Poor Folk and Other Stories
Page 34
‘Well, and what happened then? Go on, tell us!’
‘Oh, not much. I once ran into Fedosei Nikolaich, and was about to tell him to his face that he was a villain…’
‘Yes?’
‘But somehow I couldn’t get the words out, gentlemen!’
NOTES
POOR FOLK
p. 3 The epigraph is taken from a short story by V. F. Odoyevsky, The Living Corpse (1839).
p. 6 Brambew. ‘Baron Brambeus’ was the literary pseudonym of O. I. Senkovsky (1800-58), editor of thejournal Library for Reading, whose articles and stories made him (as Gogol observes in The Government Inspector) one of the idols of the minor civil-servant classes, and of the less well-educated Russian reading public in general.
p. 6 thirty-five paper rubles: assignatsii, paper money introduced into Russia in 1769, but replaced in 1843 by credit notes. In the 1830s one paper ruble was equivalent to twenty-seven silver copecks.
p. 7 Devushkin: the name is derived from the Russian wo|rd devushka, ‘a girl’.
p. 9 Dobroselova: the name means ‘good village’.
p. 15 an assessor in Tula: possibly a quotation from Pushkin’s Fragments from Onegin’s journey:
Why, like an assessor in Tula,
Am I not lying in a palsy?
p. 15 Teresa and Faldoni: the names of the unhappy lovers in the sentimental novel of the same name by the Frenchwriter N. G. Léonard (1744-93). The novel was translated into Russian in 1804, and became a popular success.
p. 16 Such temperate weather: a reference to The Divine Liturgy of Our Fathers Among the Saints John Chrysostom and Basil the Great: ‘For temperate weather, abundance of fruits of the earth, and for peaceful seasons, let uspray to the Lord’ (The Orthodox Liturgy, SPCK, 1982).
p. 19 it hardly gets dark at nights now: in Leningrad (St Petersburg) the end of May is the season of ‘White nights’.
p. 21 the St Petersburg Side: the St Petersburg side of the River Neva, facing the ‘Vyborg Side’.
p. 22 Lomond’s grammar: A Complete Trench Grammar, Comprising the Rules of Pronunciation, Composition and Spelling of Words, Composed by Lomond, and Corrected and Supplemented by Letelier, Moscow, 1831.
p. 23 Zapolsky’s: A New Textbook of the French Language, Comprising an Alphabet, Etymology, Syntax and Examples, published by V. Zapolsky, Moscow, 1817.
p. 37 the complete collection of Pushkin’s works in the most recent edition: the first posthumous edition of Pushkin’s Works, which were published in St Petersburg during the years 1838-41 in eleven volumes.
p. 54 the Kamenny Poyas: a region of Siberia.
p. 56 a Romany wine: Romaneya, a sweet wine.
p. 56 Paul de Kock: French novelist (1793-1871) who wrote bawdy, sentimental novels about Paris life, which were very popular abroad, particularly in England and Russia.
p. 57 Tales of Belkin: this is probably the first edition (1831) of Pushkin’s collection of short stories.
p. 62 The Picture of Man: The Picture of Man, an Edifying Treatise on Aspects of Self-knowledge for All the Educated Classes, Drawn by A. Galich, St Petersburg, 1834. The psychologist and philosopher A. I. Galich (1783-1848) was one of Pushkin’s teachers at the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum. It is probable that Dostoyevsky heard extracts from the Picture read aloud at the family readings which took place in his childhood home.
p. 62 The Little Bell-ringer: Le Petit Sonneur, a novel by the French sentimental-romantic writer F. G. Decray-Dumesnil (1761-1819).
p. 62 The Cranes of Ibicus: Schiller’s well-known poem, in the Russian translation by V. A. Zhukovsky (1813).
p. 62 The Stationmaster: one of Pushkin’s Tales of Belkin. Samson Vyrin is the principal character in the story.
p. 63 the vogue now was for books with illustrations and various kinds of description : in literary Russia, the 1840s were the period of the ‘physiological sketch’. These sketches or ‘descriptions’ were usually accompanied by engraved illustrations depicting’types’ – the representatives of the various estates and professions.
p. 64 I am sending you a book… The Overcoat: the third volume of Gogol’s Works, which appeared at the beginning of 1843, and in which The Overcoat received its first publication.
p. 73 I met Yemelya: Yemelya appears again in Dostoyevsky’s The Honest Thief, where his character receives further development as Yemelyan Ilyich.
p. 80 some kind of fourteenth-class civil servant: the fourteenth class was the lowest category in the table of civil service ranks inaugurated by Peter the Great.
p. 90 Lovelace: a seducer. From the name of the hero of Richardson’s novel Clarissa.
p. 95 izbas: huts, small wooden dwellings.
p. 112 I read the Bee: the conservative newspaper The Northern Bee, published in St Petersburg from 1825 until 1864 by F. V. Bulgakov and N. I. Grech. Gogol mentions the Bee as the preferred reading of minor government clerks in his The Diary of a Madman.
p. 122 canezou: sleeveless blouse.
THE LANDLADY
p. 136 like a flâneur: the word flâneur, which Dostoyevsky also uses in his feuilleton ‘A St Petersburg Chronicle’, dated 1 June 1847, was new at this time in Russian literature. It came to Russia via the novels of Balzac and the French ‘physiological sketch’.
p. 140 a German nicknamed Spiess: Dostoevsky is evidently imitating Gogol here – in Gogol’s The Nevsky Prospekt there are German craftsmen named Schiller and Hoffmann. Ch. H. Spiess (1755-99) was a German writer, whose novels on chivalric and fantastic subjects were popular in Russia. The name also suggests Spiessbürger (petty bourgeois).
p. 154 whole cemeteries giving up to him their dead: possibly an allusion to Pushkin’s tragedy The Covetous Knight, scene 2:
the awesome witch
That makes the moon grow dim, the grave, confounded,
Yield up its dead?…
(tr. Antony Wood)
In their choice of this image, both Pushkin and Dostoyevsky appear to have been influenced by Shakespeare’s Macbeth (cf. Act III, scene 4).
p. 155 Stenka Razin: Stepan Timofeyevich (1630-71), leader of the uprising in the Peasant’s War (1670-71) (see Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter).
p. 160 I’m back at the local station: Yaroslav Ilyich is a police clerk (he also appears in Mr Prokharchin).
p. 162 Koshmarov’s Tenements: the (fictional) name ‘Koshmarov’ is derived from the French: cauchemar (’nightmare’).
p. 165 Pushkin himself mentions something similar in his writings: Yaroslav Ilyich is possibly referring here to certain features of Pushkin’s biography, such as his visits to a fortune-teller and his wearing of a talismanic ring.
p. 201 like a plaster kitten: cf. Gogol, The Overcoat: ‘His collar was low and narrow, so that his neck, in spite of its not being long, seemed inordinately long as it emerged from the collar, like the neck of one of those plaster kittens with wagging heads which our foreign tradesmen carry about on head-trays in their dozens.’
p. 211 He had, what was more, grown sidewhiskers: a hint that Yaroslav Ilyich has probably been sacked from the government service for taking bribes – civil servants were forbidden to wear sidewhiskers.
MR PROKHARCHIN
p. 215 Prokharchin: the name derives from the Russian word kharchi, meaning ‘grub’, or Vittles’. The hero of the story has prokbarchilsya – gone without food to the point where he suffers the fate Dostoyevsky describes.
p. 218 This had happened back in Peski: Peski was an outlying district of St Petersburg which adjoined the Smolnymonastery.
p. 218 the raznochinets Kantarev: a raznochinets was an intellectual or educated person who did notbelong to the gentry.
p. 219 shchi: cabbage soup.
p. 223 some kind of examination in all subjects: according to an imperial decree of 1809, drafted by M. I. Speransky, government clerks (chinovniki) were to be compelled to take examinations in order to obtain civil rank. The decree was not implemented, however, and existed only on paper.
p. 22
6 Tolkuchy Market: this was situated on Sadovaya Street, inside Apraksin Dvor.
p. 226 Krivoy Lane: in the 1840s Krivoy Lane was situated between the Fontanka and Zagorodny Prospekt.
p. 227 ’noses’ and’three leaves’: card games.
p. 237 you’d eat it yourself with bread and never notice: a reference to Gogol’s tale The Nose(1836).
p. 240 they’ll give you the buckle: the buckle was a symbol of military service.
p. 244 pyatak: five-copeck piece.
p. 247 a’thrifty’ swallow: a reference to Derzhavin’s poem ‘The Swallow’ (1792).
POLZUNKOV
p. 249 Polzunkov: the name, derived from the verb polzat’, evokes creeping and crawling.
p. 255 Even the smoke of the fatherland is sweet and pleasant to us!: these words of Chatsky’s in A. S. Griboyedov’s play Woe from Wit are in their turn a quotation from G. R. Derzhavin’s poem ‘The Harp’ (1798).
p. 257 The Feast of St Mary of Egypt: this falls on 1 April (Gregorian calendar); 13 April (new style).
p. 260 the hussar who leaned on his sabre: an allusion to M. Yu. Vielgor-sky’s romance to the words of K. N. Batyushkov’s elegy ‘Parting’ (1812–13). The romance was popular during the 1850s and 1860s – Katerina Ivanovna mentions it in Crime and Punishment.
* Konstantin Mochulsky, Dostoevsky, His Life and Work, Princeton, 1967, p. 22.
*In the final version of Poor Folk, Dostoyevsky used the form ‘His Excellency’, though he did preserve the plural in the verbs, an effect impossible to translate into English.