of the first importance to him. Aged ten, Dostoyevsky was overwhelmed by a performance in Moscow of Die Rauber (The Robbers, 1781), a play that would loom large fifty years later in his last novel The Brothers Karamazov (1879-80). In his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795) Schiller claimed that 'it is through beauty that we arrive at freedom' (KL).

  41. St Anna in his buttonhole: A decoration given for service to the state in military or civil employment. The Order of St Anna, First Class, was worn on a ribbon over the shoulder; Second Class on the neck (hence the title of Chekhov's short story 'Anna Around the Neck'); Third Class, as in this case, on a small ribbon on the chest. It was a fairly modest decoration, in keeping with Luzhin's rank as 'court counsellor' (seventh in the Table of Ranks).

  42. Schleswig-Holstein: Disputed by Prussia, Denmark and Austria, these duchies were much in the news at the time of the novel's composition, before being eventually annexed by Prussia following the Austro-Prussian War (1866).

  43. Negroes . . . Latvians: American Negroes and Latvian peasants were widely discussed in Russia in the late 1850s and early 1860s, and in both cases analogies were drawn with Russian serfs. In 1862 the Dostoyevsky brothers published, as an appendix to their journal Time, a translation of Richard Hildreth's anti-slavery novel The White Slave; or, Memoirs of a Fugitive (1852); also that year an article due to appear in the same journal was censored for expressing the thought 'that the plight of free Baltic peasants is even worse, a
nd even less tolerable, than the life of our own [Russian] serfs' (PSS).

  44. lessons from the Jesuits: Referring to the allegedly relativistic morality of the Roman Catholic order of the Society of Jesus (associated with the maxim that 'the end justifies the means'), this continues the theme of moral adaptation to circumstance that so preoccupies Raskolnikov (see also Part Five, note 2). Dostoyevsky's own anti-Catholicism was by now well known, especially following the Polish uprising of 1863-4.

  45. K---- Boulevard: Konnogvardeisky (Horse Guard) Boulevard.

  46. Svidrigailov: As well as being the name of the employers of Raskolnikov's sister (see Part One, Chapter III), Svidrigailov was a surname familiar to Russian readers of the 1860s from the journal The Spark, where the 'Svidrigailov' type was satirically presented as a provincial 'man of obscure origin with a filthy past and a repulsive personality that is sickening to any fresh, honest gaze and worms its way into your soul' (BT). In addition, according to Richard Peace, 'Svidrigaylov evokes Svidrigaylo, a Lithuanian prince who was active during the fifteenth century - so fateful for the Orthodox world. He may be taken as the barbarian par excellence, the perpetrator of cynical sacrilege for the goal of self-interest'; see Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment: A Casebook, ed. Richard Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 86, 100. Dostoyevsky's own family was descended from Lithuanian nobility (on his father's side).

  47. Percentage: A reference to the excitement caused in Russian intellectual life by the publication in 1865 of a translation of Sur l'homme et le developpement de ses facultes (1835) by the Belgian 'father of statistics' Adolphe Quetelet (1796-1874), and to the success of his German popularizer Adolph Wagner (1835-1917), who thought that the quantity and distribution of crimes, suicides, marriages and divorces in society could be scientifically predicted with very high precision (PSS). It is also worth noting the Russian word for moneylender occasionally used for Alyona Ivanovna: protsentshchitsa (literally, 'percentage woman').

  48. the Islands: The green 'Islands', still famous as a place for relaxation and walks, are a small archipelago in the northern part of the Neva delta, reached from the south by crossing Tuchkov Bridge and Petrovsky Island.

  49. kutya . . . a cross: Brought to churches and graveyards on commemorative occasions. Boris Tikhomirov notes Raskolnikov's 'astonishing [...] childhood memory of the "sweetness of the cross"' (BT).

  50. horned headdress: The kichka was a traditional form of headdress worn by married Russian women on religious holidays (SB). It often had a horn-like point on either side.

  51. clinging to every object they pass: The first close echo of passages from a novel of great importance to Dostoyevsky (and translated by his brother at his initiative in 1860): Le Dernier Jour d'un condamne (The Last Day of a Condemned Man, 1829) by Victor Hugo (1802-85). Of relevance to Dostoyevsky's own experience in December 1849, as he prepared to face his imminent execution, the plight of Hugo's narrator is given paradoxical significance for Raskolnikov, who appears not to distinguish between his crime and his punishment (PSS, BT). Had Dostoyevsky persevered with his first drafts and published Crime and Punishment as a first-person narrative, the echoes of the notes of Hugo's 'condemned man' would have been even more striking.

  52. examining magistrate: A new career possibility in Russia, following the legal reforms of 1864; modelled on the French juge d'instruction.

  PART TWO

  1. bureau: Each of St Petersburg's administrative units had one main 'police station' (chast') and several smaller bureaus or offices (kontory).

  2. Laviza Ivanovna: The lieutenant evidently finds the German lady's first name, Luiza, unbearably pretentious, given her profession and status, and rechristens her with a name that sounds both mocking and 'common' to the Russian ear. It will be repeated by other characters.

  3. Catherine Canal . . . Ditch: One and the same waterway: see Part One, note 6.

  4. tomes on natural science: In Russia the 1860s witnessed a publishing boom in the natural sciences, with many foreign books in the field translated for the first time and typically put out by publishers linked to the socialists and 'nihilists' with whom Dostoyevsky so often polemicized.

  5. is a woman a human being: The craze for the natural sciences in the 1860s was related to the prominence of the 'Woman Question' (female emancipation, the relative status of women compared to men, the biology of women) as a bone of contention between the radical and conservative camps. Razumikhin's reference here is to G. Z. Yeliseyev's feuilleton 'Diverse Opinions: Are Women Human? Opinions Ancient and Modern', published in The Contemporary in 1861 (PSS, BT).

  6. the Radishchev of Geneva: Alexander Radishchev (1749-1802), author of A Journey from St Petersburg to Moscow, critic of serfdom and autocracy and celebrated Siberian exile, was more 'the Rousseau of Russia' than Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78), Radishchev's elder, was 'the Radishchev of Geneva', but the context of this inaccurate formulation is strictly commercial: an attempt to pitch a new title to the bookseller Cherubimov. Rousseau had been praised by Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828-89), Dostoyevsky's favourite intellectual target among the socialists, as a 'revolutionary democrat' in an article of 1860, and Rousseau's Confessions (1781-8) were republished in Russian translation in 1865, when Dostoyevsky began writing this novel (BT, PSS).

  7. the First Line: Parallel streets ('Lines') are a topographic feature of Vasilyevsky Island, where Razumikhin lives (and where the university is still located today). The Lines stretch from the south to the north of the Island, crossing the three main avenues going east to west.

  8. Palace . . . cathedral's dome . . . chapel: The sites mentioned in this passage are readily identifiable as the Winter Palace (home to the tsars and now to the Hermitage Museum), St Isaac's Cathedral off Nevsky Prospect, and a chapel named after Nicholas the Wonderworker on Nikolayevsky Bridge, which was St Petersburg's first permanent, cast-iron bridge over the Neva. The marble chapel was demolished in 1930 and the bridge rebuilt in 1936—8 (BT, SB).

  9. dumb, deaf spirit: An allusion to an episode in Mark's Gospel. A father brings a possessed child to Jesus: 'And they brought him unto him: and when he saw him, straightway the spirit tare him; and he fell on the ground, and wallowed foaming. [...] When Jesus saw that the people came running together, he rebuked the foul spirit, saying unto him, Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him, and enter no more into him. And the spirit cried, and rent him sore, and came out of him: and he was as one dead; insomuch that many said, He is dead. But Jesus took him by the hand, and lifted him up; and he arose.' (Mark 9:20, 25-7). The phrase 'dumb and deaf spirit' is marked in quotation marks in an early draft of the novel (BT).

  10. your blood yelling inside you: A possible allusion to God's words to Cain: 'What hast thou done? the voice of thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground' (Genesis 4: 10). According to M. S. Altman, 'Artless Nastasya uses the word "blood" in the popular understanding of "illness, fever" [...] but once again speech proves wiser than the speaker, and for Raskolnikov the words of this simple woman [...] are the accusatory voice of the common people' (BT).

  11. Vrazumikhin: Razumikhin's name - roughly, Mr Reasonable (razum: reason, intellect) - would have been a characteristic example of the often ironic names invented by teachers at religious seminaries in mid-nineteenth-century Russia and inspired by the qualities of their pupils (BT). The addition of the prefix 'v', however, makes him sound, to a Russian ear, like a man desperate to make others see reason, by whatever means necessary. See also Note on Names.

  12. through the sugar lump: The sugar lump was held in the teeth, thus saving sugar.

  13. a stream of electricity: A Russian dictionary of foreign words published in 1865 described electricity as a 'weightless liquid, found in every organism on earth' (BT).

  14. avenante-ish: Avenante (French) means 'comely'.

  15. the countess: Almost certainly an allusion to the greatest short story by Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), 'The Queen of Spades' (1834), descr
ibed by Dostoyevsky as 'the epitome of the art of the fantastic'. Pushkin's protagonist, Hermann, is determined to learn the three-card formula known only to the old countess Anna Fedotovna, who dies when he confronts her. Parallels and contrasts between Hermann and Raskolnikov are a staple of scholarly literature on Crime and Punishment.

  16. Palmerston: Typically used to refer to long, close-fitting men's coats, so named in honour of the English prime minister (1855-65). Various reasons have been given for Razumikhin's characteristically idiosyncratic usage of the term, one of the more convincing being that of Sergei Belov: 'In the early 1860s these coats started going out of fashion, which may be why Razumikhin calls Raskolnikov's decrepit hat a "Palmerston"' (SB).

  17. Charmeur's: E. F. Charmeur was one of the best and most expensive tailors in St Petersburg; Dostoyevsky himself, according to his second wife, Anna Grigoryevna, used to order suits from him (BT).

  18. studied law: The Russian word used here (pravoved) indicates that Porfiry studied at the highly prestigious Imperial College of Jurisprudence in St Petersburg, an institution founded in 1835 and open only to sons of the nobility. The course lasted six years. To judge by the reactions of early critics, such an education was unusual for a police investigator like Porfiry, adding to the complexity of his characterization (BT).