Crime and Punishment (70 page)

2
8
.
Thy kingdom come
: This invocation of the Lord's Prayer follows echoes of starkly contrasting biblical passages, notably Jesus' comments about a fallen woman saved by her faith (‘Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much', Luke
7
:
47
) and Revelation
14
:
9–10
: ‘And the third angel followed them, saying with a loud voice, If any man worship the beast and his image, and receive his mark in his forehead, or in his hand, The same shall drink of the wine of the wrath of God, which is poured out without mixture into the cup of his indignation; and he shall be tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence of the holy angels, and in the presence of the Lamb'. The latter quotation suggests some of the rich symbolism of alcohol in this chapter.

2
9
.
papirosi
: The humble
papirosa
(plural,
papirosi
) appears in the
OED
as, accurately enough, ‘A type of Russian unfiltered cigarette consisting of a tube of paper or cardboard, a short section at one end of which is filled with tobacco.' I have kept the word throughout this translation.

3
0
.
monomaniacs
: Monomania, writes J. L. Rice, was seen at the time as ‘a fluctuating disorder, equivalent to manic psychosis in the present terminology'
(
Dostoevsky and the Healing Art
, p.
116
). It was of great interest to the French school of psychiatry with whose ideas Dostoyevsky would have been familiar. ‘Esquirol wrote that in monomania the ill person might suffer from loss of will, perhaps only briefly, perhaps under the intermittent influence of hallucinatory voices. Persons thus afflicted became “the
homo duplex
of Saint Paul and Buffon: impelled to evil by one motive and restrained by another”' (ibid., pp.
115–16
). Jacques-Joseph Moreau (
1804–84
), a student of Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol (
1772–1840
), ‘saw the monomaniac as the most salient modern type [...] because in monomania the individual retains consciousness of the mental disorder' (ibid., p.
157
).

3
1
.
R—
—
province
: The province of Ryazan, located about one hundred miles south-east of Moscow. M. S. Altman argued that this must be Ryazan Province, ‘not only because there was no other province in Russia at the time beginning with R, but also because Dostoyevsky had particular grounds for linking Raskolnikov's original place of residence with a province teeming with
raskolniki
[religious dissenters; see List of Characters]' (
SB
). The relevance of this connection will grow in the course of the novel.

3
2
.
unable to support yourself
: University students were expected to pay fees of fifty roubles a year (
BT
).

3
3
.
smearing . . . with tar
: According to the ethnographer Pavel Melnikov (
1818–83
; pen name Andrei Pechersky), ‘this was considered the greatest insult for the whole family and for the girl in particular. A girl whose gates had been tarred would never be taken in marriage' (
BT
).

3
4
.
convictions of our newest generations
: A reference to the ‘nihilists' of the time who denied the soul, God and traditional values, hence the contrast with Luzhin's ‘positive' features. The sentence might suggest an endemic paradox: ‘nihilism' could also be referred to as ‘positivism', on account of its allegedly scientific method and principles. In a letter to his publisher Katkov of April
1866
(during work on this novel, and in the wake of the repressions following Dmitry Karakozov's failed attempt to assassinate the Tsar), Dostoyevsky wrote: ‘if they, the Nihilists, were given freedom of speech . . . they would make all Russia laugh by the
positive
explanation of their teachings. While now they are given the appearance of sphinxes'; see the discussion in Joseph Frank,
Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time
(Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2010
), pp.
464–7
.

3
5
.
private attorney
: An entirely new profession in Russia, made possible by the legal reforms of
1864
. It is characteristic of Luzhin, a man on the make with modest education, to want to take advantage of this opportunity without delay.

3
6
.
the Senate
: The Governing Senate in St Petersburg was Imperial Russia's highest judicial body, supervising the activity of all legal institutions and serving as the highest court of appeal (
SB
).

3
7
.
the Feast of Our Lady
: The popular term for the Feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God (
15
August), preceded in the Orthodox calendar by two weeks of fasting.

3
8
.
V—
—
Prospect
: Voznesensky Prospect.

3
9
.
Avdotya Romanovna
: A strikingly formal use of his sister Dunya's full first name and patronymic. See Note on Names.

4
0
.
beautiful souls steeped in Schiller
: Schillerian idealism is a constant butt of irony in Dostoyevsky's fiction, yet the German Romantic Johann Schiller (
1759–1805
) was a writer of the first importance to him. Aged ten, Dostoyevsky was overwhelmed by a performance in Moscow of
Die Raüber
(
The
Robbers
,
1781
), a play that would loom large fifty years later in his last novel
The Brothers Karamazov
(
1879–80
). In his
Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man
(
1795
) Schiller claimed that ‘it is through beauty that we arrive at freedom' (
KL
).

4
1
.
St Anna in his buttonhole
: A decoration given for service to the state in military or civil employment. The Order of St Anna, First Class, was worn on a ribbon over the shoulder; Second Class on the neck (hence the title of Chekhov's short story ‘Anna Around the Neck'); Third Class, as in this case, on a small ribbon on the chest. It was a fairly modest decoration, in keeping with Luzhin's rank as ‘court counsellor' (seventh in the Table of Ranks).

4
2
.
Schleswig-Holstein
: Disputed by Prussia, Denmark and Austria, these duchies were much in the news at the time of the novel's composition, before being eventually annexed by Prussia following the Austro-Prussian War (
1866
).

4
3
.
Negroes . . . Latvians
: American Negroes and Latvian peasants were widely discussed in Russia in the late
1850
s and early
1860
s, and in both cases analogies were drawn with Russian serfs. In
1862
the Dostoyevsky brothers published, as an appendix to their journal
Time
, a translation of Richard Hildreth's anti-slavery novel
The White Slave; or,
Memoirs of a Fugitive
(
1852
); also that year an article due to appear in the same journal was censored for expressing the thought ‘that the plight of free Baltic peasants is even worse, and even less tolerable, than the life of our own [Russian] serfs' (
PSS
).

4
4
.
lessons from the Jesuits
: Referring to the allegedly relativistic morality of the Roman Catholic order of the Society of Jesus (associated with the
maxim that ‘the end justifies the means'), this continues the theme of moral adaptation to circumstance that so preoccupies Raskolnikov (see also Part Five, note
2
). Dostoyevsky's own anti-Catholicism was by now well known, especially following the Polish uprising of
1863–4
.

4
5
.
K—
—
Boulevard
: Konnogvardeisky (Horse Guard) Boulevard.

4
6
.
Svidrigailov
: As well as being the name of the employers of Raskolnikov's sister (see Part One, Chapter
III
), Svidrigailov was a surname familiar to Russian readers of the
1860
s from the journal
The Spark
, where the ‘Svidrigailov' type was satirically presented as a provincial ‘man of obscure origin with a filthy past and a repulsive personality that is sickening to any fresh, honest gaze and worms its way into your soul' (
BT
). In addition, according to Richard Peace, ‘Svidrigaylov evokes Svidrigaylo, a Lithuanian prince who was active during the fifteenth century – so fateful for the Orthodox world. He may be taken as the barbarian par excellence, the perpetrator of cynical sacrilege for the goal of self-interest'; see
Fyodor Dostoevsky's
Crime and Punishment
: A Casebook
, ed. Richard Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2006
), pp.
86
,
100
. Dostoyevsky's own family was descended from Lithuanian nobility (on his father's side).

4
7
.
Percentage
: A reference to the excitement caused in Russian intellectual life by the publication in
1865
of a translation of
Sur l'homme et le développement de ses facultés
(
1835
) by the Belgian ‘father of statistics' Adolphe Quetelet (
1796–1874
), and to the success of his German popularizer Adolph Wagner (
1835–1917
), who thought that the quantity and distribution of crimes, suicides, marriages and divorces in society could be scientifically predicted with very high precision (
PSS
). It is also worth noting the Russian word for moneylender occasionally used for Alyona Ivanovna:
protsentshchitsa
(literally, ‘percentage woman').

4
8
.
the Islands
: The green ‘Islands', still famous as a place for relaxation and walks, are a small archipelago in the northern part of the Neva delta, reached from the south by crossing Tuchkov Bridge and Petrovsky Island.

4
9
.
kutya . . . a cross
: Brought to churches and graveyards on commemorative occasions. Boris Tikhomirov notes Raskolnikov's ‘astonishing [...] childhood memory of the “sweetness of the cross”' (
BT
).

5
0
.
horned headdress
: The
kichka
was a traditional form of headdress worn by married Russian women on religious holidays (
SB
). It often had a horn-like point on either side.

5
1
.
clinging to every object they pass
: The first close echo of passages from a novel of great importance to Dostoyevsky (and translated by his brother
at his initiative in
1860
):
Le Dernier Jour d'un condamné
(
The Last Day of a Condemned Man
,
1829
) by Victor Hugo (
1802–85
). Of relevance to Dostoyevsky's own experience in December
1849
, as he prepared to face his imminent execution, the plight of Hugo's narrator is given paradoxical significance for Raskolnikov, who appears not to distinguish between his crime and his punishment (
PSS
,
BT
). Had Dostoyevsky persevered with his first drafts and published
Crime and Punishment
as a first-person narrative, the echoes of the notes of Hugo's ‘condemned man' would have been even more striking.

5
2
.
examining magistrate
: A new career possibility in Russia, following the legal reforms of
1864
; modelled on the French
juge d'instruction
.

PART TWO

1
.
bureau
: Each of St Petersburg's administrative units had one main ‘police station' (
chast'
) and several smaller bureaus or offices (
kontory
).

2
.
Laviza Ivanovna
: The lieutenant evidently finds the German lady's first name, Luiza, unbearably pretentious, given her profession and status, and rechristens her with a name that sounds both mocking and ‘common' to the Russian ear. It will be repeated by other characters.

3
.
Catherine Canal . . . Ditch
: One and the same waterway: see Part One, note
6
.

4
.
tomes on natural science
: In Russia the
1860
s witnessed a publishing boom in the natural sciences, with many foreign books in the field translated for the first time and typically put out by publishers linked to the socialists and ‘nihilists' with whom Dostoyevsky so often polemicized.