The Idiot

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  16. After his defeat at Waterloo and his second abdication in 1815, Napoleon (1769–1821) wanted to escape to America, but owing to the blockade of the port at Rochefort, he was forced to negotiate with the British, who exiled him to the island of St. Helena.

  17. These words come from Pensées sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets (“Thoughts on religion and on several other subjects”), by the French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–62).

  18. The references are to the raising of Jairus’s daughter (Mark 5: 22–43) and the raising of Lazarus (John 11: 1–44). Talitha cumi is Aramaic for “Damsel, arise.”

  19. The lines that follow are not by Charles-Hubert Millevoye (1782–1816), romantic poet, author of “Falling Leaves,” but by the satirical poet Nicolas Gilbert (1751–80), from the end of his Adieux à la vie (“Farewell to Life”). Dostoevsky misquotes slightly; the first verse should read: “Ah, puissent voir longtemps votre beauté sacrée …” (“Ah, may they long behold your sacred beauty …”).

  20. In Petersburg during the month of June, the sun rises at between two and three o’clock in the morning; this is the season of the famous “white nights.”

  21. Pierre-François Lacenaire (1800–36), the subject of a notorious criminal trial in Paris, was a murderer of exceptional vanity and cruelty.

  22. The prolific French novelist Paul de Kock (1794–1871) depicted petit bourgeois life, often in rather risqué detail.

  23. The name Aglaya comes from the Greek aglaós, meaning “splendid, shining, bright, beautiful.”

  24. Cf. John 8: 3–11: “He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” (King James version).

  25. See part two, note 41, and part three, note 11. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), Swiss-born French novelist and philosopher, author of The Social Contract, was influential on young Russian radicals like Ippolit and Kolya.

  26. The English fraternity of Freemasons reorganized itself in 1717 to form a “grand lodge” in London, with a new constitution and ritual and a system of secret signs; this was to be the parent lodge of all the other lodges in Great Britain and throughout the world. Because of their secrecy and the political role they began to play (for instance, in the French revolution), the Masons were outlawed in some countries, including Russia, where they were forbidden by the emperor Alexander I in 1822. Kolya is probably referring here to the Masons’ secrecy and conspiratorial reputation.

  27. The French word is contrecarrer, “to oppose directly, to thwart.”

  28. Russian civil servants wore uniforms similar to the military, including hats with cockades.

  29. The phrase is proverbial in Russian. In Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy uses an abbreviated Latin version: “Quos vult perdere dementat.” The ultimate source is in a lost Greek tragedy quoted by the Athenian politician and orator Lykurgos (390–24 B.C.).

  30. The details come from the Mazurin murder case (see part one, note 44). Zhdanov liquid was a chemical mixture invented in the 1840s by N. I. Zhdanov to eliminate bad odors. Mazurin kept Kalmykov’s body for eight months this way.

  PART FOUR

  1. Podkolesin is one of the suitors in Gogol’s play The Marriage (1842); at the decisive moment he jumps out of the window and runs away.

  2. A line from the comedy Georges Dandin (1668), by Molière (1622–73).

  3. Lieutenant Pirogov is one of the heroes of Gogol’s tale “Nevsky Prospect” (1835); his name, while common in Russia, happens to come from the word for pastry.

  4. See part one, note 36.

  5. Nozdryov is another of Gogol’s heroes, this time from the comic novel-poem Dead Souls (1842)—an absurd, blustering liar.

  6. See part one, note 5.

  7. The year 1812 was the year of Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia.

  8. This epitaph was actually composed by the Russian writer and historian N. M. Karamzin (see part one, note 4). Dostoevsky and his brother Mikhail had it inscribed on their mother’s tombstone in 1837.

  9. A panikhida is an Orthodox memorial prayer service for the dead.

  10. R.A. Chernosvitov (b. 1810), a member of the Petrashevsky circle (see part one, note 15, and part three, note 12), wrote a book entitled Instructions for the Designing of an Artificial Leg (1855).

  11. The Russian Archive was a highly respected historical review founded in 1863 by P. Bartenev.

  12. The reference is to the opening chapter of From my Past and Thought, autobiographical reflections by the liberal Russian writer Alexander Herzen (1812–70).

  13. Moscow was evacuated at the approach of Napoleon’s army and the city was set on fire.

  14. The boyars were a privileged rank of the old nobility, the highest in Russia after the rank of prince. Since they were always ready to dispute the absolute power of the tsar, the rank was abolished by Peter the Great.

  15. Baron Jean-Baptiste de Bazancourt (1767–1830) was a French general and took part in Napoleon’s Russian campaign; he was never a chamber-page and outlived the emperor by nine years.

  16. Jean-Baptiste Adolphe Charras (1810–65) was a French politician and military historian. Dostoevsky read his anti-Bonapartist History of the Campaign of 1815: Waterloo (1864) while staying in Baden-Baden in 1867; he also had the book in his library.

  17. Louis-Nicolas Davout (1770–1823), duke of Auerstaedt, prince of Eckmühl, and maréchal de France, was one of Napoleon’s best generals. The mameluke Rustan was Napoleon’s bodyguard. Constant, one of Napoleon’s favorite valets, is often mentioned in memoirs and novels about the emperor.

  18. Marie-Josèphe (“Joséphine”) Tascher de la Pagerie-Beauharnais (1763–1814) married General Bonaparte in 1796, her first husband, the vicomte de Beauharnais, having been guillotined in 1794. She became empress in 1804, but Napoleon divorced her in 1809 to marry Marie-Louise de Lorraine-Autriche (1791–1847), daughter of the German emperor Franz II. Thus, in 1812 she was no longer empress.

  19. Napoleon’s son, François-Charles-Joseph Bonaparte (1811–32), known as Napoleon II, was declared king of Rome at birth. His mother was the empress Marie-Louise, not Josephine.

  20. The quotation is from Pushkin’s poem “Napoleon” (1821).

  21. General Ivolgin quotes imprecisely from the beginning of volume one, chapter six, of Dead Souls; Gogol wrote simply: “Oh, my youth! Oh, my freshness!”

  22. The Order of St. Anna, named for the mother of the Virgin Mary, was founded in 1735 by Karl Friedrich, Duke of Schleswig-Holstein, in honor of his wife, Anna Petrovna, daughter of Peter the Great. It had four degrees, two civil and two military.

  23. The line comes from the unfinished poem “Humor,” by the Russian civic poet N. P. Ogaryov (1813–77).

  24. Friedrich Christophe Schlosser (1776–1861), German historian, was the author of a Universal History (1844–56), which was translated into Russian in 1861–69.

  25. An ironic inversion of the apostle Thomas’s doubt of Christ’s resurrection; see part two, note 13.

  26. Stepan Bogdanovich Glebov (c. 1672–1718) was the lover of Peter the Great’s repudiated first wife Evdokia Lopukhin. He was accused of conspiring with her and the tsarevich Alexei, was tortured and condemned to this cruel death; Evdokia was sent to a nunnery.

  27. Andrei Ivanovich (or Heinrich Johann) Osterman (1686–1747) was a Russian diplomat and statesman.

  28. In Russian these words echo proverbial lines from the poem “Borodino” (1837) by Mikhail Lermontov (see part one, note 22); an old man is speaking: “Yes, those were people of our time, / Not to be compared with today’s breed …”

  29. Lebedev makes absurd use of the words about Christ from the Nicene Creed: “the only-begotten, begotten of the Father before all ages.”

  30. Sir Thomas More (Latin Morus) (1478–1535), English humanist, author of Utopia, and Lord Chancellor under Henry VIII, was decapitated for refusing to acknowledge the spiritual authority of the king. He was canonized by the Catholic Church in 1935. Lebedev’s story is apocryphal, however; on the s
caffold, More said to the executioner: “Pluck up thy spirits, man, and be not afraid to do thine office; my neck is very short; take heed therefore thou strike not awry, for saving of thine honesty” (see the Lives of Saint Thomas More, by William Roper and Nicholas Harpsfield).

  31. These Latin words from the penitential confiteor: Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, are repeated by Roman Catholic priests before the Mass and by the faithful before communion.

  32. In addition to cutting hair, barbers performed other operations, such as letting blood, which might have been thought necessary in the general’s case.

  33. The Latin words signify papal refusal to satisfy the demands of a secular power. The expression may go back to the Acts of the Apostles (4: 20).

  34. Égalité is the middle term of the French revolutionary motto: “Liberté, égalité, fraternité. In his Winter Notes from Summer Impressions (1863), Dostoevsky already cites the motto with ou la mort added to the end; his protagonist Kirillov will do the same in Demons (1872). The “two million heads” probably come from a reference in part five, chapter thirty-seven, of A. Herzen’s From My Past and Thought (see part four, note 12) to a German socialist writer who declared that it was enough to destroy two million people and the socialist revolution would go swimmingly. Herzen, a radical himself, called this notion “pernicious rubbish” and traced its origins to the French revolution, describing it as “Marat transformed into a German.” Dostoevsky refers to this notion again in Demons (1871–72) and in The Brothers Karamazov (1879–80).

  35. Cf. Matthew 7: 15–16: “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits” (King James version).

  36. That is, the “Pillars of Hercules,” the ancient name for the straits of Gibraltar, which marked the boundary of the known world in classical times.

  37. The Jesuit order, or Society of Jesus, was founded on Montmartre (Paris) in 1534 by St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491–1556), his friend and follower St. Francis Xavier (1506–52), and four other friends. More militant than contemplative, and with a strict hierarchical administration, the order quickly became very powerful. The Jesuits were eventually expelled from Portugal in 1759 and from France in 1762 (and again in 1880 and 1901). The exiled fathers either went “underground” or dispersed, some even going to Russia, where their influence was not inconsiderable.

  38. See part two, note 16.

  39. The sect of the flagellants (khlysti) emerged among the Russian peasants in the seventeenth century. Its adherents practiced self-flagellation as a means of purification from sin (see part two, note 14).

  40. These words echo the words of Christ to the apostles (Mark 9:35): “If any man desire to be first, the same shall be last of all, and servant of all.”

  41. Cf. the episode of the healing of the demoniac in Mark 9: 17–27 and Luke 9: 42.

  42. See part one, note 43.

  43. The lines come from Pushkin’s poem “Elegy” (1830).

  44. See part two, note 33.

  45. In the Orthodox wedding service, one or more “groomsmen” hold crowns above the heads of both bride and groom.

  46. The reference is to Christ forgiving the woman taken in adultery (John 8: 3–11); see part three, note 24.

  47. The princely family of Rohan is one of the most ancient and illustrious in France; their motto is “Premier ne puis, second ne daigne, Rohan suis” (“I cannot be first, I deign not to be second, I am Rohan”).

  48. Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord (1754–1838), prince of Bénévent, bishop of Autun, was one of the most important French statesmen of his time, during which he served under the king, the constitutional assembly, the Directoire, the consulate, the empire, and finally the restoration of the Bourbons; he played a brilliant and skillful role at the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), deciding the fate of post-Napoleonic France and Europe.

  49. See part four, note 22. The first degree of the civil order of St. Anna was worn on a ribbon around the neck.

  50. The quotation is from a verse fragment about Cleopatra that Pushkin included in his Egyptian Nights (1835): Cleopatra addresses the crowd gathered at her feast, asking who would be willing to give his life for a night with her.

  51. An imprecise quotation from Matthew 11: 25, Luke 10: 21.

  52. Madame Bovary, by French novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821–80), caused a scandal when it was first published in 1856 because of its frank treatment of adultery; the heroine commits suicide in the end. Dostoevsky read the novel in the summer of 1867 and admired it.

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS

  RICHARD PEVEAR has published translations of Alain, Yves Bonnefoy, Alberto Savinio, Pavel Florensky, and Henri Volohonsky, as well as two books of poetry. He has received fellowships or grants for translation from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the French Ministry of Culture.

  LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY was born in Leningrad. She has translated works by the prominent Orthodox theologians Alexander Schmemann and John Meyendorff into Russian.

  Together, Pevear and Volokhonsky have translated Dead Souls and The Collected Tales by Nikolai Gogol, and The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, Demons, The Idiot, and The Adolescent by Fyodor Dostoevsky. They were awarded the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize for their version of The Brothers Karamazov, and more recently Demons was one of three nominees for the same prize. They are married and live in France.