Bread and circuses!: Duas tantum res anxius optat, | Panem et Circences (‘Two things only the people anxiously desire: bread and the circus games’): Juvenal, Satires x. 80.
“he lived amongst us”: ‘He lived amongst us, |A people that to him were alien …’ (Pushkin’s tribute (1834) to the Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855)).
a jaunty troika rushing headlong towards an unknown destination: an image from Gogol’s Dead Souls.
the Sobakeviches, the Nozdryovs, or the Chichikovs: grotesque characters in Gogol’s novel Dead Souls.
“as the sun in a droplet of water”: a line from G. Derzhavin’s ode God.
après moi le déluge: ‘when I’m gone, to hell with everyone!’
in the British parliament: a slight anachronism, as the political situation referred to is that of 1876, rather than that of a decade earlier, when the action of the novel is meant to take place. Relations between Britain and Russia were strained in 1876; the British were wary of Russian efforts to liberate the Balkan Slavs from Turkish rule, seeing this as a pretext to move to Constantinople and the Mediterranean. In a political article of September 1876, Dostoevsky had written: ‘And so Viscount Beaconsfield—an Israelite by birth (né Disraeli)—in an address at some banquet, suddenly divulges to Europe an extraordinary secret, to the effect that all those Russians, headed by Cherniaev, who rushed into Turkey to save the Slavs, are simply socialists, communists, and communards … [who] … constitute a threat to Europe, and menace the British farmers with future socialism in Russia and in the East!’ (KC, 424–5, n. 230; DW, Sept. 1876, ch. 1, para. 1; CW, 15. 600).
and cut off their supply of grain: this refers to Russian, specifically Ukrainian, exports of grain, especially wheat, to Western and Central Europe. Throughout the nineteenth century (after the retreat of Napoleon), the Russian Empire was a large exporter of wheat. This process was intensified by the presence, in the Volga region and the Ukraine, of many large communities of Germans; their ancestors had mostly been invited to settle by Catherine the Great. They included those who had moved East to escape religious persecution and governmental obligations (particularly military service, from which they were exempted in Russia). The best known of these German sects were the Mennonites, Hutterites, and Moravian Brothers. The German communities were far more productive than the Russian estates, because they introduced agricultural machinery and new farming methods. Besides, they did not drink. When the American and Canadian wheat-growing regions opened up (from c.1850), wheat from the Russian Empire became less competitive, until the 1914 war. Domestic unrest, revolution, and then collectivization, plus a growing Soviet population, made Russia a large importer of grain. The main exporting ports from the Russian Empire in the nineteenth century were Kronstadt (St Petersburg) and Odessa.
‘strike the hearts with unsuspected power’: from Pushkin’s poem Reply to Anonymous (1830).
in St Petersburg, a young man: an actual trial which came before the St Petersburg District Court on 15 January 1879 (CW 15. 600).
Udolpho Castle: the reference is to Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Ann Radcliffe’s novels were Dostoevsky’s favourite reading in childhood.
to bind and to loose: cf. ‘And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven’: Matthew 16: 19; see also 18: 18.
that not one should perish: cf. John 10: 11 and 10: 14–15.
Fathers, provoke not your children: ‘Fathers, provoke not your children to anger …’: Colossians 3: 21; see also Ephesians 6: 1–4.
vivos voco!: the opening words of Schiller’s Song of the Bell: Vivos voco. Mortuos plango (‘I call the living. I mourn the dead’).
measured to you again: see note to p. 167.
“brass” and “brimstone”: the reference is to a character in Ostrovsky’s play Hard Times, a merchant’s wife who is terrified at the sound of these biblical references.
make her way back through the window: cf. Naturam expellas furca, tamen usque recurret (‘You may drive out nature with a fork, but she will ever return again’). Horace, Epistles, book I. 10, 24; Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop (‘Drive out nature and it comes back at a gallop’); Natur zieht stärker dänn sieben Ochsen (‘Nature draws stronger than seven oxen’). The line that Dostoevsky uses is borrowed from an essay by Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), historian and novelist, who probably translated the observation from the French, as it appears in La Fontaine’s fable La Chatte metamorphosée en femme (‘Cat turned into a woman’).
ye did not visit me: cf. ‘For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me’: Matthew 25: 35–6.
than to punish one innocent one: the ‘majestic voice’ belongs to Peter the Great, and the citation is from his Military Statute of 1716.
Thou who art Our God…!: a refrain occurring in Orthodox acathisti.
Jupiter, you are angry, that means you are in the wrong: the exact source has not been traced, but there are numerous references to an angry Jupiter in literature, Jupiter tonans (‘thundering Jupiter’).
Twenty years down the mines: Mitya is sentenced to twenty years’ hard labour. In the opinion of B. Reizov, Dostoevsky chose this period because that was the length of sentence given to Mitya’s prototype, Ensign Ilyinsky, who, like Mitya, had been falsely accused of patricide. Dostoevsky used this sentence in his novel without investigating the point any further. In fact, Mitya, who was accused of murdering his father and found guilty on all counts, should have been sentenced to lifelong penal servitude, according to the laws of Imperial Russia. The law of 1845 states: Whosoever is found guilty of premeditated murder of one’s father or mother will be subject to the loss of all legal rights and exile to hard labour in the Siberia mines for life. On arrival at their destination in the mines, the convicts in question are not to be considered for remission under any circumstances; only in cases of complete infirmity through old age are they to be relieved of their workload, and even then without permission to be freed from the precincts of the penal settlement (B. Reizov, The Story behind the ‘Karamazov Brothers’). (CW 15. 604)
march: exiles to Siberia were usually marched there, unless given special permission to go by guarded carriage. The march would be in numerous stages: firstly to some provincial mustering centre, then on the ‘Sibirsky trakt’ across the Urals, and, in some cases, on to Sakhalin, an island north of Japan, eleven time-zones away. Traditionally, the column would halt by the stone monument in the Urals which says ‘Europe-Asia’, and prayers would be said by those who would probably never see European Russia again. Obviously, the more remote the location, the better the chance of a successful escape. On the march, the convicts would be roped or shackled together in a line, and, on arrival at the penal settlement, their heads would be clean-shaven, boule à zéro, but on one side only. Special, distinctive, prison clothes were not provided.
let our names perish!: Kolya is quoting Pierre Vergniaud (1753–93), politician and famous orator, member of the Gironde, from one of his speeches at the Convention nationale (1792): Périssent nos noms, pourvu que la chose publique soit sauvée. He was guillotined along with his fellow Girondists.
headband: a ribbon, bearing an image of Our Saviour, Mother of God, or St John the Divine, tied round the head of a deceased at Orthodox funerals.
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1 To K. Pobedonostsev, 16 Aug. 1880, Collected Works, 30/pt 2, 209, (henceforth CW—see ‘Texts used’ for full citation).
2 Sigmund Freud, ‘Dostoievski and Parricide’, trans, by D. F. Tait, The Realist, 1/2 (1929), 19.
3 Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Tolstoi as Man and Artist with an Essay on Dostoïevski (1902), 251.
4 Ibid. 250.
5 Ibid. 251.
6 Ibid.
7 V. Petersen (1881), quoted in CW 15. 506.
8 Herman Hesse, In Sight of Chaos (Zurich, 1923), 17-18, 20.
9 William Horman, Vulgaria (1519), 289.
10 John Middleton Murry, Fyodor Dostoevsky (London, 1923), 213.
11 Merezhkovsky, Tolstoi as Man and Artist, 232.
12 Letter to his editor Nikolai Lyubimov, 16 Sept. 1879, CW 30/1. 126.
13 Ibid. 132.
14 Quoted in Helen Muchnic’s Dostoevsky’s English Reputation, 67 (henceforth DER— see Select Bibliography for full citation).
15 Letter to Lyubimov, 7 Aug. 1879, CW 30/1. 102.
16 Freud, ‘Dostoievski and Parricide’, 18.
17 Letter to Maykov, 16 Aug. 1867, CW 28/2. 216.
18 Voice, 156 (7 June 1879), quoted in CW 15. 490.
19 Edwin Muir, quoted in DER 99.
20 Middleton Murry, Fyodor Dostoevsky, 249.
21 Anon., ‘Dostoevsky and the Novel’, Times Literary Supplement (5 June 1930), 465.
22 Merezhkovsky, Tolstoi as Man and Artist, 256.
23 Ibid. 255.
24 Ibid. 234.
25 W.J. Leatherbarrow, The Brothers Karamazov (Cambridge, 1992), 106-7.
The Karamazov Brothers Page 122