The Idiot (Vintage Classics)

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  30. The name of the Novozemlyansky infantry regiment was invented by the poet, playwright, and diplomat Alexander Griboedov (1795–1829) in his comedy Woe from Wit (1824), the first real masterpiece of Russian drama, many lines of which have become proverbial.

  31. First half of the Italian phrase: se non è vero è ben trovato (“if it’s not true, it’s well invented”).

  32. The names of the three musketeers in the novel of Alexandre Dumas père (1802–70). Porthos, whom General Ivolgin identifies with General Epanchin, was the fat epicure of the three.

  33. Kars, in the northeast of Turkey, was besieged by the Russians for many months in 1855, during the Crimean War (1853–56).

  34. The Indépendence Belge was published in Brussels from 1830 to 1937.

  35. See note 22 above. Kolya is thinking of Arbenin insulting Prince Zvezdich (act II, scene iv).

  36. Christ is repeatedly referred to in the Gospels as “the king of the Jews,” most often as an accusation during his questioning by Pilate, and this mocking “title” was also attached to his cross. Ganya changes it ironically to mean king of the Jewish financiers. Dostoevsky has in mind The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany, a satirical prose text by the poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), in which an ironic parallel is drawn between Christ and the banker Meyer Rothschild (1744–1812). Dostoevsky published a Russian translation of Heine’s piece in his magazine Epoch (Nos. 1–1, 1864); in fact, the Russian censors cut the passage about Christ and Rothschild, but Dostoevsky had of course seen the manuscript intact.

  37. The general gives a fantastic interpretation of a real event. The great Russian surgeon N. I. Pirogov (1810–81), who organized medical care for the wounded at the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, left for Petersburg at one point, displeased by the inattention of the high military authorities to problems of medical care. Auguste Nélaton (1807–73), a French surgeon of European repute and member of the Medical Academy of Paris, was the personal surgeon of Garibaldi and Napoleon III; he never set foot in Russia.

  38. The reference is to a case that Dostoevsky himself read about in the newspapers: a nineteen-year-old Moscow University student by the name of Danilov was tried for the murder and robbery of the pawnbroker Popov and his maidservant Nordman in January 1866. Dostoevsky was particularly struck by the similarity to Raskolnikov’s crime in Crime and Punishment, which he had been at work on for several months. During Danilov’s trial it came out that the young man, who wanted to get married, had been advised by his father to stop at nothing, not even crime, to achieve his ends.

  39. The poet Ivan Krylov (1769–1844) was Russia’s greatest fabulist; further on, Ferdyshchenko slightly misquotes from “The Lion and the Ass” (the difference is lost in translation).

  40. Provincial marshal of the nobility was the highest elective office in a province before the reforms of Alexander II in 1864.

  41. La Dame aux camélias (“The Lady with the Camellias”), a novel (1848) and five-act play (1852) by Alexandre Dumas fils (1824–95), tells a tragic story of illicit love. The heroine appears at promenades with bouquets of white camellias on certain days of the month and of red camellias on other days; after her death, her lover sees to it that white and red camellias alternate in the same way on her grave.

  42. Marlinsky was the pen name of A. A. Bestuzhev (1795–1837), a Romantic writer popular in military circles, to which many of his characters belonged.

  43. Russian social thought throughout the nineteenth century was dominated by the dispute between the Westernizers, who favored various degrees of liberal reform to bring Russia into line with developments in Europe, and the Slavophiles, proponents of Russian (and generally Slavic) national culture and Orthodoxy.

  44. Dostoevsky drew these details from the case of the Moscow merchant V. F. Mazurin, a young man from a well-off family, who killed the jeweler I. I. Kalmykov with a similarly bound razor. This murder, further details of which will appear later, haunts Nastasya Filippovna throughout the novel.

  45. Ekaterinhof, at that time on the southwest periphery of Petersburg, was named in honor of Catherine I (1684–1727), the wife of the emperor Peter the Great (1682–1725), who built a palace there in 1711. In the early nineteenth century, the park surrounding the palace became one of the finest public gardens in the capital and a favorite place for promenades and picnics.

  PART TWO

  1. The original Vauxhall was a seventeenth-century pleasure garden in London. The word entered Russian as a common noun meaning an outdoor space for concerts and entertainment, with a tearoom, tables, and so on. The vauxhall in Pavlovsk, a suburb of Petersburg where much of the novel is set, was built very near the Pavlovsk railway station, one of the first in Russia—so near, in fact, that vokzal also became the Russian word for “railway station.”

  2. That is, a supporter of the elder branch of the Bourbon family in France, deposed in 1830 in favor of the younger branch of Orléans.

  3. The zemstvo was an elective provincial council for purposes of local administration, established in 1864 by Alexander II.

  4. Tarasov House was the name of the debtors’ prison in Petersburg.

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

  6. Pavlovsk, to the south of Petersburg, is a garden suburb named for the emperor Paul I (1754–1801), who had a magnificent palace there. A number of important meetings in the novel take place in the vast, rambling “English” park surrounding the palace. A dacha is a summer residence outside the city, anything from a large separate house to part of a house or one or two rented rooms; the word also summons up a certain summer mode of life, with outings, picnics, and a general air of festivity.

  7. The reference is to another notorious murder reported in the newspapers, in which Vitold Gorsky, an eighteen-year-old high-school student from a noble family, killed six members of the merchant Zhemarin’s household, including his eleven-year-old son, to whom he gave lessons.

  8. These words come from the imperial ukase of November 24, 1864, which promulgated the new judicial statutes; they were carved in gold on a marble plaque in the Petersburg courthouse; the “lawgiver” is the “tsar-reformer” Alexander II.

  9. Jeanne Bécu (1743–93), who became the Comtesse du Barry, was the last favorite of Louis XV (1710–74); she was guillotined on the order of the French revolutionary tribunal. The story of her execution and last words is told in the publisher’s preface to Mémoires de madame la comtesse du Barry, vol. 1 (Paris, 1829).

  10. Dostoevsky writes Lebedev’s spoken French in Russian transcription, reproducing the speaker’s accent. The levée du roi, or “king’s levee,” was a reception that would take place around the king’s rising from bed and morning toilet; Lebedev read about it in Mme. du Barry’s memoirs.

  11. The Apocalypse, or Revelation, of St. John the Theologian is the closing book of the New Testament; balancing the book of Genesis at the beginning of the Old Testament, it contains prophecies of the end of this world and of the Last Judgment. Its visionary, symbolic language has made it subject to many interpretations, often tendentious.

  12. The various references in this paragraph are to Revelation 6: 5–5.

  13. St. Thomas’s Sunday, in the Orthodox Church, is the first Sunday after Easter, named for the apostle who refused to believe in the resurrection until he had ocular and tactile evidence of it (John 20: 24–29).

  14. The sect of the castrates (skoptsi) in Russia, a reform of the older sect of the flagellants (khlysti), was founded in Orlov province in the second half of the eighteenth century by a peasant named Kondraty Selivanov. To combat the promiscuous behavior that generally accompanied the “zeals” of the flagellants, he introduced the practice of self-castration. The sect, which for some reason attracted many rich merchants, moneylenders, and goldsmiths, was condemned by the Church and forbidden by law.

  15. Sergei Mikhailovich Solovyov (1820–79), one of the greatest Russian historians, began to publish his History of Russia
from Ancient Times in 1851; of its twenty-nine volumes, seventeen had appeared by 1867, when Dostoevsky was writing The Idiot.

  16. In the mid-seventeenth century, the ecclesiastical reforms of the patriarch Nikon caused a schism (raskol) in the Russian Orthodox Church. Those who rejected the reforms, led by the archpriest Avvakum, held to the “old belief” and became known as Old Believers.

  17. The poem Nastasya Filippovna reads is “Heinrich,” by Heinrich Heine, which deals with the famous episode in the history of the Holy Roman Empire when Pope Gregory VII (1020?-1106) forced the emperor Henry IV (1050–1106) to come to the Italian castle of Canossa in 1077 and make humble amends to him. The poem was translated into Russian in 1859 and again in 1862.

  18. The prince is referring to the faith of the Old Believers, who did not accept the changes in the church service books instituted in the seventeenth century and made the sign of the cross in the old way, with two fingers, instead of in the three-fingered way introduced by the same reform.

  19. See part one, note 26. The painting in question is Christ’s Body in the Tomb (1521), which Dostoevsky saw in the Basel museum in August 1867, having made a special stop there for that purpose; he even stood on a chair in the museum in order to study the painting more closely. The prince’s words further on, “A man can even lose his faith from that painting!” were Dostoevsky’s own words to his wife at the time. The painting, which is of central importance to the novel, will be mentioned again later; Dostoevsky first read a description of it in Letters of a Russian Traveler (1801), by N. M. Karamzin (see part one, note 4).

  20. The details of this murder are again drawn from an actual incident reported in the newspapers—the murder of the tradesman Suslov by a peasant named Balabanov, who repeated the same prayer before taking Suslov’s silver watch.

  21. The exchanging of crosses was a custom symbolizing spiritual brotherhood.

  22. Dostoevsky, who suffered from epilepsy himself, sometimes experienced moments of such “illumination” just before a fit and said that they were “worth a whole life.”

  23. Cf. Revelation 10: 6: “that there should be time no longer” (King James version).

  24. According to Muslim tradition, Muhammad (c. 570–632) was awakened one night by the archangel Gabriel, who in the process brushed against a jug of water with his wing. Muhammad then traveled to Jerusalem, from there rose into the seven heavens where he spoke with angels, prophets, and Allah, visited the fiery Gehenna, and came back in time to keep the jug from spilling.

  25. These confused thoughts are connected with details of the Zhemarin murders (see part two, note 7).

  26. The terrace of Lebedev’s dacha, as of many country houses, is something between a room and an open veranda: a large, unheated space with many windows, with a door leading to the inner rooms, but also an outside door and steps leading down to the garden. The action of much Russian literature and drama takes place on such terraces.

  27. The first Russian state was founded at Novgorod by Rurik, chief of the Scandinavian rovers known as Varangians, in 862, on the invitation of the local Slavic populace. The millennium of Russia was celebrated on September 8, 1862.

  28. The poem in question is by Pushkin. The version Dostoevsky quotes is untitled and appears in “Scenes from Knightly Life” (1835), one of Pushkin’s “little tragedies.” It is Pushkin’s revision of a longer version written in 1829.

  29. A misquotation from Pushkin’s poem “To ***” (1825); it should read “like a genius of pure beauty.”

  30. “A.N.D.” is also incorrect, as we shall see further on. The knight wrote “A.M.D.” on his shield, which stood for Ave Mater Dei (“Hail Mother of God”).

  31. The phrase “there’s no need to go breaking chairs,” which is proverbial in Russia, comes from The Inspector General (1836), the famous comedy by Nikolai Gogol (1809–52), in which the mayor says of the schoolteacher, “Of course Alexander the Great is a hero, but why go breaking chairs?”

  32. P.V. Annenkov’s edition of Pushkin, the first to be based on a study of the poet’s manuscripts, was published in seven volumes in 1855–57. Dostoevsky owned it and quotes the verses on the “poor knight” from it.

  33. The term “nihilism,” first used philosophically in German (Nihilismus) to signify annihilation, a reduction to nothing (attributed to Buddha), or the rejection of religious beliefs and moral principles, came via the French nihilisme to Russian, where it acquired a political meaning, referring to the doctrines of the younger generation of socialists of the 1860s, who advocated the destruction of the existing social order without specifying what should replace it. The great nineteenth-century Russian lexicographer Vladimir Ivanovich Dahl (1801–72), normally a model of restraint, defines “nihilism” in his Interpretive Dictionary of the Living Russian Language as “an ugly and immoral doctrine which rejects everything that cannot be palpated.” The term became current in Russia after it appeared in the novel Fathers and Sons (1862), by Ivan Turgenev (1818–83), where it is applied to the hero, Bazarov. The nihilist literary critic D. I. Pisarev (1840–68) was a great disparager of poetry, especially of Pushkin and his “cult of women’s little feet.”

  34. See part two, note 7, and part one, note 38.

  35. The opening words in Latin of Psalm 130: “Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord,” sung in Catholic funeral services; the meaning here is “May they rest in peace.”

  36. The quotation is from Act II, scene ii, of Griboedov’s Woe from Wit (see part one, note 30).

  37. See part one, note 30. “The Stormcloud” was written in 1815.

  38. The commentator in the Academy of Sciences edition has established that this epigram is a takeoff on “Self-assured Fedya,” by M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826–89), a satirical epigram on Dostoevsky himself, published in The Whistle, No. 9 (1863).

  39. The quoted phrase is an allusion to Vera Pavlovna’s farewell to her mother, in the radical novel What Is to Be Done? (1863), by N. G. Chernyshevsky (1828–89).

  40. Probably a reference to the famous doctor S. P. Botkin (1832–89), physician to Alexander II and to Dostoevsky himself.

  41. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–65) was one of the principal French socialist theorists of the nineteenth century, author of the memorable phrase “Property is theft.” His libertarian socialism was opposed to Marxism.

  42. The line about Princess Marya Alexeevna is a paraphrase of the final line of Famusov’s last monologue, in act IV, scene xv, of Griboedov’s Woe from Wit (see part one, note 30).

  43. Ippolit is thinking of Christ.

  44. Cf. Revelation 8: 10–11.

  45. Keller is referring to a real man: Louis Bourdaloue (1632–1704), a Jesuit and a famous preacher in the age of Louis XIV, though never an archbishop. In the first case, however, he is actually making a pun on bordeaux wine and the Russian word burda, which means “swill”; only in the second case does he come to the more appropriate question of “confession.”

  PART THREE

  1. Russian seminary education was open to the lower classes and was often subsidized by state scholarships. Seminarians were thus not necessarily preparing for the priesthood. Many Russian radicals of the 1860s were former seminarians, like Joseph Stalin later. Dostoevsky wrote in a notebook around this time: “These seminarians have introduced a special negation into our literature, too complete, too hostile, too sharp, and therefore too limited.”

  2. See part one, note 12, and part two, note 31. Mikhail Vassilievich Lomonosov (1711–65) was a peasant who came on foot from Archangelsk to Petersburg in order to study; he became a great poet and scientist, and, like both Pushkin and Gogol after him, is often called “the father of modern Russian literature.”

  3. Pavel Afanasyevich Famusov is the father of the heroine in Griboedov’s Woe from Wit (see part one, note 30).

  4. See part one, note 13.

  5. Provoked by the young Frenchman’s attentions to his wife, Pushkin challenged Georges d’Anthès to a duel; having
the first shot, d’Anthès may have fired sooner than he intended to, and his bullet hit Pushkin in the stomach; the wound proved fatal.

  6. General Epanchin is trying to use the French expression ne pas se sentir dans son assiette, literally “not to feel that you are in your plate,” meaning “to be out of sorts.”

  7. Dueling was forbidden in Russia until 1894, when it was made legal for army officers. Taking part in a duel was severely punishable by law, and a lieutenant like Keller risked being broken to the ranks and thus acquiring the “red cap” of the common foot soldier.

  8. Ippolit is recalling the song of the archangel Raphael (ll. 243–244), from the “Prologue in Heaven” that begins the monumental drama Faust, by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832): “Die Sonne tönt nach alter Weise/In Brudersphären Wettgesang …” (“The sun resounds as of old/In rival-singing with his brother spheres”).

  9. See part two, note 44.

  10. Cf. Revelation 11: 6–7.

  11. François-Marie Arouet, known as Voltaire (1694–1778), was a facetious debunker of religious literalism. Dostoevsky especially admired his philosophical novel Candide (1759).

  12. An ironic reference to Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834), English economist, author of An Essay on the Principle of Population, who first perceived the threat posed by the geometric increase of the earth’s population; he declared that the “superfluous population” of the earth was bound to perish and that all social reforms would fail, and he called for the abolition of falsely philanthropic laws alleviating the condition of the poor. The radical Petrashevsky circle, to which Dostoevsky belonged as a young man, was interested in Malthus’s thought and translated some of his writings.

  13. See part two, note 23. Ippolit plays on the ambiguity of the Russian translation, which we render here.

  14. See part one, notes 2 and 36. An imperial was a Russian gold coin worth ten roubles.

  15. Actual state councillor was fourth in the table of fourteen civil service ranks established by Peter the Great, equivalent to the military rank of major general.