Crime and Punishment

by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

  24. who really are new: Most likely an ironic reference to the 'new people' envisaged by Chernyshevsky (SB).

  25. Rus . . . Napoleon: For Russian readers an obvious allusion to Pushkin's novel in verse Eugene Onegin (1823—31), Chapter 2, Stanza 14. The mention of Rus, conjuring an image of a pre-modern and 'spiritual' Russia, is also noteworthy, and Tikhomirov aptly teases out the target of Porfiry's irony: 'the ambition of a Russian hero "to become a Napoleon" and the impossibility of Western, European principles ("Napoleonism") taking root in Russian soil ("in Rus")' (BT).

  26. thirty degrees Reaumur: The equivalent of 37.5deg Celsius and nearly 100deg Fahrenheit.

  27. You're the killer: A particularly striking example of a sudden, unexpected switch to the familiar, second-person singular form of address, especially flagrant given the lowly rank of any 'tradesman'.

  28. V---- Church: The Church of the Ascension (Voznesenskaya), which was located by Voznesensky Bridge and was demolished in 1936. Its bell tower dominated the surrounding area (BT).

  29. Toulon . . . Vilno: Highlights from the military career of Napoleon: his successful orchestration of the siege of Toulon, held by royalists, in December 1793; his violent suppression of a royalist uprising in Paris in October 1795; his desertion of his army in Egypt in August 1799 to return to France (the army suffered great losses and eventually capitulated in 1801); the March on Moscow in 1812 that cost the French about half a million soldiers, according to Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), whose Memoires d'outre-tombe (1849-50) Dostoyevsky kept in his library, in Russian translation; and the quip attributed to Napoleon in Warsaw (not Vilno) on his retreat from Russia: 'Du sublime au ridicule il n'y a qu'un pas' ('From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step') (PSS, BT).

  30. idols . . . bronze: The unusual word chosen by Dostoyevsky to signify monuments (kumiry: idols), together with the mention of bronze, sends the reader back to Pushkin and the image in his great narrative poem The Bronze Horseman (1833) of Peter the Great (1672-1725) as 'The idol on a bronze horse', thus suggesting a parallel between Napoleon and Peter. Dostoyevsky saw Peter the Great as a 'man of iron, cruel', who 'as a genius, had just one aim: reform and a new order', sacrificing all moral qualms in the process (cited from BT).

  31. the pyramids, Waterloo: References to the so-called Battle of the Pyramids in July 1798, when Napoleon defeated the Mamluks in Egypt, having told his forces: 'Men! Forty centuries look down upon you from the height of those pyramids'; and to Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo in 1815, after which, according to legends cultivated by Romantic writers, Napoleon 'rejected the chance to flee to America and intentionally gave himself into the hands of the English, so that, assuming "the martyr's crown", he could bring his career, the career of "an extraordinary man", to its "ideal" conclusion' (cited from BT).

  32. carrying my little brick for universal happiness: A reworking of the expression 'apporter sa pierre a l'edifice nouveau' ('to bring one's stone for the new building'), used by Fourier's follower Victor Considerant (1808-93). Having sympathized with the ideals of utopian socialism in his youth, Dostoyevsky was much more critical by the 1860s, especially in his polemics with Chernyshevsky and other Russian socialists and radicals (PSS, BT). Tatyana Kasatkina has suggested that the substitution of 'brick' for 'stone' may allude to the building of the Tower of Babel ('And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them throughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar' (Genesis 11:3).

  33. O 'quivering' creature!: An allusion to Pushkin's cycle 'Imitations of the Koran' (1824), the first poem of which ends with Allah addressing the Prophet Muhammad as follows: 'Be strong, despise deceit Vigorously follow the path of truth Love orphans, and teach / My Koran to every quivering creature.' As Sergei Bocharov has pointed out, Pushkin was translating 'into the language of the Koran the Gospel verse addressed by the risen Christ to the apostles: "Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature"' (Mark 16:15). In Raskolnikov's citation, the phrase 'quivering creature' becomes negatively marked and, as such, a motif of Raskolnikov's perception of others and of himself (see BT).

  34. lines up a top-notch battery: Raskolnikov appears to be eliding two of his 'extraordinary' men - Muhammad and Napoleon - with particular reference to Napoleon's violent suppression of the royalist uprising in Paris in October 1795 (BT).

  PART FOUR

  1. et nihil humanum: The common misrendering of part of a celebrated quotation from the Roman poet Terence's comedy Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor): 'Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto' ('I am a man: nothing human is alien to me').

  2. bonne guerre: Literally, 'good war' (French), but in idiomatic usage signifying something like the English 'All's fair in love and war', or simply 'Fair enough' ('c'est de bonne guerre').

  3. beneficent free speech . . . German lass . . . 'The Scandal of The Age': The context of these comments is the relaxation of censorship in the early 1860s as part of the reforming agenda of Alexander II (1818-81). 'Beneficent glasnost', as it was sometimes called, brought with it a litany of public shamings and scandals much debated in the press. In 1860 a landowner, A. P. Kozlyainov, beat a German woman in a train; a correspondent in the Northern Bee spoke out against the consensus (as Svidrigailov will do), defending the landowner and citing the provocative behaviour of the possibly drunken woman, who had been pestering Kozlyainov's sister. 'The Scandal of The Age' (more literally, 'The Abominable Act of The Age') was the title of an attack in the St Petersburg Gazette against a feuilleton published in the weekly journal The Age, which objected to an allegedly immoral public reading by Yevgenia Tolmachova, the wife of a prominent provincial official, of an episode from Pushkin's unfinished 'Egyptian Nights' (1835), an improvisation in verse on the theme of 'Cleopatra and her lovers'. The scandal caused by the reading was a vivid illustration of the ongoing debate on female emancipation (PSS, BT). Dostoyevsky wrote two essays defending Tolmachova's reading and Pushkin's text, and appealing to the transformation of sexual material in the artistic process; see Susanne Fusso, Discovering Sexuality in Dostoevsky (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2006), pp. 3-9.

  4. the peasant reforms passed us by: A reference to the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861, when forests and meadows were retained by the old landed gentry.

  5. Dussots and pointes: Dussot's was a high-class restaurant just off the Moika Canal; by pointe Svidrigailov probably means the spit at the western end of Yelagin Island, a fashionable leisure spot (PSS).

  6. North Pole . . . vin mauvais: In 1865 the St Petersburg press frequently reported discussions under way in the Royal Geographic Society in London about preparations for an expedition to reach and explore the North Pole (PSS, BT). The French idiom avoir le vin mauvais (literally, 'to have bad wine') is typically said of someone who becomes aggressive when drunk.

  7. Berg's: Wilhelm Berg, a well-known fairground showman and entrepreneur who organized risky and spectacular hot-air balloon rides in the Yusupov Gardens (BT).

  8. pour vous plaire: 'Just to please you' (French).

  9. Vyazemsky's House on Haymarket: Located just off Haymarket Square, this enormous building was described by Krestovsky in Petersburg Slums as 'thirty houses in one': 'inhabited by swindlers, thieves, passportless tramps and other such types, whose existence is considered an inconvenience in a well-ordered town' (BT).

  10. Rassudkin . . . Razumikhin: A confusion arising from the fact that the words rassudok and razum have broadly similar meanings to do with reason, intellect and sense.

  11. Polechka and Lenya: The younger sister, Lenya, was referred to in Part Two as Lida. Here, as elsewhere, Dostoyevsky's inconsistencies have not been corrected.

  12. Holy fool: By Dostoyevsky's time, the Russian word yurodivyi had acquired two fundamental, but closely related meanings. One was broadly positive, deriving from the form of eccentric religious behaviour known as yurodstvo Khrista radi ('folly for Christ's sake') and finding biblical sanc
tion in Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians. A yurodivyi in this sense was a profoundly holy person whose saintliness was expressed in a paradoxical way, whether through provocative 'madness', aggression or godly simplicity. The other meaning, engendered partly by scepticism towards 'false holy fools' who wished to claim unearned privileges, was sharply negative: a halfwit or madman, without any redeeming features. Dostoyevsky often toyed with both of these meanings at once; see Harriet Murav, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky's Novels & the Poetics of Cultural Critique (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).

  13. the New Testament in Russian translation: On his way to prison camp in the Siberian town of Omsk in 1850, Dostoyevsky was given just such a book by the wives of men punished for their participation in the Decembrist uprising of 1825. Published in 1823, it gave the first full translation of the New Testament into modern Russian, rather than Church Slavonic (PSS, BT). Its publication, though authorized by Tsar Alexander I, met with immediate resistance on the part of some ministers and prelates, thereby endowing it with subversive, revolutionary force. Ministers and prelates feared, as Victoria Frede has recently written, that the new translations published by the Russian Bible Society between 1819 and 1824 'would "destroy Orthodoxy", because individuals who sought to interpret scripture on their own would inevitably reach false conclusions. Not only would translations "destroy the true faith", but they would also "disrupt the fatherland and produce strife and rebellion" [...] It would be another forty years before church and state authorized the publication of a Russian Bible' - thus bringing us up to the time of the writing of Crime and Punishment. Quoted from Frede, Doubt, Atheism, and the Nineteenth-Century Russian Intelligentsia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011), p. 34.

  14. She will see God: See the Sermon on the Mount: 'Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God' (Matthew 5:8).

  15. Read! I want you to!: Boris Tikhomirov offers an absorbing account of the way this passage evolved during work on the novel. Originally (to judge from his preparatory notes), Dostoyevsky intended Sonya to take the lead: to thrust the Gospels on Raskolnikov and to compare herself to the resurrected Lazarus. The first version of the chapter which Dostoyevsky sent to his publisher, Katkov, has been lost, but was presumably based on this plan. Katkov and his fellow editor rejected it, seeing in it 'traces of nihilism'. The revised version we now have (work on which cost Dostoyevsky, by his own account, the equivalent of 'three new chapters') represents, as Tikhomirov argues, an artistic advance on the preliminary notes: Sonya, no longer a didactic figure, becomes exemplary, here and throughout, for her presence rather than her words (BT). See also Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871, pp. 93-5.

  16. Now a certain man was sick, Lazarus of Bethany . . . : Here, and throughout the chapter, Sonya's selected reading from the story of the raising of Lazarus (John 11:1-45) is cited in the Revised Standard Version, though I have replaced 'ill' with 'sick'.

  17. Theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven: A reference to a famous passage in the Gospel of Mark: 'And they brought young children to him, that he should touch them: and his disciples rebuked those that brought them. But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God. Verily I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not enter therein' (Mark 10:13-15).

  18. grace-and-favour apartment: The Russian phrase kazyonnaya kvartira ('an apartment at public expense') could also be used idiomatically to mean a prison (BT) - a further example of Porfiry's 'double-edged' wit.

  19. state . . . actual state . . . privy: Corresponding to grades 5, 4 and 3 in the Table of Ranks.

  20. reforms afoot: The judicial reforms announced in Russia in 1864 had as one of their aims the separation of the judicial system from the civil service: examining magistrates would replace state officials in carrying out preliminary investigation of criminal offences. However, owing to a lack of qualified examining magistrates (equivalents of the juge d'instruction in France) many of the old guard from the civil service, like Porfiry Petrovich, stayed on, but under a different title (BT).

  21. straight after the Battle of Alma: After being defeated at the Battle of Alma in September 1854, during the Crimean War, the Russian army retreated to Sebastopol, where the Allied forces began a siege that lasted almost a year. Sebastopol eventually fell, after heavy casualties on both sides.

  22. Hofkriegsrat . . . General Mack: The war council of the Austrian Empire, the Hofkriegsrat, was responsible for managing the permanent army. General Mack, commander of the Austrian forces, surrendered with 23,000 men to Napoleon at the Battle of Ulm in October 1805, during the War of the Third Coalition (1803-6). Napoleon was now free to advance on the Russian army (commanded by Kutuzov), leading to victory at Austerlitz in December. These events - and the ironies of Mack's failure, despite initial optimism and detailed planning - are reflected in Volume One (Part Two, Chapter III) of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1865-9), which had recently appeared in The Russian Messenger, the same journal in which Crime and Punishment was being serially published.

  23. deputies: A reference to the pre-Reform practice whereby 'deputies' were chosen from the same social estate to which the accused belonged (in this case, the nobility) and tasked with monitoring judicial proceedings (BT).

  PART FIVE

  1. Knop's and the English Shop: Two fancy goods shops on Nevsky Prospect (BT).

  2. Fourier's system and Darwin's theory: The utopian socialist ideas of Francois Fourier and the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin (1809-82) both found many unreliable disciples among the Russian 'social democrats', atheists and 'progressivists' with whom Dostoyevsky so often polemicized, and whose ideas are slavishly recycled by Lebezyatnikov in this chapter. Highly sceptical of the practical application of Fourierist ideas to Russia, Dostoyevsky was even more hostile towards the crude application by some Russian radicals of Darwin's The Origin of Species (1859) to modern society. The spectre of 'social Darwinism' - of a society in which oppression, moral adaptation and rampant egoism might all be justified - haunts Raskolnikov's thinking throughout the novel.

  3. a new commune somewhere on Meshchanskaya Street: Young Russian radicals - women as much as men - had begun to establish 'communes' in St Petersburg in the mid-1860s, encouraged in particular by Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done?. It was hoped that a loosely structured communal life, based on the model of ordinary urban dormitories, would ultimately develop into full-blown Fourierist phalansteries. Communes soon acquired notoriety for free love and staunch opposition to Church and law (BT). A commune of nihilists (including some charged in connection with Dmitry Karakozov's failed attempt to assassinate Alexander II in April 1866) did indeed move to Middle Meshchanskaya Street, very close to Raskolnikov's address, though it is unclear whether or not they had already done so by the time this part of the novel was being written (BT, PSS).

  4. Take Terebyeva . . . civil marriage: Lebezyatnikov's confused attempts to stand up for women's emancipation and the equality of the sexes echo the ideological concerns of What Is to Be Done?, to which Lebezyatnikov unwittingly provides a 'parodic commentary', in the words of Leonid Grossman (cited in SB). At the same time, they reflect genuine changes in the morals of young, anti-religious intellectuals of the time, among whom so-called 'civil marriages' (which Russian law of the time did not acknowledge) were rife - the term often being used in a rather euphemistic sense (BT).

  5. Another young man who's 'flown the nest': An allusion to comments by the mother of Bazarov, the nihilist hero of Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (1862), about her independent and free-thinking son. The Russian idiom is more graphic: literally, 'a broken-off chunk' (of bread), playing on the Russian saying that 'a broken-off chunk can't be stuck back on the loaf'. The context of the quotation perhaps justifies the attenuated translation given here. The mother says to her husband: 'Well, what can we do, Vasy
a? Our son's flown the nest. He's like a falcon: flies in when he wants to, flies off when he wants to; while you and I never budge' (Chapter 21).

  6. distinguons: 'Let's distinguish' (French).

  7. Environment is everything . . . Not to mention Belinsky: On the environment, see Part Three, note 14. The extent to which the environment shapes (and consumes) the individual had been a theme of Russian literature since the 1840s, when Vissarion Belinsky (1811-48), the supremely influential critic and champion of socially minded art, was still alive. The theme was discussed at length in a long essay of 1860 by Nikolai Dobrolyubov (1836-61), whose utilitarian aesthetics are a target of Dostoyevsky's own essay 'Mr ----bov and the Question of Art' (1861).

  8. the unequal gesture of hand-kissing: Further parroting by Lebezyatnikov of What Is to Be Done?, in which Chernyshevsky's heroine, Vera Pavlovna, explains why women find it offensive to have their hands kissed by men: 'it means that they [men] don't consider women as people like them, they think that [...] however much a man may abase himself before her, he is still not her equal, but far superior' (Chapter 2, XVIII).

  9. workers' associations in France: A theme often championed by the Contemporary , with which Dostoyevsky's own journals often crossed swords. One contributor to the Contemporary, writing in 1864, saw in the Parisian workers' associations founded by French socialists not just 'liberation' in a material sense, but 'a moral improvement in the working class' (PSS).