The Eternal Husband and Other Stories

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  21. It was possible at that time (and long after) to rent not a room but only part of a room. This living “in corners” signified the direst poverty (or, in Soviet Russia, the direst shortage of housing).

  22. That is, not from Jerez in Spain, home of true sherry.

  23. The folk dance called “the fish” was described by Ivan Turgenev in his Old Portraits (1881) as one in which a male soloist imitates the movements of a fish taken out of the water.

  24. The slow and mournful “Luchinushka” is perhaps the most well known of all Russian songs.

  25. The Petersburg Bulletin was published by the Academy of Science in Petersburg; hence the telltale nickname.

  26. Frühstück is “breakfast” in German.

  27. Fokine, “hero of the can-can,” was popular in Petersburg during the 1860s. His dancing was considered the ultimate in shamelessness.

  28. The “Little Cossack” is a folk dance imitative of military steps.

  29. The drink Christ was offered just before the crucifixion (Matthew 27:34).

  30. Peski (“The Sands”) was a neighborhood at the opposite end of the city from the Petersburg side.

  31. Refers to the old custom among anchorites and monks of sleeping in their own coffins.

  32. “One fine morning” (French).

  THE ETERNAL HUSBAND (1870)

  1. The Black River, a small stream now well within the limits of Petersburg, was then a country spot outside the city suitable for summer houses.

  2. “Worthless person” or “good-for-nothing” (French).

  3. Turgenev’s play The Provincial Lady (1851) portrays the young wife of the elderly provincial official Stupendiev, who makes a visiting count fall in love with her.

  4. The sect of the flagellants emerged among Russian peasants in the seventeenth century. Its adherents practiced self-flagellation as a means of purification from sin. Both sect and practice were condemned by the Church.

  5. God destroyed the city of Sodom on the Dead Sea because its inhabitants practiced “sodomy” (Genesis 19:1–28), but in Russian the use of “Sodom” means a more general sort of disorderly life. For that reason, we sometimes translate it as “bedlam.”

  6. A quotation from the ballad Der Siegesfest (“The Victory Banquet”) by the German poet and playwright Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805). Pavel Pavlovich quotes the Russian translation by Vassily Zhukovsky, published in 1828. Interestingly, the great Russian prose writer Nikolai Gogol quoted these same lines in reference to himself and the poet Alexander Pushkin in a letter written on the occasion of the latter’s death.

  7. The terms appeared in an article by the critic N. N. Strakhov on Tolstoy’s War and Peace, in which he supported the opinion of the poet Apollon Grigoriev that “… our literature represents an incessant struggle between these two types… the predatory and the placid” (Zarya, Feb. 1869).

  8. In the Orthodox marriage service, crowns are held above the heads of the bride and groom.

  9. It was customary in Russia to lay out the body of a dead person on a table until the coffin arrived.

  10. The customary period of mourning was one year at least; to remarry before then was considered scandalous.

  11. Sixteen was marriageable age for a girl.

  12. Another of Dostoevsky’s plausible but wonderfully absurd names, derived from predposylka, Russian for “premise” or “presupposition.”

  13. Mikhail Glinka (1804–57), founder of the modern Russian school of music, composed this romance to words by the great Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), translated into Russian by S. Golitsyn in 1834.

  14. “Shchedrin” was the pseudonym of the Russian writer Mikhail Saltykov (1826–89), author of The Golovlovs, The History of a Certain Town, and much else. He was a liberal publicist and often Dostoevsky’s ideological opponent. The quotation is from his story For Children.

  15. Quasimodo is the hunchbacked bell ringer in Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), who is unhappily in love with the beautiful Esmeralda.

  16. “Bad tone” in the social sense (French).

  BOBOK (1873)

  1. This and the following two stories were first published in Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer, which appeared periodically between 1873 and 1881. Here and in The Meek One, he offers brief introductory remarks for the readers of the Diary.

  2. “Attic salt” refers to the subtle witticisms for which the Athenians, inhabitants of the region of Attica, were famous in ancient times.

  3. The French writer and philosopher François-Marie Arouet, called Voltaire (1694–1778), was one of the most famous figures of his age and a great producer of salty witticisms (bons mots). Dostoevsky admired his philosophical tale Candide, of which he long planned to write a Russian variant. Several of Dostoevsky’s characters, including the narrator of The Dream of a Ridiculous Man at the end of this collection, sit in a variety of chair known as a “Voltaire armchair.”

  4. Civil servants also wore uniforms in Russia, which varied according to rank.

  5. This would be an exhibition of the painters known as Peredvizhniki (“Wanderers”), a group opposed to the Academy of Art in Petersburg and therefore controversial.

  6. The publisher Suvorin, an enlightener of the people, produced extremely cheap editions, including tear-off calendars giving a bit of art or literature, a saying or a saint’s life, along with the date.

  7. This epitaph was in fact composed by the Russian writer and historian Nikolai M. Karamzin (1766–1826). Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail had it placed on their mother’s tombstone in 1837.

  8. According to a popular notion, as a person’s soul ascends toward heaven after death, it meets evil spirits that try to force it down into hell. Only the souls of the righteous avoid these “torments” (there are said to be twenty of them).

  9. According to another popular belief, the soul is finally separated from this world forty days after death. On the fortieth day, a prayer service is customarily held and the relatives visit the grave.

  10. Kutya (accented on the final syllable) is a special dish offered to people after a memorial service (and, in some places, on Christmas Eve), made from rice (or barley or wheat) and raisins, sweetened with honey.

  11. According to tradition, the valley of Jehoshaphat, near Jerusalem, is the burial place of the Judean king Jehoshaphat. In the prophecy of Joel (3:17) it is the place where God will judge all the nations in the last days.

  12. S. P. Botkin (1832–89) was a famous doctor and scientist, founder of physiological and experimental medicine.

  13. “Young scamp” or “dissolute person” (French).

  14. “In high places” (French).

  15. A ludicrous name compounded of the Russian diminutive for Yulia (Julie), the common French name Charpentier, and Lusignan, the name of one of the most illustrious French feudal families, rulers of Angoulême and La Manche, one branch of which became the royal family of Cyprus and Jerusalem (1192–1489).

  16. After defeating the French in 1871, the Prussians, under Kaiser Wilhelm I and his chancellor Bismarck, became the dominant military power in Europe, thus posing a threat to Russia much spoken of in the press.

  17. In January 1873 Dostoevsky became editor of the newspaper The Citizen, continuing in that position until March 1874. The first installments of his Diary of a Writer appeared there (the later installments of 1876–77, 1880, and 1881 he published by subscription on his own). The “certain person” apparently succeeded in placing his “notes” there.

  THE MEEK ONE (1876)

  1. See note 9 to The Eternal Husband.

  2. The Voice was a liberal weekly published in Petersburg between 1863 and 1884, edited by A. A. Kraevsky (see note 20 to A Nasty Anecdote).

  3. Faust is the monumental two-part poetic drama by German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). The narrator distorts the line slightly; Mephistopheles says he is “part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.”

  4
. “English style” (French).

  5. The quotation is a paraphrase of a line from Alexander Pushkin’s poem “The Demon” (1823).

  6. “Hot blood and surplus strength” is a free quotation from the poem “Do not, do not believe yourself, young dreamer” (1839) by Mikhail Lermontov.

  7. Songbirds, or Pericola, is an operetta by the French composer Jacques Offenbach (1819–80). The other play has not been identified.

  8. John Stuart Mill (1806–73), English economist and utilitarian philosopher, is a singularly inappropriate choice here, since he would certainly have agreed with the narrator.

  9. The Haymarket was a square in a poor quarter of Petersburg (much of Crime and Punishment takes place there). Vyazemsky’s house was a flophouse on the Haymarket.

  10. In June-July 1862, on his way home from England, Dostoevsky stopped in Boulogne-sur-Mer, a French port on the English Channel famous as a seaside resort.

  11. Gil Blas is the hero of the French picaresque novel Histoire de Gil Blas de Santillane (1715–36) by Alain-René Lesage (1668–1747). Serving as secretary to the archbishop of Granada, Gil Blas becomes his favorite by praising his sermons. The archbishop enjoins him always to criticize his sermons sincerely. When Gil Blas permits himself one small criticism, the archbishop fires him for tastelessness and ignorance.

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