Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
rial sense, but 'a moral improvement in the working class' (PSS).
10. open doors: In What Is to Be Done? rules are established for communal living in which a man and a woman each have one room in which they cannot be disturbed, as well as one 'neutral' room in which they take tea and meals together. Here Lebezyatnikov appears to suggest that contemporary commune-dwellers have even 'gone beyond' Chernyshevsky (BT).
11. cesspits: The question of who would attend to the 'cesspits' in a Fourier-style community was a familiar one in journalistic debate of the time. Fourier said that this chore would be carried out by 'cohorts of self-sacrificing' adolescents (BT); here, too, Lebezyatnikov and his mentors have gone one step further ('no self-sacrifice would be involved').
12. more useful: Dostoyevsky and his journal Epoch often scorned the utilitarianism of a rival journal, the Russian Word, mocking its contributors for making out that 'a pair of boots are even better than Pushkin' (PSS). Their prime target was the talented young critic Dmitry Pisarev, to whom the remark is now commonly attributed. In fact, Pisarev understood 'usefulness' in a much broader sense, asking, in his essay 'The Realists' (1864), for poets to be useful 'as poets'.
13. Whatever is useful . . . is thereby noble!: Echoing Chernyshevsky's claim in his essay 'The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy' (1860) that 'only that which is useful for man in general can be considered a true good'.
14. grey and rainbow-coloured banknotes: Worth, respectively, 50 and 100 roubles.
15. vile, hussarish Pushkinism: A schoolboy poem attributed to Pushkin in the Contemporary in 1863 contains a couplet specifically linking 'horns' with Hussars: 'But Hussars are not to blame / For the length of a husband's horns' (BT).
16. but now I respect you: Again Lebezyatnikov takes his cue from Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?, in which a similar sentiment is expressed by Vera Pavlovna's husband Lopukhov when she tells him she has fallen in love with another man (Chapter 3, XXV).
17. kutya: A dish of rice, raisins and honey or sugar, usually eaten at funeral banquets; previously mentioned in Part One, Chapter V.
18. Gostiny Dvor: A further allusion to the luxurious shops of Nevsky Prospect, glimpsed in the background of the novel from the poverty of its primary setting. The neoclassical Great Gostiny Dvor, one of the world's oldest shopping arcades, still thrives today.
19. Pani chorazyna: 'Madame Ensign' (Polish).
20. Panie!: 'Mister!' (Polish, vocative case).
21. bread and salt: The phrase khleb-sol' (bread-salt) is found in a variety of idiomatic expressions in Russian, most commonly to signify hospitality. In Katerina Ivanovna's repeated usage it gains a proud ring, despite its humble literal meaning (an example of the 'pauper's pride' mentioned earlier).
22. Vater aus Berlin: 'Father from Berlin' (German).
23. T----, the town of her birth: Almost certainly a covert allusion to Katerina Ivanovna's real-life prototype Maria Dmitrievna, Dostoyevsky's first wife, with whom he had a difficult marriage (1857-64) cut short by her death, also from 'consumption'. Maria Dmitrievna was born in Taganrog and graduated from Taganrog boarding school with a certificate of distinction (BT). Compare the descriptions of the ailing Katerina Ivanovna (and her attitude towards her husband, Marmeladov) with the description of Maria Dmitrievna left by Baron Wrangel, a friend of Dostoyevsky's: 'very thin, with a passionate and excitable nature. Even then the ominous flush played over her pale face and a few years later consumption did carry her off to the grave. She was well read, quite well educated, inquisitive, kind-hearted and extraordinarily vivacious and impressionable. She had an ardent concern for Fyodor Mikhailovich and was very kind to him; I don't believe that she held him in very high esteem - it was more a matter of pity for an unfortunate man crushed by fate' (cited in KL).
24. en toutes lettres: 'Quite explicitly' (French).
25. Geld: 'Money' (German).
26. her father was a colonel: In the space of two pages, Katerina Ivanovna has upgraded her father's status from 'court counsellor' (whose military equivalent in the Table of Ranks was lieutenant colonel) to colonel (BT).
27. Burgermeister: 'Town mayor' (German).
28. Gott der Barmherzige!: 'Merciful Lord!' (German).
29. sausage-maker: A pejorative nickname for German women in Russia at the time, when most sausage shops in St Petersburg were run by Germans (SB).
30. for the right hand . . . not to know: See Matthew 6:3: 'But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.' Tikhomirov aptly comments that Lebezyatnikov's 'forgetfulness in this situation is far from accidental, since he renounces alms-giving on principle' (BT).
31. The General Conclusion of the Positive Method: A collection of articles, edited and translated from French and German by N. Neklyudov and published in St Petersburg in 1866; it included 'Brain and Spirit. A Survey of Physiological Psychology for All Thinking Readers' by the German doctor and writer Theodor Piderit (1826-1912), and 'The Regularity of Apparently Voluntary Human Actions from the Point of View of Statistics' by the economist Adolph Wagner (see Part One, note 47). A review in the Russian press bewailed the book's incoherence, but singled out Piderit's and Wagner's articles for praise; it seems likely that here, too, Lebezyatnikov is merely parroting someone else's opinion (BT, PSS).
32. Panie lajdak!: 'Mr Scoundrel!' (Polish).
33. unhappier than you are now: An abrupt change in the Russian text: from the respectful, second-person plural form with which Sonya has addressed Raskolnikov until now, she switches to the familiar singular form with which he has long been addressing her. From this point on she will switch between the two forms.
34. neither Toulon nor Egypt nor the pass at Mont Blanc: References to two of Napoleon Bonaparte's celebrated triumphs (see Part Three, notes 29 and 31) and to his audacious crossing of Mont Blanc in 1800 with 40,000 men and heavy artillery in order to strike at the rear of the Austrian army in Italy.
35. all this was dawning on me: Tikhomirov traces this ambivalent image of sudden revelation, 'like the sun', to the appearance of devils, masked as angels, in the cave of the eleventh-century hermit Isaac of Kiev. St Isaac's hagiographer repeatedly compares their appearance to a sudden burst of illumination, 'like the sun' (BT).
36. kiss the earth you've polluted: The image may be traced to the Old Testament and to Russian folk culture, with its ancient practice of kissing and even eating the earth on making a vow, and its mythological image of Mat'-Syra Zemlya or Mother Damp Earth (BT). The latter, following the Christianization of Russia, became popularly linked with the image of the Virgin Mary. Dostoyevsky's readers might also have been reminded of the 'native soil' philosophy (pochvennichestvo) that he and fellow-minded writers had been elaborating since 1861 (see Part Three, note 1).
37. tubercles on the brain: Tikhomirov argues that Lebezyatnikov's comment probably reflects 'superficially understood information about "tubercular inflammation of the membranes of the brain" (i.e., tubercular meningitis)', which he has misapplied to Katerina Ivanovna (BT).
38. Tenez-vous droite: 'Straighten up' (French).
39. Petrushka: The Russian version of Punch and Judy. A staple of fairgrounds, Petrushka had begun to flourish on city streets as well. Dostoyevsky, who took a great interest in street theatre and music, once described the character of Petrushka as 'a kind of Sancho Panza or Leporello, but a completely Russified, popular character'. As Boris Tikhomirov notes, it is precisely the popular quality of Petrushka that Katerina Ivanovna, with her aristocratic taste, wishes to distance herself from (and also, perhaps, the fact that the roguish Petrushka is given to mocking seekers of justice and truth).
40. 'Little Farm': See Part One, note 25.
41. 'The Hussar . . . 'Cinq sous': 'The Hussar Leaning on his Sabre', based on words from Konstantin Batyushkov's poem 'Separation' (1814), is sung by prostitutes in Krestovsky's Petersburg Slums (BT). 'Cinq sous' ('Five pennies') is the refrain from a beggars' song in Grace de Dieu, a melodrama known to theatregoers in Moscow and St Petersburg from the 1840s onwards (PSS, BT).
42. Marlborough . . . reviendra: The first lines of a popular French folk song ('Marlborough is off to war / And doesn't know when he'll return'). The song mockingly describes a page giving (mistaken) news of the death in battle of the Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722) to his widow. It gained particular popularity in Russia after 1812, 'since its ironic story of Marlborough's unsuccessful campaign [in the War of the Spanish Succession] was taken as an allusion to the defeat of Napoleon' (BT).
43. Cinq sous . . . menage: 'Five pennies, five pennies / To set up our home' (French).
44. pas de basque: A ballet step performed either close to the floor (glisse) or with a jump (saute).
45. Du hast Diamanten . . . du mehr?: 'You have diamonds and pearls [...] You have the most beautiful eyes, / Girl, what more could you want?' (German). Lines from a poem by Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), though the original has Mein Liebchen ('My darling') where Dostoyevsky has Madchen ('Girl').
46. In the midday heat . . . Dagestan: The opening words of Mikhail Lermontov's poem 'Dream' (1841), set to music many times by Russian composers.
PART SIX
1. political conspirator: Work on this part of Crime and Punishment, in the latter part of 1866, coincided with the public hanging in St Petersburg of Dmitry Karakozov (1840-66), who had tried to shoot Tsar Alexander II in April that year. Also due for public execution was Nikolai Ishutin (1840-79), to whose revolutionary circle Karakozov had belonged; Ishutin was spared at the last moment by an unexpected pardon from the Tsar - as Dostoyevsky himself had been seventeen years earlier (BT). On Karakozov and his significance for Dostoyevsky see Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity and the Birth of Terrorism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).
2. I went to see B----: The illustrious physician Sergei Botkin (1832-89), who diagnosed Dostoyevsky's own pulmonary malady as he was beginning work on Crime and Punishment (BT).
3. A hundred rabbits . . . English proverb has it: A characteristic piece of mystification and misquotation on Porfiry's part, for no such English proverb exists. A 'French proverb' quoted in one of Ivan Turgenev's letters has been cited as one inspiration (SB), but there appears to be a common source: the Proces de Madame Lafarge (Pagnerre: Paris, 1840), an account of the trial of Marie Lafarge (1816-52), who was eventually convicted for the murder of her husband by arsenic. The pioneering trial hinged on forensic evidence and chemical tests, and 'l'affaire Lafarge' was followed in the daily press by a gripped and divided French society. One of the defendant's lawyers, Maitre Paillet, criticized the preference of the Ministere Publique for generalities rather than hard facts. In support of his position, he invoked the words of the Attorney-General at the Court of Appeal, Monsieur Dupin, who had recently made the following 'picturesque' criticism of the Ministere Publique: 'avec vos trente-six petits lapins blancs vous ne ferez jamais un cheval blanc' ('your thirty-six little white rabbits will never make a white horse'); Proces de Madame Lafarge, p. 433. The case furnishes an interesting and complex precedent for both Porfiry and Dostoyevsky, given the latter's suspicion of any legal system in which only 'hard facts' - or white horses - hold sway.
4. the plucking of a string: An allusion to the delirious final paragraph of Nikolai Gogol's story 'Notes of a Madman' (1835): 'a bluish mist spreads itself out beneath my feet; in the mist, the plucking of a string'. Noting the possible parallel between Raskolnikov, a would-be Napoleon, and Gogol's 'mad' narrator Poprishchin, who fancies himself the King of Spain, Tikhomirov also cites a letter Dostoyevsky wrote to Ivan Turgenev in December 1863, where he employs this motif, endowing it with his own meaning and artistic credo. After criticizing utilitarian currents in contemporary culture, Dostoyevsky observes that Turgenev's fantastical tale 'Phantoms' paradoxically expresses the real condition of the soul of contemporary man: 'This reality is the anguish of an educated and conscious creature of our times [...] It's "a string being plucked in the mist", and thank goodness for that.' According to Tikhomirov, 'it is precisely "the anguish of an educated and conscious creature" [...] that is the source of everything that happens to the hero of Dostoyevsky's novel' (BT).
5. umsonst!: 'To no avail!' (German).
6. the final pillars: An unusual idiom inspired by the labours of Hercules, meaning 'to reach the limit', 'the furthest point' (BT).
7. a child: Mikolka is, in fact, twenty-two (see Part Two, Chapter IV).
8. schismatic . . . 'Runners' . . . Elder: The causes and effects of the mid-seventeenth-century schism (raskol) in Russian Orthodoxy, between those who accepted the reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon (1605-81) and those who would henceforth be known as the Old Believers or schismatics, preoccupied Dostoyevsky throughout his life, as reflected in the name he gave to the hero of this novel. One of the most radical sects attached to the Old Belief was that of the Runners (beguny), for whom the earth was already in the grip of the Antichrist, and who 'ran' from all worldly authority into forests and remote places. Their tendency to admit to crimes they hadn't committed and to seek out suffering for themselves as a path to holiness was much discussed in the Russian journals of the mid-1860s (PSS). The symbolic relationship - in terms both of contrast and of possible affinity - between Raskolnikov and the raskolnik Mikolka is further underlined by the fact that both men seem to hail from the province of Ryazan (where the district of Zaraisk is located) and are of similar age (twenty-three and twenty-two). The starets (Elder) is a charismatic, often controversial holy man who offers spiritual direction and ministry to Orthodox believers, as depicted most famously in the character of Zosima in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov.
9. old, 'true' books: Religious books that were especially valued by the Old Believers and contained, for example, the sayings of St John Chrysostom (347-407). Published before the Schism, in the mid-seventeenth century, they were republished in Poland at the end of the eighteenth century and circulated among Old Believers throughout the nineteenth century (BT).
10. new courts: A reference to the legal reforms of 1864, not yet implemented at the time in which the novel is set (summer 1865).
11. 'renewal' through bloodshed: A possible reference to the ideas expounded in Proudhon's La Guerre et la Paix (see Part Three, note 20), as well as to those putatively set out in Raskolnikov's article on crime (BT).
12. Seek and ye will find: See Matthew 7:7: 'Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.'
13. warrant officer: A reference to a character in Gogol's play Marriage (1842) - called Petukhov, though misremembered by Porfiry (or Dostoyevsky) as the offstage warrant officer Dyrka - who, 'even if you just show him a finger will suddenly laugh out loud, by God, and laugh till the cows come home' (BT). The reference echoes Porfiry's characterization of Mikolka earlier in the chapter.
14. ----sky Prospect: Obukhovsky (now Moskovsky) Prospect.
15. must be a seminarian: See Part Two, note 11.
16. cher ami: 'Dear friend' (French).
17. La nature et la verite: A variation of Heinrich Heine's description of Rousseau as 'L'homme de la verite et de la nature' ('The man of truth and nature'), which, in turn, paraphrased Rousseau's pledge in the first book of his Confessions to show man 'in all the truth of his nature'. In a notebook entry written shortly before he began work on Crime and Punishment Dostoyevsky described the ideal of 'the man of truth and nature' as nothing but 'a puppet that doesn't exist' (BT). Through Svidrigailov, la nature receives an even more critical (and cynical) interpretation.
18. Sistine Madonna: According to the memoirs of Dostoyevsky's second wife, Anna Grigoryevna, Dostoyevsky spoke of the 'sorrow in the smile' of the Sistine Madonna, which he considered 'the greatest manifestation of human genius' (BT). The comparison with a 'holy fool' drawn by Svidrigailov is more fanciful, though it continues a motif of the novel, linking the Virgin Mary with Lizaveta and Sonya, both compared to holy fools earlier in the novel; see Part Four, note 14.
19. Ou va-t-elle la vertu se nicher?: 'Where does virtue make its nest?' (French). An almost exact quotation from Voltaire's Vie de Moliere: 'He [Moliere] had just given alms to a beggar; the next moment, the beggar ran after him and said: "Sir, perhaps you did not intend to give me a gold coin: here, have it back." "Keep it, my friend," said Moliere, "and have another"; then he exclaimed: "See where virtue makes its nest!"'
20. assez cause!: 'Enough talk!' (French); see Part Two, note 32.
21. adieu, mon plaisir: 'Farewell, the pleasure was all my mine' (French).
22. orphanages: Dating to the times of Catherine the Great (1729-96), such orphanages took in children aged seven to eleven, after which they were handed over to schools or factories, or to be apprenticed to private individuals (SB).
23. get yourself off to America: In Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done? one of the characters, the medical student and 'rational egoist' Lopukhov, emigrates to America in order not to impede his wife's new romantic attachment. There is also a historical backdrop to Svidrigailov's injunction: the emigration of Russians to America was frequently reported and debated in the Russian press of the 1860s and 1870s, as was the exile of convicts to North America by the British Empire (SB, PSS). Furthermore, Napoleon was said to have rejected the chance to flee to America after his defeat at Waterloo (see Part Three, note 31).
24. a citizen and a man: 'A man and a citizen' was a stock phrase in nineteenth-century Russian discourse, which Tikhomirov traces to the translated title of a school textbook on morals and civic duty by the educational reformer Johann Ignaz von Felbiger (1724-88), used from the era of Catherine the Great onwards. Variations on the formula make numerous ironic appearances in Dostoyevsky's fiction and the phrase will reappear in a later chapter (see BT, p. 417).
25. robbed a mail coach: See Part Two, note 23.
26. une theorie comme une autre: 'A theory like any other' (French).
27. no truly sacred traditions . . . Chronicles: Svidrigailov's comments on the lack of strong traditions and memories in Russian civilized society ec
10. open doors: In What Is to Be Done? rules are established for communal living in which a man and a woman each have one room in which they cannot be disturbed, as well as one 'neutral' room in which they take tea and meals together. Here Lebezyatnikov appears to suggest that contemporary commune-dwellers have even 'gone beyond' Chernyshevsky (BT).
11. cesspits: The question of who would attend to the 'cesspits' in a Fourier-style community was a familiar one in journalistic debate of the time. Fourier said that this chore would be carried out by 'cohorts of self-sacrificing' adolescents (BT); here, too, Lebezyatnikov and his mentors have gone one step further ('no self-sacrifice would be involved').
12. more useful: Dostoyevsky and his journal Epoch often scorned the utilitarianism of a rival journal, the Russian Word, mocking its contributors for making out that 'a pair of boots are even better than Pushkin' (PSS). Their prime target was the talented young critic Dmitry Pisarev, to whom the remark is now commonly attributed. In fact, Pisarev understood 'usefulness' in a much broader sense, asking, in his essay 'The Realists' (1864), for poets to be useful 'as poets'.
13. Whatever is useful . . . is thereby noble!: Echoing Chernyshevsky's claim in his essay 'The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy' (1860) that 'only that which is useful for man in general can be considered a true good'.
14. grey and rainbow-coloured banknotes: Worth, respectively, 50 and 100 roubles.
15. vile, hussarish Pushkinism: A schoolboy poem attributed to Pushkin in the Contemporary in 1863 contains a couplet specifically linking 'horns' with Hussars: 'But Hussars are not to blame / For the length of a husband's horns' (BT).
16. but now I respect you: Again Lebezyatnikov takes his cue from Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?, in which a similar sentiment is expressed by Vera Pavlovna's husband Lopukhov when she tells him she has fallen in love with another man (Chapter 3, XXV).
17. kutya: A dish of rice, raisins and honey or sugar, usually eaten at funeral banquets; previously mentioned in Part One, Chapter V.
18. Gostiny Dvor: A further allusion to the luxurious shops of Nevsky Prospect, glimpsed in the background of the novel from the poverty of its primary setting. The neoclassical Great Gostiny Dvor, one of the world's oldest shopping arcades, still thrives today.
19. Pani chorazyna: 'Madame Ensign' (Polish).
20. Panie!: 'Mister!' (Polish, vocative case).
21. bread and salt: The phrase khleb-sol' (bread-salt) is found in a variety of idiomatic expressions in Russian, most commonly to signify hospitality. In Katerina Ivanovna's repeated usage it gains a proud ring, despite its humble literal meaning (an example of the 'pauper's pride' mentioned earlier).
22. Vater aus Berlin: 'Father from Berlin' (German).
23. T----, the town of her birth: Almost certainly a covert allusion to Katerina Ivanovna's real-life prototype Maria Dmitrievna, Dostoyevsky's first wife, with whom he had a difficult marriage (1857-64) cut short by her death, also from 'consumption'. Maria Dmitrievna was born in Taganrog and graduated from Taganrog boarding school with a certificate of distinction (BT). Compare the descriptions of the ailing Katerina Ivanovna (and her attitude towards her husband, Marmeladov) with the description of Maria Dmitrievna left by Baron Wrangel, a friend of Dostoyevsky's: 'very thin, with a passionate and excitable nature. Even then the ominous flush played over her pale face and a few years later consumption did carry her off to the grave. She was well read, quite well educated, inquisitive, kind-hearted and extraordinarily vivacious and impressionable. She had an ardent concern for Fyodor Mikhailovich and was very kind to him; I don't believe that she held him in very high esteem - it was more a matter of pity for an unfortunate man crushed by fate' (cited in KL).
24. en toutes lettres: 'Quite explicitly' (French).
25. Geld: 'Money' (German).
26. her father was a colonel: In the space of two pages, Katerina Ivanovna has upgraded her father's status from 'court counsellor' (whose military equivalent in the Table of Ranks was lieutenant colonel) to colonel (BT).
27. Burgermeister: 'Town mayor' (German).
28. Gott der Barmherzige!: 'Merciful Lord!' (German).
29. sausage-maker: A pejorative nickname for German women in Russia at the time, when most sausage shops in St Petersburg were run by Germans (SB).
30. for the right hand . . . not to know: See Matthew 6:3: 'But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.' Tikhomirov aptly comments that Lebezyatnikov's 'forgetfulness in this situation is far from accidental, since he renounces alms-giving on principle' (BT).
31. The General Conclusion of the Positive Method: A collection of articles, edited and translated from French and German by N. Neklyudov and published in St Petersburg in 1866; it included 'Brain and Spirit. A Survey of Physiological Psychology for All Thinking Readers' by the German doctor and writer Theodor Piderit (1826-1912), and 'The Regularity of Apparently Voluntary Human Actions from the Point of View of Statistics' by the economist Adolph Wagner (see Part One, note 47). A review in the Russian press bewailed the book's incoherence, but singled out Piderit's and Wagner's articles for praise; it seems likely that here, too, Lebezyatnikov is merely parroting someone else's opinion (BT, PSS).
32. Panie lajdak!: 'Mr Scoundrel!' (Polish).
33. unhappier than you are now: An abrupt change in the Russian text: from the respectful, second-person plural form with which Sonya has addressed Raskolnikov until now, she switches to the familiar singular form with which he has long been addressing her. From this point on she will switch between the two forms.
34. neither Toulon nor Egypt nor the pass at Mont Blanc: References to two of Napoleon Bonaparte's celebrated triumphs (see Part Three, notes 29 and 31) and to his audacious crossing of Mont Blanc in 1800 with 40,000 men and heavy artillery in order to strike at the rear of the Austrian army in Italy.
35. all this was dawning on me: Tikhomirov traces this ambivalent image of sudden revelation, 'like the sun', to the appearance of devils, masked as angels, in the cave of the eleventh-century hermit Isaac of Kiev. St Isaac's hagiographer repeatedly compares their appearance to a sudden burst of illumination, 'like the sun' (BT).
36. kiss the earth you've polluted: The image may be traced to the Old Testament and to Russian folk culture, with its ancient practice of kissing and even eating the earth on making a vow, and its mythological image of Mat'-Syra Zemlya or Mother Damp Earth (BT). The latter, following the Christianization of Russia, became popularly linked with the image of the Virgin Mary. Dostoyevsky's readers might also have been reminded of the 'native soil' philosophy (pochvennichestvo) that he and fellow-minded writers had been elaborating since 1861 (see Part Three, note 1).
37. tubercles on the brain: Tikhomirov argues that Lebezyatnikov's comment probably reflects 'superficially understood information about "tubercular inflammation of the membranes of the brain" (i.e., tubercular meningitis)', which he has misapplied to Katerina Ivanovna (BT).
38. Tenez-vous droite: 'Straighten up' (French).
39. Petrushka: The Russian version of Punch and Judy. A staple of fairgrounds, Petrushka had begun to flourish on city streets as well. Dostoyevsky, who took a great interest in street theatre and music, once described the character of Petrushka as 'a kind of Sancho Panza or Leporello, but a completely Russified, popular character'. As Boris Tikhomirov notes, it is precisely the popular quality of Petrushka that Katerina Ivanovna, with her aristocratic taste, wishes to distance herself from (and also, perhaps, the fact that the roguish Petrushka is given to mocking seekers of justice and truth).
40. 'Little Farm': See Part One, note 25.
41. 'The Hussar . . . 'Cinq sous': 'The Hussar Leaning on his Sabre', based on words from Konstantin Batyushkov's poem 'Separation' (1814), is sung by prostitutes in Krestovsky's Petersburg Slums (BT). 'Cinq sous' ('Five pennies') is the refrain from a beggars' song in Grace de Dieu, a melodrama known to theatregoers in Moscow and St Petersburg from the 1840s onwards (PSS, BT).
42. Marlborough . . . reviendra: The first lines of a popular French folk song ('Marlborough is off to war / And doesn't know when he'll return'). The song mockingly describes a page giving (mistaken) news of the death in battle of the Duke of Marlborough (1650-1722) to his widow. It gained particular popularity in Russia after 1812, 'since its ironic story of Marlborough's unsuccessful campaign [in the War of the Spanish Succession] was taken as an allusion to the defeat of Napoleon' (BT).
43. Cinq sous . . . menage: 'Five pennies, five pennies / To set up our home' (French).
44. pas de basque: A ballet step performed either close to the floor (glisse) or with a jump (saute).
45. Du hast Diamanten . . . du mehr?: 'You have diamonds and pearls [...] You have the most beautiful eyes, / Girl, what more could you want?' (German). Lines from a poem by Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), though the original has Mein Liebchen ('My darling') where Dostoyevsky has Madchen ('Girl').
46. In the midday heat . . . Dagestan: The opening words of Mikhail Lermontov's poem 'Dream' (1841), set to music many times by Russian composers.
PART SIX
1. political conspirator: Work on this part of Crime and Punishment, in the latter part of 1866, coincided with the public hanging in St Petersburg of Dmitry Karakozov (1840-66), who had tried to shoot Tsar Alexander II in April that year. Also due for public execution was Nikolai Ishutin (1840-79), to whose revolutionary circle Karakozov had belonged; Ishutin was spared at the last moment by an unexpected pardon from the Tsar - as Dostoyevsky himself had been seventeen years earlier (BT). On Karakozov and his significance for Dostoyevsky see Claudia Verhoeven, The Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity and the Birth of Terrorism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009).
2. I went to see B----: The illustrious physician Sergei Botkin (1832-89), who diagnosed Dostoyevsky's own pulmonary malady as he was beginning work on Crime and Punishment (BT).
3. A hundred rabbits . . . English proverb has it: A characteristic piece of mystification and misquotation on Porfiry's part, for no such English proverb exists. A 'French proverb' quoted in one of Ivan Turgenev's letters has been cited as one inspiration (SB), but there appears to be a common source: the Proces de Madame Lafarge (Pagnerre: Paris, 1840), an account of the trial of Marie Lafarge (1816-52), who was eventually convicted for the murder of her husband by arsenic. The pioneering trial hinged on forensic evidence and chemical tests, and 'l'affaire Lafarge' was followed in the daily press by a gripped and divided French society. One of the defendant's lawyers, Maitre Paillet, criticized the preference of the Ministere Publique for generalities rather than hard facts. In support of his position, he invoked the words of the Attorney-General at the Court of Appeal, Monsieur Dupin, who had recently made the following 'picturesque' criticism of the Ministere Publique: 'avec vos trente-six petits lapins blancs vous ne ferez jamais un cheval blanc' ('your thirty-six little white rabbits will never make a white horse'); Proces de Madame Lafarge, p. 433. The case furnishes an interesting and complex precedent for both Porfiry and Dostoyevsky, given the latter's suspicion of any legal system in which only 'hard facts' - or white horses - hold sway.
4. the plucking of a string: An allusion to the delirious final paragraph of Nikolai Gogol's story 'Notes of a Madman' (1835): 'a bluish mist spreads itself out beneath my feet; in the mist, the plucking of a string'. Noting the possible parallel between Raskolnikov, a would-be Napoleon, and Gogol's 'mad' narrator Poprishchin, who fancies himself the King of Spain, Tikhomirov also cites a letter Dostoyevsky wrote to Ivan Turgenev in December 1863, where he employs this motif, endowing it with his own meaning and artistic credo. After criticizing utilitarian currents in contemporary culture, Dostoyevsky observes that Turgenev's fantastical tale 'Phantoms' paradoxically expresses the real condition of the soul of contemporary man: 'This reality is the anguish of an educated and conscious creature of our times [...] It's "a string being plucked in the mist", and thank goodness for that.' According to Tikhomirov, 'it is precisely "the anguish of an educated and conscious creature" [...] that is the source of everything that happens to the hero of Dostoyevsky's novel' (BT).
5. umsonst!: 'To no avail!' (German).
6. the final pillars: An unusual idiom inspired by the labours of Hercules, meaning 'to reach the limit', 'the furthest point' (BT).
7. a child: Mikolka is, in fact, twenty-two (see Part Two, Chapter IV).
8. schismatic . . . 'Runners' . . . Elder: The causes and effects of the mid-seventeenth-century schism (raskol) in Russian Orthodoxy, between those who accepted the reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon (1605-81) and those who would henceforth be known as the Old Believers or schismatics, preoccupied Dostoyevsky throughout his life, as reflected in the name he gave to the hero of this novel. One of the most radical sects attached to the Old Belief was that of the Runners (beguny), for whom the earth was already in the grip of the Antichrist, and who 'ran' from all worldly authority into forests and remote places. Their tendency to admit to crimes they hadn't committed and to seek out suffering for themselves as a path to holiness was much discussed in the Russian journals of the mid-1860s (PSS). The symbolic relationship - in terms both of contrast and of possible affinity - between Raskolnikov and the raskolnik Mikolka is further underlined by the fact that both men seem to hail from the province of Ryazan (where the district of Zaraisk is located) and are of similar age (twenty-three and twenty-two). The starets (Elder) is a charismatic, often controversial holy man who offers spiritual direction and ministry to Orthodox believers, as depicted most famously in the character of Zosima in Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov.
9. old, 'true' books: Religious books that were especially valued by the Old Believers and contained, for example, the sayings of St John Chrysostom (347-407). Published before the Schism, in the mid-seventeenth century, they were republished in Poland at the end of the eighteenth century and circulated among Old Believers throughout the nineteenth century (BT).
10. new courts: A reference to the legal reforms of 1864, not yet implemented at the time in which the novel is set (summer 1865).
11. 'renewal' through bloodshed: A possible reference to the ideas expounded in Proudhon's La Guerre et la Paix (see Part Three, note 20), as well as to those putatively set out in Raskolnikov's article on crime (BT).
12. Seek and ye will find: See Matthew 7:7: 'Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.'
13. warrant officer: A reference to a character in Gogol's play Marriage (1842) - called Petukhov, though misremembered by Porfiry (or Dostoyevsky) as the offstage warrant officer Dyrka - who, 'even if you just show him a finger will suddenly laugh out loud, by God, and laugh till the cows come home' (BT). The reference echoes Porfiry's characterization of Mikolka earlier in the chapter.
14. ----sky Prospect: Obukhovsky (now Moskovsky) Prospect.
15. must be a seminarian: See Part Two, note 11.
16. cher ami: 'Dear friend' (French).
17. La nature et la verite: A variation of Heinrich Heine's description of Rousseau as 'L'homme de la verite et de la nature' ('The man of truth and nature'), which, in turn, paraphrased Rousseau's pledge in the first book of his Confessions to show man 'in all the truth of his nature'. In a notebook entry written shortly before he began work on Crime and Punishment Dostoyevsky described the ideal of 'the man of truth and nature' as nothing but 'a puppet that doesn't exist' (BT). Through Svidrigailov, la nature receives an even more critical (and cynical) interpretation.
18. Sistine Madonna: According to the memoirs of Dostoyevsky's second wife, Anna Grigoryevna, Dostoyevsky spoke of the 'sorrow in the smile' of the Sistine Madonna, which he considered 'the greatest manifestation of human genius' (BT). The comparison with a 'holy fool' drawn by Svidrigailov is more fanciful, though it continues a motif of the novel, linking the Virgin Mary with Lizaveta and Sonya, both compared to holy fools earlier in the novel; see Part Four, note 14.
19. Ou va-t-elle la vertu se nicher?: 'Where does virtue make its nest?' (French). An almost exact quotation from Voltaire's Vie de Moliere: 'He [Moliere] had just given alms to a beggar; the next moment, the beggar ran after him and said: "Sir, perhaps you did not intend to give me a gold coin: here, have it back." "Keep it, my friend," said Moliere, "and have another"; then he exclaimed: "See where virtue makes its nest!"'
20. assez cause!: 'Enough talk!' (French); see Part Two, note 32.
21. adieu, mon plaisir: 'Farewell, the pleasure was all my mine' (French).
22. orphanages: Dating to the times of Catherine the Great (1729-96), such orphanages took in children aged seven to eleven, after which they were handed over to schools or factories, or to be apprenticed to private individuals (SB).
23. get yourself off to America: In Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done? one of the characters, the medical student and 'rational egoist' Lopukhov, emigrates to America in order not to impede his wife's new romantic attachment. There is also a historical backdrop to Svidrigailov's injunction: the emigration of Russians to America was frequently reported and debated in the Russian press of the 1860s and 1870s, as was the exile of convicts to North America by the British Empire (SB, PSS). Furthermore, Napoleon was said to have rejected the chance to flee to America after his defeat at Waterloo (see Part Three, note 31).
24. a citizen and a man: 'A man and a citizen' was a stock phrase in nineteenth-century Russian discourse, which Tikhomirov traces to the translated title of a school textbook on morals and civic duty by the educational reformer Johann Ignaz von Felbiger (1724-88), used from the era of Catherine the Great onwards. Variations on the formula make numerous ironic appearances in Dostoyevsky's fiction and the phrase will reappear in a later chapter (see BT, p. 417).
25. robbed a mail coach: See Part Two, note 23.
26. une theorie comme une autre: 'A theory like any other' (French).
27. no truly sacred traditions . . . Chronicles: Svidrigailov's comments on the lack of strong traditions and memories in Russian civilized society ec