The Adolescent

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 procurator 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.

3. Kutya (accented on the last syllable) is a special dish offered to people in church at the end of a memorial service, and in some places on Christmas Eve, made from rice, barley, or wheat and raisins, sweetened with honey.

4. This day of commemoration of the dead, also known as Krasnaya gorka (“Pretty Little Hill”), falls on the Tuesday following Saint Thomas’s Sunday, the first Sunday after Easter. The Russian name probably comes from the custom of decorating the graves (“little hills”) for the occasion.

5. In Part Three of both editions of The Adolescent published during Dostoevsky’s lifetime, the name of this character changes from Darya Onisimovna to Nastasya Egorovna. The same shift occurs in the notebooks for the novel, and evidently slipped from there into the final draft and hence into print. We follow the definitive Russian edition in preserving the change.

6. See Part Two, note 5.

7. Saint Mary of Egypt, a fifth-century saint greatly venerated in Orthodoxy, was a prostitute who was miraculously converted and spent the last forty-seven years of her life in the desert, in prayer and repentance.

8. The merchant’s name, though a plausible one in Russian, is suggestive of his character: it means “cattle slaughterer.”

9. There are twelve great feasts in the Orthodox liturgical year.

10. A “holy fool” (or “fool in God,” or “fool for Christ’s sake”—yurodivy in Russian) is a saintly person or ascetic whose saintliness is expressed in a certain “folly” of behavior. Holy fools were known early in Christian tradition. However, the term may also be applied to a harmless village idiot.

11. A distorted quotation of the Epistle of Jude: “hating even the garment spotted by the flesh” (Jude 23).