How we cite our quotes: (Section.Paragraph)
Quote #7
I'll confide in you that I have many wooers. I often sit in the window and look at them. Ah, if you only knew how ugly some of them are. The coarsest of mutts, terribly stupid, stupidity written all over his face, goes down the street most imposingly, imagining he's the noblest person, thinking everyone is looking only at him. Not a bit of it. (8.18)
This is from Medji's letter, so we're not going to fault Poprishchin this time (although it's probably coming straight from his mind in the form of a hallucination). But it's a good example of classism. Here, Medji is calling a lower class mutt ugly, coarse, and stupid. Medji the dog is supposed to represent upper class women, so we'd say the classism part is quite accurate. Style over…well, you get it.
Quote #8
Oh, she's a perfidious being—woman! Only now have I grasped what woman is. Till now no one has found out who she's in love with: I'm the first to discover it. Woman is in love with the devil. Yes, no joking. It's stupid what physicists write, that she's this or that—she only loves the devil. (13.1)
"Till now no one has found out"? Oh, please. Actually, the woman being in cahoots with the devil has been a classic theme of (male dominated) literature since the beginning of time. Can you name a few classic stories sharing this theme?
Quote #9
… it's all the doing of some barber who lives in Gorokhovaya Street. I don't know what his name is; but it's known for certain that he, together with some midwife, wants to spread Mohammedanism throughout the world, and as a result, they say, in France the majority of people already accepts the faith of Mohammed. (13.1)
As we can see, Islamophobia isn't anything new. Actually, it was very common in the Russian Empire. That comes with the territory. As in, literally: the Empire colonized a huge area of land in Siberia and Central Asia, which meant that the biggest minority, with 10% of the population, were Muslims. They were severely oppressed. So when Poprishchin becomes paranoid, it's not surprising that one of his delusions is that Muslims are conspiring to take over the world.