Crime and Punishment (72 page)

3
1
.
that chap went to the bank
: This account of a nervous criminal, which continues the story of the forged lottery tickets first mentioned in the previous chapter, cleaves closely to a contemporaneous account published
in the
Moscow Gazette
of
10
September
1865
about a young man who, like Raskolnikov – and the mail-robber mentioned earlier – was a ‘former student' who hadn't completed his course (
BT
).

3
2
.
Assez causé!
: ‘Enough talk!' (French). A phrase much used by Balzac and, following his example, Dostoyevsky.

3
3
.
Spermaceti
: ‘A wax-like substance that results from processing the liquid animal wax obtained from the skull of the sperm whale. In the nineteenth century spermaceti was taken to be a sperm whale's semen (hence its name). It would seem that Razumikhin's surprising image is linked to the notions of medieval alchemists, who used sperm in their experiments to create an artificial man or homunculus' (
BT
).

3
4
.
Since that
evening
: As Tikhomirov points out, this is ‘a memory slip either by Raskolnikov or Dostoyevsky: the hero walks past
that
house on the way to the police bureau on the morning after the murder' (
BT
).

3
5
.
meloning and lemoning
: An example (freely translated) of the many phrases transposed to
Crime and Punishment
from Dostoyevsky's ‘Siberian Notebook' in which he collected colourful examples of the language of his fellow convicts.

3
6
.
A drunk can't
hold a candle
: Another unusual idiom recorded by Dostoyevsky while in exile in Siberia.

3
7
.
kammerjunker
: An honorary rank at court typically granted to young noblemen, most famously to Alexander Pushkin. ‘Groom of the Chamber' is the approximate English equivalent.

3
8
.
The prince
: Between
1861
and
1866
the Military Governor General of St Petersburg (the administrative head of the city) was Prince A. A. Suvorov, grandson of Generalissimo Alexander Suvorov (
1730
?–
1800
), famed for never losing a battle during his illustrious career (
BT
).

3
9
.
a feather the colour of fire
: Viktor Shklovsky compared this to the ‘feather of an angel', a point developed by Tikhomirov, who invokes the Orthodox iconography of Sophia (Sofya/Sonya) as angel-like, with face and hands ‘the colour of fire'. The iconic significance of this detail contrasts strikingly with Sonya's dress with its ‘ridiculously long train', which would have been suitable only for high-society occasions (
BT
).

PART THREE

1
.
A complete lack of personality
: In this chapter Razumikhin's defence of personality and cultural difference has much in common with aspects of the ‘native soil' philosophy (
pochvennichestvo
) that Dostoyevsky, his
brother and fellow contributors had been elaborating in the pages of
Time
and
Epoch
between
1861
and
1865
. ‘The term derives from
pochva
(soil, native soil, “roots”) and in its most basic sense as a doctrine it called for a return to their native soil by Russia's educated classes, who, since the reforms of Peter I in the early eighteenth century, had evolved as a Westernized elite split away from their Russian heritage and from the majority of their fellow Russians' (
KL
). Optimistically conceived by Dostoyevsky as a philosophy that might reconcile the Slavophiles and the Westernizers,
pochvennichestvo
was opposed directly to the position of the socialists and of the radical journal
The Contemporary
. The latter's ideal, Dostoyevsky claimed in
1862
, was complete impersonality and a kind of identikit man ‘who would be exactly the same wherever he was – in Germany, England or France – and who would embody the general human type that had been manufactured in the West' (
BT
).

2
.
monomania
: See Part One, note
30
.

3
.
a Rubinstein
: Anton Rubinstein (
1829–94
), the celebrated virtuoso pianist and founder of the St Petersburg Conservatory; he taught Dostoyevsky's niece and met Dostoyevsky himself at least once (
BT
).

4
.
Prussian House of Lords
: The Upper House of the Prussian parliament, which between
1862
and
1866
was at loggerheads with Bismarck's government (
BT
).

5
.
hypochondriac
: See Part One, note
2
.

6
.
The queen . . . who darned her own stockings
: A reference to Marie Antoinette (
1755–93
), imprisoned in
1792
and guillotined the following year. Various historians of the French Revolution (
1789
) mention this scene, in which she typically uses toothpicks instead of knitting needles (
BT
,
SB
).

7
.
Crevez, chiens, si vous n'êtes pas contents!
: ‘Drop dead, dogs, if you aren't satisfied!' (French): an almost exact quotation from Victor Hugo's novel
Les Misérables
, which Dostoyevsky read on its appearance in
1862
. See Book Eight, Chapter Four (‘A Rose in Misery'), in which the young student, Marius, receives a visit from the young and appallingly emaciated daughter of his neighbour Jondrette. In the course of their conversation, she tells him: ‘Do you know what it will mean if we get a breakfast today? It will mean that we shall have had our breakfast of the day before yesterday, our breakfast of yesterday, our dinner of today, and all that at once, and this morning. Come! Parbleu! if you are not satisfied, dogs, burst!' (trans. Isabel Hapgood).

8
.
such a melancholic
: See Part One, note
2
.

9
.
Mitrofanievsky Cemetery
: A large cemetery in the south of St Petersburg, dismantled in the early Soviet decades. Favoured at the time by poor and middling families, it contained two functioning churches and a chapel by the entrance (
BT
).

1
0
.
funeral banquet
: In Russia, a memorial meal for the dead usually takes place immediately after the funeral, but also forty-nine days after death. A solemn occasion, marked by various rituals, the funeral banquet (
pominki
) can also be a marker of social status and wealth; see, for example, Firs Zhuravlyov's painting
A Merchant's Funeral Banquet
(
1876
).

1
1
.
play Lazarus
: A reference to the Lazarus laid at the gates of a wealthy man's house, hungry and ‘full of sores' (Luke
16
:
20
). His legend inspired a spiritual folk song in Russia, often sung by beggars. In turn, the song gave rise to the Russian idiom used here – ‘
pet' Lazarya
' (literally, ‘to sing Lazarus') – with the meaning of exhibiting and even exaggerating one's poverty or misfortune and playing for sympathy. Raskolnikov's allusion to the beggar Lazarus closely precedes mention in the next chapter of the more famous biblical Lazarus, who was raised from the dead by Christ and becomes a motif of the novel. As Boris Tikhomirov notes, the two biblical Lazaruses have often been fused, whether in the popular imagination or in Ernest Renan's
Vie de Jésus
(
1863
), a book well known to Dostoyevsky. On the importance of the spiritual songs for Dostoyevsky, and of the Russian folk heritage in general, see Faith Wigzell's fine contribution to
The Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002
), pp.
21–46
.

1
2
.
No need to break the chairs . . . to think about!
: An almost verbatim quotation from Nikolai Gogol's great comedy
The Government Inspector
(
1836
) and the first of many references to Gogol by Porfiry Petrovich.

1
3
.
Ordinary paper
: All official documents had to be written on special stamped paper issued by the Ministry of Finances; such paper came in three varieties, ‘ordinary' being the cheapest. This category was itself divided into four further types, ‘the most ordinary' costing only twenty copecks a sheet (
BT
).

1
4
.
‘the environment'
: The cliché at issue here is the phrase
sreda zayela
(‘the environment [that] eats away' at the individual). For Russian radicals of the
1860
s the ‘environment' was so decisive a factor that it lessened or entirely eradicated the moral responsibility of the individual.
Crime and Punishment
is, among other things, a trenchant response to such theories, particularly as articulated by Nikolai Chernyshevsky. As such, it continues the critique of Chernyshevskian rationalism and
determinism begun in Dostoyevsky's novella
Notes from Underground
(
1864
).

1
5
.
mathematical head . . . phalanstery
: The utopian socialist François Marie Charles Fourier (
1772–1837
) conceived of ‘phalansteries' as enormous, palace-like buildings congenial to new forms of cooperative life. Eventually, the world would be divided into precisely
2
,
985
,
984
such communities. In a letter to his publisher Katkov, written while he was working on this part of the novel, Dostoyevsky noted: ‘Fourier was convinced that it needed only one phalanstery to be built and the entire world would immediately be covered with them'. As a young man Dostoyevsky had himself been close to the Fourierists of the ‘Petrashevsky circle' in St Petersburg, involvement with which led directly to his imprisonment and exile in Siberia. In a written deposition before his sentencing, Dostoyevsky expressed sympathy with Fourier's ‘love of humanity', but called his system the most unrealistic of utopias (
BT
,
KL
).

1
6
.
Ivan the Great Bell Tower
: The tallest of the towers in the Kremlin, it is, in fact, some twenty-five feet higher than is suggested here. Razumikhin appears to be parodying the determinist arguments of Chernyshevsky's characters in his novel
What Is to Be Done
?
(
1863
) (
BT
).

1
7
.
Weekly Review . . . Periodical Review
: Journals appeared and disappeared with alarming speed in
1860
s Russia; the Dostoyevsky brothers'
Time
was shut down by the censor in
1863
, only to re-emerge as
Epoch
eight months later (
SB
,
KL
).

1
8
.
all because they are extraordinary
: The originality of Raskolnikov's argument about the moral rights of extraordinary men continues to exercise scholars; Tikhomirov calls it ‘the
Russian version
of a certain pan-European archetype'. In his epic biography Joseph Frank mentions numerous literary precursors – including Schiller, Byron, Balzac and Pushkin – but gives pride of place to the radical critic Dmitry Pisarev's interpretation of Ivan Turgenev's nihilist hero Bazarov in
Fathers and Sons
(
1862
). Where others saw Bazarov in a satirical light, Pisarev exalted him as a solitary figure who rises above the mass of humanity and the fetters of his own conscience: ‘Neither above him, nor outside him, nor inside him does he recognize any regulator, any moral law, any principle.' Dostoyevsky's colleague and friend Nikolai Strakhov (
1828–96
) observed (in Frank's words) ‘that Pisarev had gone farther than other radicals along the path of total negation' and Dostoyevsky appeared to share this view. See Derek Offord, ‘
Crime and Punishment
and Contemporary Radical Thought' in
Fyodor Dostoevsky's
Crime
and Punishment
: A Casebook
;
Joseph Frank,
Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years,
1865–1871
(London: Robson Books,
1995
), pp.
70–75
; and Introduction. A more immediate source of Raskolnikov's emphasis on ‘extraordinary' people appears to have been Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte's
Histoire de Jules César
, translated into Russian in
1865
and interpreted as a defence of Napoleon more than of Caesar. Perhaps this is the ‘book' to which Raskolnikov's ‘article' putatively responded. Ideas about rare individuals were in any case already in the air: twenty-five years earlier Thomas Carlyle's
On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History
(
1841
) had greatly impressed Russian educated society (
BT
,
SB
).