How we cite our quotes: (Section.Paragraph)
Quote #4
Am I some sort of nobody, a tailor's son, or a sergeant's? I'm a nobleman. So, I, too, can earn rank. […] Just give me a Ruch tailcoat, cut in the latest fashion, and let me have the same kind of necktie as you have—you won't hold a candle over me. No income—that's the trouble. (3.1)
Poprishchin might be a nobleman technically, but he doesn't have a high enough rank to have hereditary nobility. So he's pretty insecure when it gets to being "somebody." The whole nobility business got kind of complicated in Imperial Russia when nobility became tied to civil service. Suddenly, formerly lower class people had some chance to rise through the ranks and attain nobility. How to rise through the ranks? Well, money and lots of it helps. So Poprishchin is spelling out that chain reaction leading to success: from income to the latest fashions, to being treated like a nobleman to actually being one. Style over substance again.
Quote #5
Went to the theater. […] There was some other vaudeville about some collegiate registrar, written quite freely, so that I wondered how it passed the censors, and they said outright that merchants cheat people and their sons are debauchers and try to worm their way into the nobility. (4.1)
If money meant being able to attain nobility, penniless (or should we say kopeck-less) people like Poprishchin viewed merchants, who had money, with suspicion and resentment. Our noses smell something of a revolution in the air (but it will probably take until 1917 to reach us).
Quote #6
I can't stand cabbage, the smell of which comes pouring out of all the small shops on Meshchanskaya; besides that, there was such a whiff of hell coming from under the gates of each house that I held my nose and ran for dear life. And those vile artisans produce so much soot and smoke in their workshops that it's decidedly impossible for a gentleman to walk there. (7.1)
Cabbage was the quintessential ingredient of lower class cooking. Poprishchin tries to distinguish himself from the lower-class artisans by putting them down with something as essential as the food they eat and their working conditions. As you can see, relations between the upper and the lower classes weren't exactly ideal.