9. The Summer Garden in Petersburg is on the left bank of the Neva, a short distance from the imperial Winter Palace. Copies of antique sculptures were placed in it, on the orders of the tsar Peter the Great (1672–1725), for the edification of the public that went strolling there.
10. Lambert, being French, is a Catholic. In the Catholic Church at that time, first communion followed and was directly connected with confirmation in the faith, and was received at the age of ten or twelve, usually accompanied by a family celebration. (In the Orthodox Church, communion is given immediately after baptism to infants as well as adults.)
11. The relics of a saint are “revealed” when they start producing miracles of one sort or another—giving off a sweet fragrance, healing the sick, and so on.
12. One form of mortification of the flesh among ascetics was (and perhaps still is) the wearing of heavy iron chains wrapped about the waist under one’s clothing.
13. Baron James Rothschild (1792–1868), the “moneylender to kings,” died a few years before the events described in the novel. His “coup” had to do, however, with advance knowledge of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, not of the assassination of the Duc de Berry in 1820.
14. Dostoevsky modeled Dergachev and his associates on an actual conspiratorial group of some ten members, led by an engineer named Dolgushin, which called for the overthrow of the landowners and the tsar, the extermination of the bourgeoisie, and the redistribution of the land under an elected government. Dostoevsky closely followed their trial in July 1874. Among Dolgushin’s people there was a Kramer and a Vasnin, corresponding to the Kraft and Vasin of the novel. Kraft’s fate exactly parallels Kramer’s, as described in the memoirs of Dostoevsky’s friend, the famous jurist A. F. Koni.
15. The police found several inscriptions in Dolgushin’s house, in English, French, Italian, and among them this one in Latin; they also found a large wooden cross with Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité carved on it.
16. One slogan of the Dolgushin group was: “Man should live according to truth and nature.” The words have a long history both in enlightened social thought and in Dostoevsky’s work, where they go back to the narrator’s sarcastic play in
17. The “calendars” published in Russia at that time, like the American
18. The term “phalanstery” (
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
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.
