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).
31. 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.
32. unable to support yourself: University students were expected to pay fees of fifty roubles a year (BT).
33. 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).
34. 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.
35. 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.
36. 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).
37. 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.
38. V—— Prospect: Voznesensky Prospect.
39. Avdotya Romanovna: A strikingly formal use of his sister Dunya’s full first name and patronymic. See Note on Names.
40. 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).
41. 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).
42. 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).
43. Negroes . . . Latvians: American Negroes and Latvian