The Karamazov Brothers

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Would man rise from degradation: Eleusinian Festival, stanza 7.

  Ceres: the goddess of corn and harvests in Greek mythology. She had a daughter by Jupiter, whom she called Proserpine, ‘fruit-bearing’. This daughter was carried away by Pluto as she was gathering flowers in the plains near Enna. The rape of Proserpine was grievous to Ceres, who sought her all over Sicily, and, when night came, she lit two torches in the flames of Mount Etna to continue her search by night the world over. During Ceres’ search for her daughter the cultivation of the earth was neglected and the ground became barren. A festival in honour of Ceres is depicted, for example, in part II of Berlioz’s The Trojans.

  Joy in Nature’s wide dominion: Hymn to Joy, F. Schiller. The translation used here is by Edgar Alfred Bowring (1883).

  begin with the ideal of the Madonna and finish with that of Sodom: Mitya’s soul is torn between these two ideals, the strife between them being the very source of his life’s energy. Cf. L’homme est ni ange ni bête, et le malheur est que qui veut faire l’ange fait la bête: ‘Man is neither angel nor beast, and the misfortune is that he who wishes to be an angel becomes a beast’ (Blaise Pascal).

  Paul de Kock: Paul de Kock (1793–1871), a French writer, very popular in nineteenth-century Russia, considered risqué and lowbrow.

  There were tender words: the source of this quotation is unknown. The assumption must be that the couplet is an original composition.

  Staff Captain: in the Russian Imperial Army an officer’s rank in infantry, artillery, and engineering regiments between Lieutenant and Captain. The rank was abolished in the former Soviet Army, the order of seniority below Captain being Senior Lieutenant, Lieutenant, Junior Lieutenant, Warrant Officer, etc. In the British and US armies the order is Captain, Lieutenant, Warrant Officer, etc. (CW15.543).

  Our Balaam’s ass: Numbers 22: 21–31.

  God created light: Genesis 1: 3–5, 14–19.

  Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka: Nikolai Gogol’s first collection of stories, published 1831–2.

  Universal History: A history textbook by S. Smaragdov (St Petersburg, 1845).

  the painter Kramskoy: Ivan Kramskoy (1837–87), leader of the anti-academic association of Russian painters known as the Wanderers. His picture The Contemplative was first exhibited in St Petersburg on 9 Mar. 1878.

  a Russian soldier: Warrant-Officer Foma Danilov of the 2nd Turkestan battalion, captured by the Kipchaks and put to death in Margelan on 21 Nov. 1875 (DW, Jan. 1877, ch. 1, para. 3.)

  it is written in the Scriptures: Matthew 17: 20: ‘If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove …’; 21: 21: ‘if ye shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; it shall be done’; see also Mark 11: 23; Luke 17: 6.

  koulibiaca: a type of fish pie; a Russian gastronomic delicacy.

  With what measure ye mete, it shall yourself be measured: Matthew 7: 1; Luke 6: 38; Mark 4: 24.

  Tout cela c’est de la cochonnerie: ‘it’s a complete pigsty’.

  Marquis de Sade: Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), French writer notorious for depicting perverse pleasure derived from the exercise of cruelty (sadism).

  il y a du Piron làdedans: ‘there’s a touch of Piron in him’: Alexis Piron (1689–1773), French poet and playwright with a penchant for licentiousness.

  Credo: ‘I believe’.

  A Hero of Our Time … Arbenin: A Hero of Our Time, the novel by the Russian poet Yury Lermontov (1815–41). Arbenin, however, is the protagonist in Lermontov’s drama Masquerade. The brandy has gone to Fyodor Pavlovich’s head.

  feastdays of the Holy Virgin: the principal feasts of the Holy Virgin are the Nativity (8 Sept.), Presentation of the Blessed Virgin (21 Nov.), Annunciation (25 Mar.), Intercession of the Holy Virgin (1 Sept.), and Assumption (15 Aug.).

  Aesop: Aesopus, Phrygian mythologist and philosopher who, originally a slave, procured his liberty by the sallies of his genius. He is best known for his fables. His acerbic wit proved to be his undoing. While consulting the oracle at Delphi, he had made some disparaging remarks about the Delphians, who were so incensed by his witticisms that they cast him from a rock to his death in 561 BC. His biographer, Maximus Planudes, represents him as a clownish figure, short of stature and deformed. Dmitry’s spontaneous association (subsequently reiterated by Ivan) of his father with the man of wisdom and genius is highly significant, indicating the subconscious regard in which he and others hold the old reprobate (see CD).

  Therapon: Greek , meaning ‘ministrant’. After the 1917 Revolution, the Russian orthography was updated; one of the changes was to dispense with the letter Θ, the reason being that it was merely an orthographic relic from the Greek, without the phonal th characteristic. Θ was pronounced either as f (mifologiya, mythology) or as t (teatr, theatre). ‘Thomas’ in modern Russian is ‘Foma’; similarly ‘Theodore’, ‘Fyodor’. By analogy, the Soviet editors of Dostoevsky have transcribed as ‘Ferapont’, which, from an English point of view, is a further corruption of the original and suppresses the underlying meaning of the word.

  The fact that modern Russian for ‘therapy’ is ‘terapiya’ is an added justification for using Th (rather than F) in transcribing the name of Dostoevsky’s hero into English.

  he strongly accented the letter ‘o’: a feature of a northern Russian dialect.

  Laodicean Council. Laodicea (present-day Latakia, Syria), venue of an important Church Council held in AD 360 or 370.

  in the spirit and glory of Elias: cf. Luke 1: 17: ‘And he shall go before him in the spirit and power of Elias, to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children …’.

  and the gates of hell shall not prevail: Matthew 16: 18.

  like chaff in the wind: Psalm 1: 4: ‘The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff which the wind driveth away.’

  C’est tragique: ‘It’s tragic’.

  Goulard’s extract: or Goulard’s water. A solution of subacetate of lead, used as a lotion to treat inflammation. Introduced in 1806 by the French surgeon Thomas Goulard (OED).

  Den Dank, Dame: ‘Madame, I can do without your gratitude’ (from Schiller’s ballad ‘Der Handschuh’ (‘The Glove’)).

  Stolichny Gorod: the Capital City, an inn.

  And nothing in the whole of Nature: from the poem Demon by Aleksander Pushkin.

  Mr Chernomazov: an intentional, pre-Freudian slip on the author’s part: chërny (pronounced chorny) is Russian for ‘black’; kara means ‘black’ in Turkish; maz comes from the Russian mazat’, to smear, to stain; conflating these concepts, one may interpret ‘Karamazov’ as ‘Blackstain’, ‘Blackman’. ‘Karamazov’ is not an established Russian surname; it was made up by Dostoevsky along the lines indicated above.

  a student: universities ran special courses for women only (hence kursistka, a female member of a course). Full-time student status was not available to women at the time.

  to seek justice for Russian women on the banks of the Neva: women’s rights were among the top priorities of the Russian radical movement (KC 206, n. 174). ‘The banks of the Neva’ is a poetic reference to St Petersburg.

  In the province of K: traditional Russian literary device for referring to a place that the author wishes to remain nameless. Any letter, or even two, may be used. Cf. the title of Chekhov’s short story In the Town of S; also, ‘Through the hotel gates of the provincial town NN, rolled a handsome, well-sprung brichka, such as gentlemen bachelors, retired Lieutenant-Colonels, Staff Captains, landowners with about a hundred peasant serfs to their name, in a word, all those who are known as gentlemen of independent means, are wont to ride in’, the opening lines of Gogol’s Dead Souls.

  like Famusov in his last scene … Chatsky … Sofia: characters in Griboyedov’s play, variously translated from the Russian as Woe from Wit; Wit Works Woe; The Misfortune of Being Clever; Clever by Half and, in the 1993 version by Anthony Burgess, Chatsky: The Importance of Being Stupid,
none of which quite captures the simplicity and directness of the Russian original, Gore ot yma.

  tore her guts out: commentators trace the origin of this phrase to Exodus 13: 2, 12 (see CW, 15. 549).

  the father of the present one: Smerdyakov gets it wrong. The ‘present one’—Napoleon III—was Napoleon I’s nephew, i.e. the son of Napoleon I’s brother, Louis Bonaparte, the first King of Holland.

  Petrovka: name of a street in central Moscow.

  professions de foi: ‘declarations of faith’.

  “Do you believe or don’t you believe at all?”: standard question from the ritual of the consecration of a bishop, in response to which the bishop-elect recites the Creed.

  s’il n’existait pas Dieu il faudrait l’inventer: ‘if God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him’: Voltaire, Epistles: A l’auteur du livre des trois imposteurs (‘To the Author of a Book on the Three Impostors’) in Ivan’s own rendering (see note to p. 31).

  meet somewhere at infinity: the Russian mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky (1793–1856) was the founder of non-Euclidean, Lobachevskian geometry. Lobachevskian geometry accepts all of Euclid’s axioms, except the fifth, which deals with parallel lines. At its simplest, parallel lines in Euclid never meet, but, from the time he first formulated his postulates in the fourth century BC, the best mathematical brains have tried, for over 2,000 years, to supply the requisite analytical proof: from Ptolemy (second century AD) to Proclus (fifth century AD), from Ibn-al-Khaitam of Iraq (end of tenth, beginning of eleventh century), and Giovanni Saccheri (1733)—the latter attempting to prove Euclid’s fifth axiom by disproving its converse—to the German mathematician J. H. Lambert (c.1766, published 1786). We read the following in the Encyclopaedia Britannica: ‘In 1763 the German mathematician Georg Simon Klügel listed nearly 30 attempts to prove axiom 5 and concluded that the alleged proofs were all unsound. Fifty years later a new generation of geometers, still working on the same problem, were becoming more and more frustrated. One of them, a Hungarian named Farkas Bolyai, wrote in a letter to his son János: “I entreat you, leave the science of parallels alone … I have travelled past all reefs of this infernal Dead Sea and have always come back with a broken mast and torn sail.” The son, refusing to heed this warning, continued to think about parallels until, in 1823, he saw the whole truth and declared, in his youthful enthusiasm, “I have created a new universe from nothing.”’ Bolyai Junior published (1832) his observations in a 24-page appendix to his father’s textbook. But the honour of publishing the first book on non-Euclidean geometry, and pioneering its study, goes to Lobachevsky (1829–30); it would be fair to say that he did to Euclidean geometry what Einstein did to Newtonian physics. So important was the breakthrough in the field of geometry that it led the American mathematician George Bruce Halsted, who was unfamiliar with Lobachevsky’s work at the time, to hail Bolyai’s publication as ‘the most extraordinary two dozen pages in the whole history of thought’. Lobachevsky, in spite of a general indifference to his ideas in the West, maintained a steady stream of publications in Russian as well as in French and German. In 1837 his Géometrie imaginaire (‘Imaginary Geometry’) was published, and it was not until much later that his work appeared in English, under the title Geometrical Researches on the Theory of Parallels (1891; 2nd edn., 1914), translated from the German by Halsted. This study of Lobachevskian geometry was further extended by Bernhard Riemann, amongst others (1826–66), who concluded that the non-Euclidean approach to the principle of parallelism must imply ultimate curvature of space, or, to put it graphically, an astronomer looking out into space through an infinitely powerful telescope would see the back of his head. Hence space—the universe, in fact—is unbounded rather than being infinite. Taking this as the point of departure, it was but a small step for Einstein to take before making his giant leap into his Theory of Relativity. Ivan, who represents the ordinary ‘thinking’ man, the ordinary intellectual, the interested observer, rather than an authoritative man of science in his own right, could only stand and marvel in awe at the astonishing progress in the evolution of human knowledge, and, ever humourless, he reflects on his anxieties and bewilderment in a horror-laden atmosphere. Cf. the far healthier attitude of the benign Colonel Rostanev in The Village of Stepanchikovo, who is also far from indifferent to astronomy as well as to man’s progress in technology, railway engineering, and the like.

  Hyperbolic geometry (Riemannian geometry) has found an important application in space flight navigation.

  the Word: ‘in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’: John 1:1.

  John the Merciful: John the Merciful, Patriarch of Alexandria (sixth-seventh centuries). See Flaubert’s LaLégende de Saint fulien l’Hospitalier (1876). Julian was guilty of patricide.

  as gods: ‘For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil’: Genesis 3: 5.

  the Turks and the Circassians: in his Diary of a Writer, Dostoevsky often wrote about the atrocities committed in the Balkans.

  six inches from its face: 10 a.m., 21 Apr. 1993, BBC Radio 4, news bulletin: ‘babes held in mothers’ arms and shot dead’. Mayhem in the Balkans continues unabated.

  to crack the wind of the poor phrase: Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1. iii.

  with us it’s more likely to be birching, flogging, and whipping: although the death penalty in Russia was abolished by Empress Yelizaveta Petrovna, corporal punishment of the most barbaric kind continued to be practised unabated late into the nineteenth century.

  Nekrasov: the Russian poet Nikolai Nekrasov (1821–77). The poem referred to is Before Twilight.

  a little girl of seven: this is based on an actual court case, the V. Kronenberg trial. See Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer, Feb. 1876, ch. 2. The defence counsel was V. Spasovich, a possible model for Fetyukovich, Dmitry’s defence counsel.

  A little girl of five: also based on a court case, the Eugene and Aleksandra Brunst trial, as recorded in the daily Voice, 79, 80, 82 (1879).

  our Tsar Liberator: Alexander II (1818–81) came to the throne in 1855 and introduced a series of major reforms: emancipation of the serfs (1861), legal reforms (1862), abolition of corporal punishment and branding of convicts (1863); he was assassinated in 1881.

  a fabulously rich landowner: the story appeared in the Russian Herald, 9 (1877), ‘Reminiscences of a Serf.

  Le Bon Jugement de la très sainte et gracieuse Vierge Marie: ‘the wise judgement of the Blessed and Holy Virgin Mary’.

  Behold, I come quickly: ‘Behold, I come quickly: hold that fast which thou hast, that no man take thy crown’: Revelation 3: 11; also 22: 7, 12, 20.

  But of that day and hour: Matthew 24: 36; also Mark 13: 32. Heaven makes no pledges: Schiller, Sehnsucht (‘Longing’), 1801.

  a terrible new heresy: the Reformation.

  A great star: ‘there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of waters; And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter’ Revelation 8: 10–11.

  Lord appear unto us: to suit his argument, Ivan is probably drawing on, and, in the process, distorting, Psalm 118: 27: ‘God is the Lord, which hath shewed us light…’.

  And blessed you as he passed: closing lines of his poem ‘These Forsaken Villages …’, by F. Tyutchev (1803–73).

  They burned the evil heretics: from the poem ‘Coriolanus’ by A. Polezhayev (1805–38).

  as the lightning cometh out of the east: Matthew 24: 27: ‘For as the lightning cometh out of the east, and shineth even unto the west; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be.’ See also Luke 17: 24.

  ad majorem gloriam Dei: the motto of the Jesuit Order is Ad majorem Dei gloriam, ‘To the greater glory of God’.

  Talitha cumi: ‘And he took the damsel by the hand, and sa
id unto her, Talitha cumi; which is, being interpreted, Damsel, I say unto thee, arise. And straightway the damsel arose, and walked …’: Mark 5: 40–2.

  Idea: in the original Russian text this word is not capitalized, and its use is rather obscure. Cf. ‘This new created world … how good, how faire, Answering his great Idea’: Milton, Paradise Lost, vii. 557. ‘Idea’ is capitalized in Richard Bentley’s (London) edition of 1732, and in the OED. All the editions of Paradise Lost after 1735 that I consulted print ‘idea’ without an initial capital.

  I want to make you free: ‘And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free’: John 8: 32; ‘If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed’: John 8: 37.