The Adolescent

12. Cenobitic order means a life in common (from the Greek koinobion, “common life”) for all the monks in a monastery, as opposed to the “idiorhythmic” life in which each monk is responsible for his own maintenance.

13. In the Orthodox Church, young children are allowed to take communion without prior preparation, but after a certain age they are expected to prepare, like adults, by attendance at services, confession, and fasting.

14. In Orthodox piety, the “gift of tears” is a sign of profound spiritual development. In The Brothers Karamazov the elder Zosima will say: “Water the earth with the tears of your joy, and love those tears.”

15. In the Book of Job, God in his wager with Satan allows him to destroy Job’s seven sons and three daughters. Having won the wager by proving Job’s righteousness, God gives him another seven sons and three daughters. It is never said, however, that Job “forgot the former ones.”

16. A nobleman convicted of a crime would be stripped of his legal and hereditary rights, but it was possible to have them restored in return for service to the state, for instance, in one of the new Russian “colonies” in Turkestan, which was being settled at the time.

17. Arkhangelsk is in the northwest of Russia on the White Sea; Kholmogory is a small village about fifty miles south of Arkhangelsk on the Dvina River.

18. The German title Kammerjunker (“gentleman of the bedchamber”) was adopted by the Russian court. It was a high distinction for a young man.

19. This is an example of the long fellow’s (or Dostoevsky’s) absurd humor: the French often substitute a w for a v in writing German or Russian names, but the w is still pronounced as a v. However, Arkady’s name transliterated into French would be “Dolgorouky,” not “Dolgorowky.” What’s more, the long fellow obviously pronounces his fanciful version “Dolgorovky,” which is why Arkady thinks he has said “Korovkin.”

20. The Journal des débats was a French daily newspaper founded in 1789 and continuously published until 1944, always with a moderate liberal tendency; the Indépendance belge was published in Brussels from 1830 to 1937.

21. In Russian, the German Junker, meaning “young lord,” referred to a lower officer’s rank open only to the nobility.

22. That is, Bolshaya Morskaya Street, which runs from Palace Square to Senate Square in Petersburg, parallel to the Moyka River. It was a wealthy street with many fine houses on it, including the mansion belonging to Vladimir Nabokov’s family.

23. Noël-François-Alfred Madier de Montjau (1814–1892) was a French lawyer who became a people’s representative after the establishment of the Second Republic in 1848. Banished following Napoleon III’s coup d’état in 1852, his name became news again in 1874, when his election as a deputy of the extreme left caused a considerable stir. The “current Parisian events” were the declaration of the Third Republic, the elections, and the drafting of a new constitution. The Poles, who had been under Russian domination since the partition of Poland in 1772, were often ardent republican sympathizers.

24. An imprecise quotation from the poem “I feel dull and sad . . .” by the Russian poet Mikhail Lermontov (1814–1841).

25. The monumental two-part drama by the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1852), based on the much older legend of the philosopher Faust, who sells his soul to the devil in exchange for earthly power. Gretchen is a young girl seduced and abandoned by Faust.

26. The first words (and title) of the great hymn from the missa pro defunctis (requiem mass): Dies irae, dies illa / solvet saeclum in favilla, / teste David cum Sibylla (“Day of wrath, day that will / dissolve the world to burning coals, / as witnessed David and the Sibyl”), a meditation on the Last Judgment attributed to Tommaso da Celano (1190–1260), one of the first disciples and also the first biographer of Saint Francis of Assisi.

27. Alessandro Stradella (1644–1682) was an Italian singer and composer of cantatas, operas, oratorios, and instrumental music.

28. In the Orthodox liturgy, these words are sung by the choir at the end of the Cherubic Hymn, which accompanies the entrance of the priest bearing the bread and wine of the eucharist: “Let us lay aside all earthly cares . . . That we may receive the King of all, who comes invisibly upborne by the angelic hosts. Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!” Trishatov recites the scene in the cathedral from the opera Faust, by French composer Charles Gounod (1818–1893), but adds his own uplifting “hosanna” at the end.

29. This famous phrase comes from the book What Is Property? (1840), by the French socialist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865).