Crime and Punishment (77 page)

3
6
.
a cannon fired once . . . The water's rising
: A sophisticated signalling system warned residents of St Petersburg about the imminent threat of flooding and the degree of severity; two cannon shots every quarter of an hour from both the Admiralty and the Peter and Paul Fortress indicated that the Neva had risen by a whole seven feet. The Neva reached a comparable height on the night of
29–
30
June
1865
, shortly before Dostoyevsky started work on the novel (
BT
).

3
7
.
the face of a ‘camellia'
: Following the success of
La Dame aux camélias
(
1848
) by Alexandre Dumas
fils
(
1824–95
), ‘camellia' became a byword, in Russia as elsewhere, for women of the demi-monde – and, more broadly, prostitutes (
BT
). The heroine of Dumas's novel, later adapted for the stage, acquires her nickname because of the camellias that decorate her box at the theatre; perhaps it is the girl's ‘scarlet lips' that suggest this particular euphemism to Svidrigailov here.

3
8
.
tall watch tower
: In her notes to the novel, Anna Grigoryevna identified this as the ‘Police station on Petersburg Side (Fire-fighting Department). On the corner of Syezzhinskaya Street and Bolshoi Prospect' (
PSS
).

3
9
.
tell them I've gone to America
: This scene completes the reworking of the American motif in
What Is to Be Done?
(see note
23
above); if, in Chernyshevsky's novel, Lopukhov, ‘the rational egoist', merely stages his suicide and really does leave for America after the end of his relationship with Vera Pavlovna, Svidrigailov does the precise opposite (
BT
) – offering, one might add, a different model of ‘rational' and godless behaviour.

4
0
.
makes up for forty sins
: On the one hand, the phrase is a variation of the notion in Slavonic cultures that the killing of a spider makes amends for forty sins (in a folkloric context where the spider is opposed to the Mother of God in particular); on the other, it echoes the popular Russian legend ‘Sin and Penance' (
Grekh i pokayanie
) and its many variants, in which the killing of an oppressor and ‘blood-sucker', far from being a sin, proves to be the only atonement possible for the murderer's previous sins (
BT
).

4
1
.
crowned in the Capitol
: A reference to Julius Caesar (
100–
44
BC
) in particular, perhaps in the light of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte's newly published book on the Roman emperor (see Part Three, note
18
).

4
2
.
raining down bombs . . . during a regular siege
: Another reference to Napoleon's successful siege of Toulon in December
1793
(
BT
).

4
3
.
no sight, no sound
: A formula often used in the much-loved collection of folktales by Alexander Afanasyev (
1826–71
) (
BT
).

4
4
.
Zimmerman's
: See Part One, note
5
.

4
5
.
Livingstone's journals
: Almost certainly a reference to the Russian translation of
A Popular Account of Dr Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries and of the Discovery of the Lakes Shirwa and Nyassa (
1858–1864)
(1865). The translation, edited by Dostoyevsky's friend Nikolai Strakhov, had been approved by the Russian censor in late
1866
, just as Dostoyevsky was working on this part of the novel. The legendary expeditions of David Livingstone (
1813–73
) to explore
Africa in the mid-nineteenth century were well known in Russia even before the publication of this translation (
SB
,
BT
).

4
6
.
a citizen and a man
: See note
24
above.

4
7
.
short-haired wenches . . . to study anatomy
: A further allusion to the Great Reforms of the late
1850
s and early
1860
s, when higher education was (to a limited extent) opened up to women. The decision to allow women to attend lectures at St Petersburg University, and then at the Medical-Surgical Academy (referred to here), caused consternation in society. As with other reforms, the authorities soon backtracked. The phrase ‘short-haired wenches' was firmly associated at the time with radically minded,
papirosa-
smoking female ‘nihilists'. The passage also alludes to Chernyshevsky's
What Is to Be Done?
, whose socialist heroine Vera Pavlovna also studied medicine (
BT
).

EPILOGUE

1
.
there stands a town . . . a prison
: The model appears to be the town of Omsk, in Western Siberia, on the banks of the Irtysh. Dostoyevsky was confined in Omsk Prison from
1850
to
1854
. ‘Located some
1
,
500
miles east of Moscow, this military prison was housed in an eighteenth-century fortress originally built as protection against the steppe nomads. The prison itself was surrounded by a high stockade in the form of a hexagon' (
KL
). Dostoyevsky's experiences there had already been amply reflected in one of his masterpieces,
Notes from the Dead House
(
1860–2
), and in his correspondence. In a letter to his brother Mikhail, written a week after his release from Omsk Prison, Dostoyevsky wrote: ‘Things were very bad for us. A military prison is much worse than a civilian one. [...] We lived on top of each other, all together in one barrack [...] In summer, intolerable closeness; in winter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floors an inch thick; one could slip and fall'; quoted in Joseph Frank,
Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time
, p.
189
. Also alluded to in this sentence, not without irony, is the opening of Alexander Pushkin's narrative poem
The Bronze Horseman
(
1833
), describing Peter the Great looking out from the site of his future city, St Petersburg, to the West: ‘On the banks of the deserted waves / Stood he, full of great thoughts, / And gazed afar. Broadly before him / The river raced past.'

2
.
second category
: Convicts were divided into three categories, according to the gravity of their crime: convicts of the first category worked in the
pits; of the second, in fortresses; of the third, mainly in saltworks and distilleries. Like his protagonist, Dostoyevsky had also been a convict of the second category (
SB
).

3
.
theory of temporary insanity
: Tikhomirov notes that Dostoyevsky may have familiarized himself with this theory in an article by the Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (
1840–1902
), which had just appeared in Russian at the time of writing: ‘The Doctrine of Temporary or Transitory Insanity (
mania transitoria
), Expounded for Doctors and Jurists' listed a number of symptoms of this condition reminiscent of Raskolnikov's behaviour during the murder. According to Krafft-Ebing,
mania transitoria
lasts only a few hours, ‘mainly strikes young people [...] aged between twenty and thirty' and is most commonly found in men. ‘Temporary insanity,' the psychiatrist concludes, ‘is becoming all the more important in court practice, because it evidently represents an entirely unfree state: during a fit of temporary insanity a man is not aware of himself, nor of the meaning of what he does, its consequences, punishability; the place of actions controlled by the will is taken by automatic movements instigated by spurious notions, a false emotional sensation of anguish and an unconscious urge' (
BT
). The theory was not new to Russia, however, having been cited, for example, in the early
1840
s by the Ministry of the Interior's Medical Council, which concluded that a peasant who had killed her nine-month-old baby had done so ‘during an attack of temporary insanity'; see Rice,
Dostoevsky and the Healing Art
, p.
179
.

4
.
his shaven head and his half-and-half jacket
: As Dostoyevsky explained in
Notes from the Dead House
, each category of convict had its own dress code. Exiled civilian convicts of the second category wore jackets that were half-grey and half-black. Other categories might have jackets all of one colour except for the sleeves; right and left trouser legs could also be of different colours. Heads, too, were shaved ‘half-and-half', either from one end of the skull to the other or across. Raskolnikov's head, like Dostoyevsky's, would have been shaved ‘across' (
BT
).

5
.
Oh, men of wisdom, who deny everything
: An unmistakable reference to the ‘nihilists', notably Dmitry Pisarev, who were in the ascendant in the
1860
s, denying spiritual and cultural values.

6
.
Polish convicts
: Participants, presumably, in the uprising against Imperial Russia in the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from
1863
to
1864
, many thousands of whom were deported to Siberia. Some of Dostoyevsky's co-prisoners in Omsk in the
1850
s were also Polish noblemen,
punished for their involvement in the movement for national liberation (
BT
). Dostoyevsky wrote warmly of them in
Notes from the Dead House
, though their relations were soured both by the Russian writer's conviction that Poland, Lithuania and other nations all belonged under the rule of the Tsar, and by the Poles' contempt for the Russian peasant convicts; see Frank,
Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time
, pp.
206–7
.

7
.
an axe
: No object could be more characteristic of archaic peasant Russia; see, for example, James H. Billington's classic study
The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture
(
1966
).

8
.
his turn came . . . to pray
: During Great Lent, which begins seven weeks before Easter, Orthodox believers devote several days to preparing for the sacraments of Confession and Holy Communion, during which they fast (avoiding animal products in particular), pray intensively and attend every church service. In Omsk, as Dostoyevsky wrote in
Notes from the Dead House
, the prisoners took turns to prepare (thirty at a time) and were let off work. In Part Two, Chapter V of that book, he describes the week of preparation in detail, reflecting on the pleasurable memories it evoked of his childhood. Here, Dostoyevsky is much more restrained, though one is reminded of the association of churches and childhood in Raskolnikov's dream much earlier in the novel (Part One, Chapter V).

9
.
New trichinae
: The ability of trichinae – minute parasitic worms – to spread from pigs to humans caused a panic that began in Western Europe in
1863
and reached Russia by the time Dostoyevsky set to work on
Crime and Punishment
. The term had already been used in a metaphorical sense by Krestovsky in his novel
Petersburg Slums
, and would be reworked again by Dostoyevsky in ‘The Dream of a Ridiculous Man' (
1877
) (
BT
).

1
0
.
The pestilence
: Dostoyevsky uses the archaic word ‘pestilence' (
morovaya yazva
) in preference to ‘plague' (
chuma
), calling to mind passages in the Old Testament where the image is frequently used to express God's anger and punishment (see especially Jeremiah
29
:
17–
19
and Ezekiel
14
:
21
), and in the New Testament (especially Matthew
24
:
7
, Luke
21
:
11
); equally relevant is the use of the term as a metaphor for the moral corruption caused by ‘temptation' in the writings of Tikhon of Zadonsk (
1724–83
), a saint much loved by Dostoyevsky: ‘The pestilence begins at first in a single person, then the whole house, and from that the whole town or village, and later the whole country too, is infected and perishes' (
BT
,
SB
).

1
1
.
old burnous and the green shawl
: According to Tatyana Kasatkina, the
burnous
(‘a cloak and outer garment of various types . . . ostensibly based
on an Arab model') ‘most resembles the traditional clothing of Mary – the
Maforiy
(the dress of married Palestinian women)'; while
green
, ‘as the colour of life on earth, is directly linked to the image of the Madonna' and ‘is constantly present even in icons'. See her article on the Epilogue in
Fyodor Dostoevsky's
Crime and Punishment
: A Casebook
(p.
175
).