19. The Kalmyks are a nomadic Buddhist Mongol people, originally from Dzungaria in western China, who migrated to the steppes between the Don and the Volga, and also to Siberia.
20. The Crimean War (1854–1856) was fought by Russia against an alliance of Turkey, England, France, and the Piedmont.
21. Arbiter of the peace was one of the government posts established in Russia after the emancipation of the serfs by the “tsarliberator” Alexander II in 1861. Arbiters of the peace were elected by the nobility from among local landowners and were mainly responsible for questions of land division between peasants and landowners. The function, taken earnestly at first, later became subject to abuses and was finally abolished in 1874.
22. Harpagon and Plyushkin are both famous misers, the former from the comedy L’Avare (“The Miser”) by Molière (1622–1673), the latter from the novel Dead Souls, by Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852).
23. Historically, Russia had two capitals: Moscow, dating back to the thirteenth century, and St. Petersburg, founded by Peter the Great in 1703. Dostoevsky later refers to the period following 1703 as “the Petersburg period of Russian history.”
24. Names of well-known Russian tycoons of the period following the abolition of serfdom in 1861, when mining, industry, railroads, and banking developed at a great pace. Polyakov and Gubonin were mainly builders of railroads.
25. John Law (1671–1729), a Scottish financier, became comptroller general of French finances, created the French Indies Company, and in 1719, having offered the plan unsuccessfully to Scotland, England, and Savoy, managed to persuade the Regency government to create a Banque Générale of France, based on the selling of shares and the issuing of paper money. Extremely popular and successful at first, the system soon led to runaway inflation and ended in a catastrophic bankruptcy. Law was forced to flee France, and died in poverty in Venice.
26. Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754–1838), prince of Bénévent, bishop of Autun, an ambitious, intelligent, and extremely witty man, was one of the most skillful French diplomats and politicians 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. Alexis Piron (1689–1773) was a poet, known mainly for his satires and often licentious songs. Denied admission to the French Academy, he wrote his own epitaph, which is also his most famous piece of verse: Ci-gît Piron, qui ne fut rien, / Pas mê;me académicien (“Here lies Piron, who was nothing, / Not even an academician”).
27. These lines come from the central monologue of the Baron in The Covetous Knight, one of the “little tragedies” by the poet Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837). Arkady Makarovich’s “Rothschild idea” has been strongly influenced by the Baron’s own “idea”—that the awareness of the power money brings is superior to the need to exercise it.
28. God commanded the ravens to feed the prophet Elijah when he went into hiding in the wilderness after denouncing the wicked King Ahab for abandoning the God of Israel (I Kings 17:4–6).
29. The Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), the “Iron Chancellor,” was one of the main architects of German unification. In 1871, after defeating France, he proclaimed the German Empire, of which he became the first chancellor in that same year. The early period of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against the Catholics and social democrats coincided with the writing of The Adolescent, and Dostoevsky kept a close eye on the successes of this man who was famous for having said, “The questions of the time will be decided not by speeches and resolutions of the majority, but by blood and iron.”
30. See note 16 above. Rousseau’s Confessions were published posthumously in 1782 and 1789. Arkady Makarovich makes explicit what Rousseau describes more circumspectly at the beginning of Book III: “I sought out dark alleys, hidden redoubts, where I could expose myself from afar to persons of the fair sex in the state in which I should have liked to be able to be up close to them.”
31. This painting of the Mother of God by Raphael Sanzio (1483– 1520), usually known as the Sistine Madonna because it was painted for the church of St. Sixtus in Piacenza, belongs to the collection of the Dresden Pinakothek. For Dostoevsky, who had seen the painting a number of times during his visits to Dresden, it represented the ideal of pure beauty. In the last years of his life, he himself had a large engraving of it hanging in his study in Petersburg.
32. Arkady Makarovich probably means the famous doors of the Florentine Baptistry, the work of Lorenzo Ghiberti (1378–1455), which Michelangelo, in admiration, called “the doors of paradise.” Dostoevsky’s wife, Anna Grigorievna, recalls in her memoirs that her husband, during their stay in Florence (1868–1869), often made a special detour to look at these doors, before which he would stand in ecstasy.
33. Versilov is probably referring to the ideas of Rousseau (who was born in Geneva) and his followers, including the early utopian socialists. In Part Two of the novel, he will explain to Arkady that by “Geneva ideas” he means “virtue without Christ . . . today’s ideas . . . the idea of the whole of today’s civilization” (in the notebooks for the novel, Dostovsky has him say more specifically “the French ideas of today”).
34. Eliseevs’ was and still is a fine delicatessen and wine shop on Nevsky Prospect in Petersburg. Ballet’s was a confectioner’s shop, also on Nevsky Prospect, still mentioned in Baedecker’s guide for 1897.
35. This is the first line of a folk song made popular by the singer and amateur of folk music M. V. Zubova (d. 1779). There is mention of the lady and the song in a book titled Modern Russian Women, by P. D. Mordovtsev, published in 1874, when Dostoevsky was working on the novel.
36. The allusion is to the famous reply of Voltaire (1694–1778), when he was asked which literary genre was the best: “Tous les genres sont bons hors le genre ennuyeux” (“All genres are good, except the boring genre”).
37. The poet Ivan Krylov (1769–1844), Russia’s greatest fabulist, is often referred to as the Russian La Fontaine (many of whose fables he translated or adapted into Russian). Arkady will quote from his fable “The Fussy Bride” a little further on.
38.Woe from Wit, a comedy by the Russian poet and diplomat Alexander Griboedov (1795–1829), is the first masterpiece of the Russian theater; many lines from the play became proverbial in Russia and have remained so.
39. Chatsky is the disillusioned protagonist of Woe from Wit, and the first in the series of “superfluous men” in nineteenth-century Russian literature. He is often likened to Alceste, the hero of Molière’s Misanthrope. Zhileiko was a well-known actor of the time, who played in the private theaters of the nobility as well as on the public stage.
40. The linked short stories of A Hunter’s Sketches, by Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883), were published in one volume in 1852.
41. As the son of a serf, Arkady Makarovich would not have had the possibility of attending high school and university and would not have enjoyed the legal rights of a gentleman.
42. The wanderer (strannik) is a well-known figure in Russian religious life. Such spiritual wandering meant abandoning a fixed home and undertaking a sort of perpetual pilgrimage from monastery to monastery, as is described most memorably in The Way of a Pilgrim, an anonymous book published in the nineteenth century.
43. The Slavophiles (“lovers of the Slavs”) were a group of writers and thinkers of the nineteenth century (the most important were Alexei Khomyakov, Konstantin and Ivan Aksakov, and Yuri Samarin) who believed that Russia should follow her own way of development, based on the structures of the rural community and the Orthodox Church, instead of imitating the West, as their opponents, the Westernizers, advocated. The Slavophile-Westernizer controversy dominated Russian social thought throughout the nineteenth century. Dostoevsky appeared, at various times, to take both sides in it.