in a train; a correspondent in the Northern Bee spoke out against the consensus (as Svidrigailov will do), defending the landowner and citing the provocative behaviour of the possibly drunken woman, who had been pestering Kozlyainov’s sister. ‘The Scandal of The Age’ (more literally, ‘The Abominable Act of The Age’) was the title of an attack in the St Petersburg Gazette against a feuilleton published in the weekly journal The Age, which objected to an allegedly immoral public reading by Yevgenia Tolmachova, the wife of a prominent provincial official, of an episode from Pushkin’s unfinished ‘Egyptian Nights’ (1835), an improvisation in verse on the theme of ‘Cleopatra and her lovers’. The scandal caused by the reading was a vivid illustration of the ongoing debate on female emancipation (PSS, BT). Dostoyevsky wrote two essays defending Tolmachova’s reading and Pushkin’s text, and appealing to the transformation of sexual material in the artistic process; see Susanne Fusso, Discovering Sexuality in Dostoevsky (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2006), pp. 3–9.
4. the peasant reforms passed us by: A reference to the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861, when forests and meadows were retained by the old landed gentry.
5. Dussots and pointes: Dussot’s was a high-class restaurant just off the Moika Canal; by pointe Svidrigailov probably means the spit at the western end of Yelagin Island, a fashionable leisure spot (PSS).
6. North Pole . . . vin mauvais: In 1865 the St Petersburg press frequently reported discussions under way in the Royal Geographic Society in London about preparations for an expedition to reach and explore the North Pole (PSS, BT). The French idiom avoir le vin mauvais (literally, ‘to have bad wine’) is typically said of someone who becomes aggressive when drunk.
7. Berg’s: Wilhelm Berg, a well-known fairground showman and entrepreneur who organized risky and spectacular hot-air balloon rides in the Yusupov Gardens (BT).
8. pour vous plaire: ‘Just to please you’ (French).
9. Vyazemsky’s House on Haymarket: Located just off Haymarket Square, this enormous building was described by Krestovsky in Petersburg Slums as ‘thirty houses in one’: ‘inhabited by swindlers, thieves, passportless tramps and other such types, whose existence is considered an inconvenience in a well-ordered town’ (BT).
10. Rassudkin . . . Razumikhin: A confusion arising from the fact that the words rassudok and razum have broadly similar meanings to do with reason, intellect and sense.
11. Polechka and Lenya: The younger sister, Lenya, was referred to in Part Two as Lida. Here, as elsewhere, Dostoyevsky’s inconsistencies have not been corrected.
12. Holy fool: By Dostoyevsky’s time, the Russian word yurodivyi had acquired two fundamental, but closely related meanings. One was broadly positive, deriving from the form of eccentric religious behaviour known as yurodstvo Khrista radi (‘folly for Christ’s sake’) and finding biblical sanction in Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians. A yurodivyi in this sense was a profoundly holy person whose saintliness was expressed in a paradoxical way, whether through provocative ‘madness’, aggression or godly simplicity. The other meaning, engendered partly by scepticism towards ‘false holy fools’ who wished to claim unearned privileges, was sharply negative: a halfwit or madman, without any redeeming features. Dostoyevsky often toyed with both of these meanings at once; see Harriet Murav, Holy Foolishness: Dostoevsky’s Novels & the Poetics of Cultural Critique (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992).
13. the New Testament in Russian translation: On his way to prison camp in the Siberian town of Omsk in 1850, Dostoyevsky was given just such a book by the wives of men punished for their participation in the Decembrist uprising of 1825. Published in 1823, it gave the first full translation of the New Testament into modern Russian, rather than Church Slavonic (PSS, BT). Its publication, though authorized by Tsar Alexander I, met with immediate resistance on the part of some ministers and prelates, thereby endowing it with subversive, revolutionary force. Ministers and prelates feared, as Victoria Frede has recently written, that the new translations published by the Russian Bible Society between 1819 and 1824 ‘would “destroy Orthodoxy”, because individuals who sought to interpret scripture on their own would inevitably reach false conclusions. Not only would translations “destroy the true faith”, but they would also “disrupt the fatherland and produce strife and rebellion” [...] It would be another forty years before church and state authorized the