"crystal palace"

[kevin at limits.org]

On Sat, 5 May 2001, pynchon-l-digest wrote:
> > Germans and your Love for Capital Letters.  :)  I take it as a
> > reference to the ideas embodied/promoted by the Great Exhibition --
> > knowledge, commerce, and empire coming together in glorious
> > transparency.  The term "crystal palace" as a concept (not a building)
> > appears in the literature of the Victorian era; Dostoyevsky used it in
> > a few of his novels.
> 
> The one Dostoevsky refers to is likely the one built for Catherine in 
> ice......

Huh, I'd never heard of that.  When did they do that?

Anyway, here's what I had in mind:

	"And it is then -- this is still you [the reader] speaking -- that
	the new economic relations will come, quite ready-made, and also
	calculated with mathematical precision, so that all possible
	questions will vanish in an instant, essentially because they will
	have been given all possible answers.  Then the crystal palace
	will get built."
	--"Underground," chapter 7, Pevear & Volokhonsky trans. (Vintage)

P & V have a footnote here:

	"...an allusion to...the Novel _What is to Be Done?_ (1863) by
	Chernyshevsky, one of D.'s main ideological enemies and the target
	of much of the satire in _Notes_.  C.'s thought combined the
	humanitarian socialism of the 1840s with the utilitarianism of the
	60s....

	"C.'s "crystal palace," a vision of the the ideal living space for
	the future utopian communist society, based on the 'phalanstry'
	defined by the French utopian socialist Charles Fourier, drew its
	physical details from the cast-iron and glass pavilion designed by
	Sir Joseph Paxton for the London Exhibition of 1851."

A restaurant-hotel called the Palais de Crystal opened in St. Petersburg
in 1862.  It was considered a ritzy hangout for the Westernized
inteliigentsia.  In part two of _Crime and Punishment_, Raskolnikov visits
a restaurant of the same name, though it's actually not located in the
same part of town as the real hotel.

--Kevin Troy