The Adolescent

30. Alexander Herzen (1812–1870), a radical publicist and an acquaintance of Dostoevsky’s in the 1840s, went into self-imposed exile in 1847. In London, from 1857 to 1869, he published a revolutionary Russian-language weekly called The Bell, and also wrote two important books: From the Other Shore , a series of letters on socialism, and My Past and Thoughts.

31. See Part One, note 21.

32. Dostoevsky first intended this dream for the chapter entitled “At Tikhon’s” in his previous novel, Demons (1871–1872). That chapter was suppressed by his publisher, and the dream was then reincorporated into The Adolescent with modifications. Dostoevsky knew this painting from his own visits to the Dresden Pinakothek. Claude Gellée, called Le Lorrain (1600–1682), was a master of sun and light, and one of the greatest French painters of landscape. The Sicilian shepherd Acis, who was loved by the nymph Galatea, was crushed under a huge rock by the jealous cyclops Polyphemus. The cyclops in the picture makes the age a little less golden than Versilov likes to think.

33. The allusions are to the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871) and the burning of the Tuileries (and much of the Louvre) in Paris under the Commune (1871).

34. Pétroleurs were incendiaries who used oil or kerosene (pétrole) to start fires.

35. The reference is to the poem “Frieden” (“Peace”), from the cycle Die Nordsee (“The North Sea”) in Das Buch der Lieder (“The Book of Songs”), by the German poet Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), which describes Christ’s return to earth and the regeneration of people under his love. Versilov (or Dostoevsky) changes the North Sea to the Baltic.

36. Versilov is probably referring to the soliloquy that opens Act V, Scene ii of Othello (“It is the cause, it is the cause, my soul”), not Othello’s last speech in lines 338–56 of the same scene (“Soft you! A word or two before you go”). “Evgeny at Tatyana’s feet ” refers to stanza XLI in the eighth and final chapter of Pushkin’s novel in verse Evgeny Onegin. The episode from Les Misérables (Part Two, Book Three) describes the meeting of the little girl Cosette with the escaped convict Jean Valjean.

37. It was customary in Russia to lay a dead person out on a table while waiting for the coffin to be prepared.

38. A panikhida is a memorial service for the dead, which may be held before as well as after the actual burial service.

39. See Part Two, note 25. The Old Believers, in their wish to hold on to all that had characterized the Russian Orthodox Church before the reforms of the patriarch Nikon, managed to preserve some of the finest old Russian icons.

40. See Part Two, note 28. As is often the case with Arkady’s allusions, the story of Abishag has no relation at all to what he is describing here.

41. A vogue for spiritualism, or spiritism, as it was originally called, swept through upper-class Europe, including the courts, in the late 1860s and early 1870s, when mediums and table-rapping séances became socially respectable. Tolstoy also refers mockingly to the vogue for spiritism in Anna Karenina, which was written at the same period as The Adolescent.

42. The von Sohn murder trial caused a stir in Petersburg in 1869– 1870. The elderly von Sohn was murdered in a brothel to the dancing and singing of the prostitutes; he was then put in a trunk and shipped to Moscow as baggage. Dostoevsky refers to the case again in The Brothers Karamazov.

43. An imprecise quotation of a line spoken apropos of Chatsky by the old lady Khlyostova in Woe from Wit (see Part One, notes 38 and 39).

44. Militrisa is the daughter of King Kirbit in The Tale of Prince Bova, a sixteenth-century Russian version of Beuves d’Hanstone, a thirteenth-century French chanson de geste that was widely spread in Europe. Dostoevsky refers to the same tale again in The Brothers Karamazov.

45. In the Orthodox Church, Great Lent is the forty-day period of fast that precedes Holy Week (see Part Two, note 31). Preparation for communion at Easter would include eating lenten meals (no meat, eggs, or dairy products), confessing, and attending the services of Lent and Holy Week.

46. During the Bridegroom services that fall on the first three days of Holy Week, the hymn is sung which gives these services their name: “Behold! the Bridegroom comes at midnight, and blessed is the servant whom He shall find watching . . .”

47. Molchalin is the trivial and servile private secretary in Woe from Wit (see Part One, notes 38 and 39). Dostoevsky mentions Molchalin in his Diary of a Writer for October 1876 (Chapter One, section 3), and adds parenthetically, “Some day I am going to dwell on Molchalin. It is a great theme.”