The Adolescent

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  20. The Crimean War (1854–1856) was fought by Russia against an alliance of Turkey, England, France, and the Piedmont.

  21. Arbiter of the peace was one of the government posts established in Russia after the emancipation of the serfs by the “tsarliberator” Alexander II in 1861. Arbiters of the peace were elected by the nobility from among local landowners and were mainly responsible for questions of land division between peasants and landowners. The function, taken earnestly at first, later became subject to abuses and was finally abolished in 1874.

  22. Harpagon and Plyushkin are both famous misers, the former from the comedy L’Avare (“The Miser”) by Molière (1622–1673), the latter from the novel Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852).

  23. Historically, Russia had two capitals: Moscow, dating back to the thirteenth century, and St. Petersburg, founded by Peter the Great in 1703. Dostoevsky later refers to the period following 1703 as “the Petersburg period of Russian history.”

  24. Names of well-known Russian tycoons of the period following the abolition of serfdom in 1861, when mining, industry, railroads, and banking developed at a great pace. Polyakov and Gubonin were mainly builders of railroads.

  25. John Law (1671–1729), a Scottish financier, became comptroller general of French finances, created the French Indies Company, and in 1719, having offered the plan unsuccessfully to Scotland, England, and Savoy, managed to persuade the Regency government to create a Banque Générale of France, based on the selling of shares and the issuing of paper money. Extremely popular and successful at first, the system soon led to runaway inflation and ended in a catastrophic bankruptcy. Law was forced to flee France, and died in poverty in Venice.

  26. Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838), prince of Bénévent, bishop of Autun, an ambitious, intelligent, and extremely witty man, was one of the most skillful French diplomats and politicians of his time, during which he served under the king, the constitutional assembly, the Directoire, the consulate, the empire, and finally the restoration of the Bourbons. Alexis Piron (1689–1773) was a poet, known mainly for his satires and often licentious songs. Denied admission to the French Academy, he wrote his own epitaph, which is also his most famous piece of verse: Ci-gît Piron, qui ne fut rien, / Pas mê;me académicien (“Here lies Piron, who was nothing, / Not even an academician”).

  27. These lines come from the central monologue of the Baron in The Covetous Knight, one of the “little tragedies” by the poet Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837). Arkady Makarovich’s “Rothschild idea” has been strongly influenced by the Baron’s own “idea”—that the awareness of the power money brings is superior to the need to exercise it.

  28. God commanded the ravens to feed the prophet Elijah when he went into hiding in the wilderness after denouncing the wicked King Ahab for abandoning the God of Israel (I Kings 17:4–6).

  29. The Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), the “Iron Chancellor,” was one of the main architects of German unification. In 1871, after defeating France, he proclaimed the German Empire, of which he became the first chancellor in that same year. The early period of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against the Catholics and social democrats coincided with the writing of The Adolescent, and Dostoevsky kept a close eye on the successes of this man who was famous for having said, “The questions of the time will be decided not by speeches and resolutions of the majority, but by blood and iron.”

  30. See note 16 above. Rousseau’s Confessions were published posthumously in 1782 and 1789. Arkady Makarovich makes explicit what Rousseau describes more circumspectly at the beginning of Book III: “I sought out dark alleys, hidden redoubts, where I could expose myself from afar to persons of the fair sex in the state in which I should have liked to be able to be up close to them.”

  31. This painting of the Mother of God by Raphael Sanzio (1483– 1520), usually known as the Sistine Madonna because it was painted for the church of St. Sixtus in Piacenza, belongs to the collection of the Dresden Pinakothek. For Dostoevsky, who had seen the painting a number of times during his visits to Dresden, it represented the ideal of pure beauty. In the last years of his life, he himself had a large engraving of it hanging in his study in Petersburg.

  32. Arkady Makarovich probably means the famous doors of the Florentine Baptistry, the work of Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455), which Michelangelo, in admiration, called “the doors of paradise.” Dostoevsky’s wife, Anna Grigorievna, recalls in her memoirs that her husband, during their stay in Florence (1868–1869), often made a special detour to look at these doors, before which he would stand in ecstasy.

  33. Versilov is probably referring to the ideas of Rousseau (who was born in Geneva) and his followers, including the early utopian socialists. In Part Two of the novel, he will explain to Arkady that by “Geneva ideas” he means “virtue without Christ . . . today’s ideas . . . the idea of the whole of today’s civilization” (in the notebooks for the novel, Dostovsky has him say more specifically “the French ideas of today”).

  34. Eliseevs’ was and still is a fine delicatessen and wine shop on Nevsky Prospect in Petersburg. Ballet’s was a confectioner’s shop, also on Nevsky Prospect, still mentioned in Baedecker’s guide for 1897.

  35. This is the first line of a folk song made popular by the singer and amateur of folk music M. V. Zubova (d. 1779). There is mention of the lady and the song in a book titled Modern Russian Women, by P. D. Mordovtsev, published in 1874, when Dostoevsky was working on the novel.

  36. The allusion is to the famous reply of Voltaire (1694–1778), when he was asked which literary genre was the best: “Tous les genres sont bons hors le genre ennuyeux” (“All genres are good, except the boring genre”).

  37. The poet Ivan Krylov (1769–1844), Russia’s greatest fabulist, is often referred to as the Russian La Fontaine (many of whose fables he translated or adapted into Russian). Arkady will quote from his fable “The Fussy Bride” a little further on.

  38. Woe from Wit, a comedy by the Russian poet and diplomat Alexander Griboedov (1795–1829), is the first masterpiece of the Russian theater; many lines from the play became proverbial in Russia and have remained so.

  39. Chatsky is the disillusioned protagonist of Woe from Wit, and the first in the series of “superfluous men” in nineteenth-century Russian literature. He is often likened to Alceste, the hero of Molière’s Misanthrope. Zhileiko was a well-known actor of the time, who played in the private theaters of the nobility as well as on the public stage.

  40. The linked short stories of A Hunter’s Sketches, by Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883), were published in one volume in 1852.

  41. As the son of a serf, Arkady Makarovich would not have had the possibility of attending high school and university and would not have enjoyed the legal rights of a gentleman.

  42. The wanderer (strannik) is a well-known figure in Russian religious life. Such spiritual wandering meant abandoning a fixed home and undertaking a sort of perpetual pilgrimage from monastery to monastery, as is described most memorably in The Way of a Pilgrim, an anonymous book published in the nineteenth century.

  43. The Slavophiles (“lovers of the Slavs”) were a group of writers and thinkers of the nineteenth century (the most important were Alexei Khomyakov, Konstantin and Ivan Aksakov, and Yuri Samarin) who believed that Russia should follow her own way of development, based on the structures of the rural community and the Orthodox Church, instead of imitating the West, as their opponents, the Westernizers, advocated. The Slavophile-Westernizer controversy dominated Russian social thought throughout the nineteenth century. Dostoevsky appeared, at various times, to take both sides in it.

  44. This combination of terms goes back ultimately to such eighteenth-century treatises as A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, by the Anglo-Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke (1729–1797) and Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). The Russ
ian phrase, replacing “sublime” with the less rhetorical “lofty,” became a critical commonplace in the 1840s, but acquired an ironic tone in the utilitarian and anti-aesthetic 1860s. The narrator of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground makes much sarcastic play with it.

  45. See II Samuel 11. Uriah the Hittite was the husband of Bathsheba; King David arranged for him to be killed in battle, so that he could take his wife.

  46. A line from the poem “Vlas,” by Nikolai Nekrasov (1821–1878), an old acquaintance and longtime ideological opponent of Dostoevsky’s, editor of the journal Notes of the Fatherland at the time that The Adolescent was appearing in it. The poem describes a greedy and pitiless peasant who ends his days as a wanderer collecting money for churches. Dostoevsky wrote about the poem in his Diary of a Writer for 1873, quoting many passages, including this same line, which he describes as “wonderfully well-put.” Incidentally, Vlas wore iron chains “for his soul’s perfection” as he went on his wanderings.

  47. Pushkin’s story “The Queen of Spades,” published in 1834, is one of the key works of Russian literature; in its atmosphere and in the character of its hero, Hermann, it prefigured the depiction of Petersburg in the works of Gogol, Dostoevsky, Andrei Bely, and others.

  48. The reference is to the equestrian statue of Peter the Great by the French sculptor Etienne-Maurice Falconet (1716–1791), which stands on Senate Square in Petersburg, and to Pushkin’s poem “The Bronze Horseman,” which describes the same statue come to life in the delirium of its hero.

  49. An allusion to shares in the “Brest-Graev” railway, referring to an actual forgery scandal of the day, involving shares in the Tambov-Kozlov line. The forger, Kosolov, prototype of Dostoevsky’s Stebelkov, was prosecuted by A. F. Koni (see note 14).

  50. The quotation is from Pushkin’s poem “The Black Shawl” (1820).

  51. It was indeed possible to rent not a whole room but only a corner of a room, which would be partitioned off by a hanging sheet or the like.

  52. See Hamlet’s soliloquy about the player (Act II, Scene ii, ll. 553–563): “Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect / A broken voice, and his whole function suiting / With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing! / For Hecuba? / What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba / That he should weep for her?” The comparison does not quite fit Kraft’s case.

  53. See Luke 15:11–32, the parable of the prodigal son. Arkady totally confuses the meaning of the parable.

  54. Rurik (d. 879), chief of the Scandinavian rovers known as Varangians, founded the Russian principality of Novgorod at the invitation of the local populace, thus becoming the ancestor of the oldest Russian nobility. The dynasty of Rurik ruled Russia from 862 to 1598, when it was succeeded by the Romanovs.

  55. Court councillor was seventh in the table of ranks established by Peter the Great, equivalent to the military rank of major.

  56. A condensed quotation of Matthew 5:25–26 (King James Version).

  57. Céladon, the hero of the pastoral novel Astrée, by Honoré d’Urfé (1607–1628), is a platonic and sentimental lover.

  58. See Luke 15:32 (King James Version). This is now Arkady’s third reference to the parable of the prodigal son. In the parable, however, these words are spoken of the son by the father; Arkady reverses the relations.

  59. The lines are from Pushkin’s poem “The Hero” (1830).

  60. The fig (figue in French, fica in Italian) is a contemptuous gesture made by inserting the thumb between the first and second fingers of the fist; also used in verbal form, as in the saying, “I don’t care a fig.” Obsolete in English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary , its use has continued in Russia, where a special covert form known as “a fig in the pocket” was developed, especially among intellectuals, as a sign of dissent during Soviet times.

  PART TWO

  1. Borel’s restaurant in Petersburg, named for its French founder, was already famous in Pushkin’s time. The plural implies “Borel and the like.”

  2. Titular councillor was ninth in the table of ranks, equivalent to the military rank of staff-captain. The type of the titular councillor entered Russian literature in the person of the wretched copying clerk Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, hero of Gogol’s story “The Overcoat.”

  3. That is, under the emperor Nicholas I (1796–1855).

  4. The Duma referred to in this case is the city council, elected from the nobility.

  5. The first railway in Russia, the Tsarskoe Selo line from Petersburg to Pavlovsk, was opened in 1838. Tsarskoe Selo (literally “Tsar’s Village”) was an aristocratic suburb about fifteen miles south of Petersburg; Pavlovsk, named for the emperor Paul (1754– 1801), who had a palace there, is slightly further south.

  6. The Cathedral of St. Isaac in Petersburg was begun in 1819 and completed in 1858, on plans by the French architect Auguste Ricard de Montferrand (1756–1858).

  7. Alexander Suvorov (1729–1800), who served under Catherine the Great (1729–1796), was the only Russian military man to bear the title of generalissimo until Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) awarded himself the title during World War II. Suvorov’s successes against the French revolutionary army in Italy gained him the additional titles of count of Italy and prince of Rimini, but they were not hereditary.

  8. Zavyalov was a Russian merchant and manufacturer.

  9. King Charles XI of Sweden (1655–1697) was said to have had a vision of an assembly in a brightly lit hall in which unknown men were cutting the throats of a great number of young people under the eyes of a fifteen-year-old king seated on his throne. The vision was spread through the Russian court under Alexander I (1777–1825) by the Swedish ambassador, a freemason by the name of Stedding.

  10. See Part One, note 7. According to a popular anecdote, the “somebody” was in fact the emperor Alexander I himself.

  11. Pavel Bashutsky (1771–1836) was an officer who fought in the campaigns against the French, was promoted to general, and from 1814 until his death served as military commandant of Petersburg.

  12. Alexander Chernyshov (1785–1857), who distinguished himself at Austerlitz and as a partisan leader in 1812, went on diplomatic missions for Alexander I, was made a count by Nicholas I, and served as minister of war from 1827 to 1852.

  13. A quotation from Luke 8:17 (King James Version).

  14. See Matthew 4:3, Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, where the devil asks him to prove he is the son of God by turning stones into bread.

  15. See Part One, note 33.

  16. According to legend, during the reign of the third king of Rome, Tullus Hostilius (seventh century B.C.), the three sons of Horatius fought for Rome against three champions of the city of Alba Longa, in the presence of the two armies, to decide which of the two peoples would command the other. The only survivor of the six was one of the Horatii, who thus gave the victory to Rome.

  17. See Part One, note 11.

  18. Vissarion Belinsky (1811–1848) was the most influential liberal critic and Westernizer of his time, an advocate of socially committed literature. He championed Dostoevsky’s first novel, Poor Folk (1845), and exerted a strong influence on the young writer, but they soon disagreed and parted ways. Dostoevsky’s inner debate with Belinsky continued throughout his life.

  19. Bolshaya Millionnaya is an older name for the present Millionnaya Street, which runs through what was then an aristocratic neighborhood between the Summer Garden and Palace Square in Petersburg.

  20. See Part One, note 47.

  21. The period of Tartar occupation of Russia, known as the “Tartar Yoke,” in fact lasted from the conquest of 1237–1240 to around 1480, when Prince Ivan III of Moscow removed the last traces of Muscovite dependence on the khanate of the Golden Horde.

  22. That is, from Lucia di Lammermoor, an opera by Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848).

  23. According to the Gospels, the court of the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem convicted Christ of blasphemy, which carried a sentence of death, and turned him over to the Roman procura
tor Pontius Pilate for sentencing. Pilate, who found no fault in him, washed his hands of the guilt and, yielding to the demands of the crowd, gave him over to be crucified.

  24. The princely family of Rohan, one of the most ancient and illustrious in France, has as its motto, Premier ne puis, second ne daigne, Rohan suis (“I cannot be first, I scorn to be second, I am Rohan”).

  25. In 1720, Peter the Great abolished the position of patriarch, the administrative head of the Orthodox Church, chosen by and from the clergy, and established a standing council to administer Church affairs, presided over by a lay procurator appointed by the emperor himself. The term “schismatic” (raskolnik) refers to the so-called Old Believers, who split off from the Orthodox Church in disagreement over the reforms of the patriarch Nikon in the mid-seventeenth century.

  26. Russian borrowed the word “keepsake” (kipsek) from English. It was the trade name of a literary annual or miscellany, finely bound and illustrated, intended for gift-giving.

  27. Soden is a German watering-place at the foot of the Taunus Mountains, ten miles west of Frankfurt-am-Main. Bad-Gastein is a watering-place near Salzburg in Austria.

  28. The biblical Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs, is a collection of mystical-erotic bridal poems written down in about the third century B.C. The opening of the first Book of Kings tells how King David in his old age took a young virgin, Abishag the Shunammite, to his bed to keep him warm and minister to him, though he “knew her not” (I Kings 1:1–15).

  29. The French writer Paul de Kock (1794–1871) was the author of innumerable novels depicting petit-bourgeois life, some of them considered risqué.

  30. Alexei Mikhailovich Romanov (1629–1676), tsar of Russia, was the father of Peter the Great.

  31. Holy Week is the week between Palm Sunday and Easter Sunday.

  PART THREE

  1. In Petersburg, owing to its northern latitude, the sun sets in midafternoon during the winter.

  2. The two-week fast preceding the feast of Saints Peter and Paul on June 29.