Humiliated and Insulted

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  p.15, The Children’s Reader: The Children’s Reader for the Heart and Mind (1785–89) was the first Russian reader for children and adolescents.

  p.16, some hundred and fifty souls: Under serfdom (abolished in 1861) the value of an estate was assessed principally by the number of serfs (souls) attached to it.

  p.19, “a pauper – scion of an ancient line”: From the poem ‘The Princess’ by Nikolai Nekrasov (1821–87).

  p.25, B.: Visarion Belinsky (1811–48) was Russia’s most famous literary critic, responsible for launching Dostoevsky’s first novel Poor Folk (1846). Ivan Petrovich, a lightly autobiographical figure, is writing that very novel on the pages of Humiliated and Insulted, published in 1861. Having read Poor Folk in manuscript, Belinsky rushed over to Dostoevsky in the dead of night to get him out of bed and congratulate him.

  p.27, Sumarokov’s generalship… court poet Derzhavin… Lomonosov: In the reign of Catherine the Great the playwright Alexander Sumarokov (1718–77) enjoyed a high-ranking civic title which was equivalent to that of an army general. Gavrila Derzhavin (1743–1816) was a poet at the Court of Catherine the Great and subsequently Minister of Justice in the reign of Alexander I. His ode Felicia earned him from Catherine II a diamond-encrusted tobacco casket and five hundred gold coins. Mikhail Lomonosov (1711–65) was a great scientist (discoverer of the atmosphere of Venus), writer, educator – a true polymath. Catherine came to visit him in his home laboratory on 7th June 1764.

  p.28, a Roslavlev, say, or a Yury Miloslavsky: Heroes in the historical novels of the writer Mikhail Zagoskin (1789–1852), Roslavlev or Russians in 1812 (1831) and Yury Miloslavsky or Russians in 1612 (1829), which formed part of the staple reading diet in the household of Dostoevsky’s parents.

  p.29, The Liberation of Moscow: A popular historical romance by Ivan Glukharev (1809–c.1840), first published in 1840, a favourite of the previous generation.

  p.31, Chevalier Star: The medal given to those awarded the French order of the Légion d’Honneur.

  p.31, Abbaddonna: An 1834 novel by Nikolai Polevoy (1796–1846) in which the hero conforms to the popular image of the misunderstood poet-dreamer.

  p.49, Scribe: The French playwright Eugène Scribe (1791–1861) enjoyed a long vogue from the 1820s to the 1840s with a prolific output of light social comedies.

  p.67, we too… my stepdaughter: According to Russian Orthodox Church law, marriage between a widower and a widow precludes subsequent marriage between their respective children from former unions.

  p.68, Karamzin: The classic twelve-volume History of the Russian State by Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), published 1816-29.

  p.82, Still the ringing… old soul: From the famous (rhymed) 1854 poem ‘The Harness Bell’ by Yakov Polonsky (1819–98).

  p.92, Gogol’s Mr Midshipman: A character in Gogol’s 1842 comedy The Marriage.

  p.98, ‘Dunk it’: In Gogol’s comic sketch The Lawsuit, published around 1839 or 1840, the wealthy old lady landowner Evdokia scribbles, “Dunk it” under her will instead of her name.

  p.98, Quelle charmante peinture!: “What a charming painting!” (French).

  p.128, He gave his shirt collar a flick: “I’ve had a few” in Russian body language.

  p.130, Cornelius Nepos: Cornelius Nepos (c.100–24 bc) was a Roman biographer, whose writings were a staple for students learning Latin.

  p.131, Frederick Barbarossa: Frederick I, or Frederick Barbarossa, (1122–90) was the Holy Roman Emperor from 1155 to his death in 1190 during the Third Crusade.

  p.132, Je prends mon bien où je le trouve: “I take my goods where I can find them” (French).

  p.141, Penates: The guardian deities of the Roman household.

  p.147, the St Stanislas Order: A civil honour instituted by Tsar Nicholas I in 1829 in recognition of service and contribution to the common weal, as well as the promotion of the glory of the country.

  p.164, the daughter of that king: Servius Tullius, the sixth king of Rome, was murdered by his son-in-law in 534 BC.

  p.204, Yeliseyev’s: A luxury department store in St Petersburg – still trading – equivalent to London’s Fortnum & Mason.

  p.215, Childhood and Youth: A reference to Tolstoy’s groundbreaking semi-autobiographical trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, Youth (1852–57). Here Dostoevsky takes a subtle, typically Dostoevskian dig, at his great contemporary whom he never met. Their wish to keep their distance was, of course, mutual.

  p.234, A bientôt!: “See you soon!” (French). Again, Dostoevsky’s useof French seems to be erroneous in this context.

  p.237, the incipient reforms: As discussed in the Russian press between 1858 and 1860, the emancipation of the serfs, legal reforms, cen-sorship, law reforms, etc.

  p.238, pire ça va, mieux ça est: “The worse it gets, the better it is” (French). Dostoevsky’s erroneous French has been preserved.

  p.249, Pardon, mon ami: “Sorry, my friend” (French).

  p.253, one of your writers: Ivan Turgenev (1818–83) in his 1860 novel On the Eve.

  p.255, mon cher: “My dear” (French).

  p.255, Pulcinella: A stock character, equivalent to Punch, in Italian Commedia dell’arte and puppetry.

  p.260, Quelle idée, mon cher… Buvons, mon ami: “What an idea, my dear”, “Let’s drink, my friend” (French).

  p.263, en somme: “In sum” (French).

  p.265, Talleyrand: Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand (1754–1838) was a French diplomat and politician who was famous for his political astuteness.

  p.298, shchi: Along with borsch, one of Russia’s most distinctive soups, prepared from cabbage, mostly pickled.

  p.344, Take S***… one in ten: Probably Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) and Ivan Goncharov (1812–91) respectively. The latter spent ten years on his classic 1859 novel Oblomov.

  p.358, Wieland: The German Romantic poet Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813), author of Oberon (1780).

  Extra Material on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Humiliated and Insulted

  Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Life

  The family name Dostoevsky was derived from the village Dostoev in the Minsk region. It was granted by the Prince of Pinsk in perpetuity to the boyar Danil Ivanovich Rtishchev in 1506 for services rendered. The city of Pinsk goes back to the eleventh century and forms the heartland of Belorussia. No fewer than four nationalities – Belorussian, Russian, Ukrainian and Polish – go into the composition of the Dostoevsky family tree, and the end result is about as multinational as was possible at the time. The Rtishchevs were Russian, the setting was Belorussian, the suffix “-sky” is predominantly Polish, and over the years some of the Dostoevskys moved and settled in the Ukraine, while others, like the Fyodor Mikhailovich branch, ended up in Moscow. Dostoevsky’s father, Mikhail Andreyevich (1789–1839), was the son of a Ukrainian Uniate priest, Andrey Dostoevsky. Fyodor Mikhailovich himself, of course, never considered himself anything other than Russian. The eminent Dosto­evsky scholar, Ludmila Saraskina, was recently asked if the writer was not of Polish blood, and she responded: “The Dostoevsky lineage presents a fascinating and unusual mixture of nationalities: in a family where the father was Lithuanian, the mother Ukrainian, there was a cult of Russian literature and history, the cult of reading. The atmosphere was one of devotion to the spoken word, and it is precisely this which above all else shaped the author’s creative make-up. Hence, Dostoevsky’s Russianness is a wholly cultural rather than ethnic phenomenon.” The concept “Lithuanian” must, of course, be understood in the traditional sense as in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which has precious little to do with modern Lithuania.

  Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in Moscow on 30th October 1821. In 1831, his father had bought a small estate, Darovoye, and two years later, the neighbouring Chermoshnya, which would acquire lasting fame as Chermashnya, in the violent murder plot of Karamazov senior in
The Karamazov Brothers. Speaking of Darovoye, Dostoevsky confessed: “This small, insignificant place left in me the deepest and most memorable impression for life.” Fyodor was the second in a family of six siblings. His mother, Maria Fyodorovna (née Nechayeva, 1800–37), a religious minded woman, came from a merchant family. She taught him to read from an edition of One Hundred and Four Old and New Testament Stories, and within the family circle there were readings from Karamzin’s The History of the Russian State, as well as from the works of Derzhavin, Zhukovsky and Pushkin. Dostoevsky often sought the company of peasants, and his discussions with them proved to be a rich source of material for his future compositions.

  In 1832 Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail were educated at home by visiting tutors, and from 1833 they were placed in various boarding schools. Dostoevsky found the atmosphere in these establishments oppressive and uncongenial, and his only solace was extensive and intensive reading. From late 1834 to early 1837 the two brothers attended one of Moscow’s best private boarding schools, run by the Czech-born Leontiy Ivanovich Chermak, a man of little or no education, but a brilliant, intuitive pedagogue and a humane and understanding father figure. State-run schools, on the other hand, had an overall unflattering reputation for frequent application of the disciplinary rod and staple bad food. The teacher of Russian, Nikolai Ivanovich Bilevich, turned out to be something of a role model and has allegedly served as the prototype for Nikolai Semyonovich in The Adolescent (variously known as Raw Youth and Accidental Family), whom the hero Arkady picked at random as an appraiser of his autobiographical notes. “At long last I decided to seek someone’s counsel. Having cast around, I chose this gentleman with purposeful deliberation. Nikolai Semyonovich was my former tutor in Moscow, and Marya Ivanovna’s husband…” (The Adolescent, penultimate chapter.)

  By all accounts Dostoevsky’s father, Mikhail Andreyevich, was an upstanding, hard-working family man – his one failing, however, being his touchy, short temper. After the death of his wife in 1837, he retired and settled in Darovoye, where he died on 6th June 1839. Officially the cause of death was recorded as apoplexy, but by all popular accounts he perished at the hands of his peasants, forming a possible clue to the origins of the plot involving the mysterious death of the head of the family in The Karamazov Brothers. The loss of his mother in 1837 coincided with the shattering news of Pushkin’s fatal duel, which Dostoevsky perceived as a personal bereavement too. Dostoevsky’s adulation of Pushkin continued all his life, and reached its apotheosis in 1880, only months before his own death.

  In May 1837 he enrolled at the Koronad Filipovich Kosto­marov cramming institute, prior to applying to the Central Military Engineering Academy, where he got to know the highly colourful Ivan Nikolayevich Shidlovsky, subsequently a poet and church historian. Originally the name of the principal character in The Idiot was to be Shidlovsky, and when responding to Vladimir Solovyev’s request in 1873 for some biographical material for an article, Dostoevsky enjoined him to mention his friend. “Make sure you mention him in your article. It does not matter that no one knows of him and that he has not left behind a literary legacy. I beg you, my dear chap, mention him – he was a major figure in my life, and deserves that his name should live on.” Dostoevsky attended the Engineering Academy from January 1838; unfortunately his brother Mikhail had failed to qualify for entry. The gruelling, soul-destroying military regime was to a large extent relieved by the company of close and devoted friends, the writer Dmitry Vasilyevich Grigorovich being one of them. It was he who first noted Dostoevsky’s reticence and unsociability, and who later recorded the tumultuous effect upon Dostoevsky of his rift with Belinsky and his circle, most particularly with Ivan Turgenev.

  The vast bulk of information on Dostoevsky’s early life comes from the Reminiscences of his younger brother Andrey. He was an architect, and also a meticulously scrupulous and tidy worker in everything he undertook. His Reminiscences are well executed, detailed and informative. Quaintly, and for an architect not inappropriately, the book is conceived as a mansion, and the chapters are termed rooms.

  Dostoevsky’s first literary projects were conceived at the Engineering Academy. In 1841, at a soirée organized by his brother Mikhail, Dostoevsky read out excerpts from some of his dramatic compositions – Mary Stuart and Boris Godunov – none of which have survived. On graduation, and having served just under a year in the St Petersburg Engineering Corps, he resigned with the rank of senior lieutenant (поручик) to devote himself entirely to literature.

  His first published work was a translation of Balzac’s Eugènie Grandet, which appeared in 1844. In the winter of the same year he started writing the epistolary novel Poor Folk. Dmitry Grigorovich and the poet Nikolai Nekrasov were so taken by it that they spent the night reading it in manuscript. They then headed for Belinsky’s and on the doorstep announced, “We’ve a new Gogol!” to which Belinsky retorted, “Gogols sprout like mushrooms with you!” But having read the work, his enthusiasm knew no bounds: “The novel reveals such profundities of characters and of life in Russia as no one had ever dreamt of before.” It was accepted for publication by the St Petersburg Anthology, edited by Nekrasov. The praise lavished on the novel obviously went to Dostoevsky’s head, because he requested that each page should have a black border to make the work stand out; the astonished Nekrasov refused point blank, and it was published without the borders. It was an overnight success.

  At the end of 1845 at a soirée at Belinsky’s, Dostoevsky read out selected passages from The Double. Belinsky was quite interested at first, but later expressed his disapproval. This marked the beginning of the rift between the two men. Dostoevsky took it very badly and, stressed as he was, the very first symptoms of epilepsy, which were to plague him for the rest of his life, began to manifest themselves.

  In spring 1847 Dostoevsky began to attend (on a far from regular basis) the Friday meetings of the revolutionary and utopian socialist Mikhail Petrashevsky. The discussions, which included literary themes, bore on the whole a political and sociological slant – the emancipation of the serfs, judicial and censorship reforms, French socialist manifestos and Belinsky’s banned letter to Gogol were typical subjects of debate. In 1848 Dostoevsky joined a special secret society, organized by the most radical member of the Petrashevsky Circle, one Nikolai Speshnev, by all accounts a colourful and demonic figure, whom Dostoevsky imagined to be his Mephistopheles. The society’s goal was to organize an insurrection in Russia. On the morning of 23rd April 1849, the author, together with other members of the group, was arrested and confined in the Peter and Paul Fortress. Many of them, including Speshnev, found themselves depicted twenty-three years later in the pages of Devils.

  After eight months in the fortress, where Dostoevsky wrote his story The Little Hero, he was found guilty of “plotting to subvert public order” and was initially sentenced to death by firing squad, which was at the last moment commuted to mort civile, amounting to four years of hard labour and subsequent conscription into the army. His experiences as a convict of the Omsk Fortress are poignantly recorded in Notes from the House of the Dead (1860–62) and the theme of execution itself is treated in some detail in The Idiot.

  After January 1854 Dostoevsky served as a private in Semipalatinsk, eastern Kazakhstan. Even before his departure for the army, he wrote to Natalya Dmitrievna Fonvizina, the wife of one of the Decembrists (members of the ill-fated uprising in December 1825):

  I seem to be in some kind of an expectation of something; I can’t help feeling I’m ill, and that soon, very soon something decisive will happen. I feel that I’m approaching a turning point in my life, that I’ve reached a state of maturity and am on the verge of something peaceful, blithe – perhaps awesome – but certainly inevitable.

  These were prophetic words. Almost immediately on arrival in Semipalatinsk he made the acquaintance of a minor clerk, Alexander Ivanovich Isayev, an impoverished customs-and-excise officer and alcoholic, and his
wife, Maria Dmitrievna. Mrs Isayeva was then twenty-nine years old. Dostoevsky fell head over heels for her, although his love was not always requited and she considered him to be “a man with no future”. He was no doubt attracted by what he perceived to be her vulnerability and spiritual defencelessness. Dostoevsky’s own life was not of the happiest, and the two revelled in bouts of self-pity. And then came a terrible blow: Isayev was transferred to Kuznetsk, some six hundred versts from Semipalatinsk. Dostoevsky took the parting indescribably badly.

  In August 1855 Maria Dmitrievna informed Dostoevsky that her husband had passed away. She was in dire straits – alone, without means, in an unfamiliar town, without relatives or friends to help her. Dostoevsky proposed to her immediately, but Maria Dmitrievna demurred. He realized, of course, that it was his own lowly status that was at the root of the problem. However, with the death of Nicholas I and the enthronement of Alexander II, there was hope in the improvement of the fate of the Petrashevtsy convicts. In December 1855 he was made a warrant officer; this elated him so much that in early 1856 he wrote to his brother of his intention to tie the knot: “I’ve taken my decision and, should the ground collapse under me, I’ll go through with it… without that, which for me is now the main thing in life, life itself is valueless…”

  Dostoevsky was so desperately short of money that he implored his brother for a loan of 100 roubles or more, or as much as he could afford. Begging for money was to become a way of life for Dostoevsky. Almost in desperation, he made a daring move. Having obtained official leave to go to Barnaul, he took a secret trip to Kuznetsk. But, to his surprise, instead of being greeted with love and affection, he found himself in a situation such as is depicted in White Nights and Humiliated and Insulted. Maria Dmitrievna flung her arms round his neck and, crying bitterly and with passionate kisses, confessed that she had fallen in love with the schoolteacher Nikolai Borisovich Vergunov and was intending to get married to him. Dostoevsky listened in silence to what she had to say, and then sat down with her to discuss her prospective marriage to a man who had even less money than he, but had two incontestable advantages – he was young and handsome. Maria Dmitrievna insisted the two rivals should meet and, like the Dreamer in White Nights and Ivan Petrovich in Humiliated and Insulted, Dostoevsky decided to sacrifice his own love for the sake of others. This fairly bowled Maria Dmitrievna over: Dostoevsky wrote to Wrangel, quoting her words to him: “‘Don’t cry, don’t be sad, nothing has yet been decided. You and I, and there’s no one else.’ These were positively her words. I spent two days in bliss and suffering! At the end of the second day I left full of hope…”