The Adolescent

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 Russian 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.