by Leo Tolstoy
9 diable rose: In 1874 the French Theatre in Petersburg produced a play by E. Grange and L. Thiboux entitled Les Diables roses (The Pink Devils).
10 a man deprived of a shadow: There is no such tale in the collection of the Brothers Grimm. The motif of the lost shadow belongs to The Extraordinary Adventures of Peter Schlemihl, by Adalbert Chamisso (Adalbert de Chamisso de Boncourt, 1781-1838), a German Romantic writer of French origin. But Princess Miagky may be thinking of 'The Shadow', by Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75), published in Russian translation in 1870.
11... some French verse: An almost literal translation of 'Nul n'est content de sa fortune, ni mecontent de son esprit', a line by the French pastoral poet Mme Antoinette Deshoulieres (1637-94).
12 Bouffe: Opera bouffe (from the Italian opera buffa, 'comic opera') became popular in the eighteenth century. The Opera-bouffe in Paris was opened at the Theatre Montmartre in 1847. In 1870 a French comic opera theatre called the Opera Bouffe was opened in Petersburg.
13 Rambouillet... graces and muses: The literary salon at the Hotel Rambouillet, presided over by the Marquise de Rambouillet (1588-1665), was the most influential of its day, bringing together important writers, poets, artists and politicians - the 'taste-makers' of their age.
14 conscription: The new military regulations of 1874 replaced the twenty-five-year term of service by a maximum six-year term and abolished the privilege of exemption from military service enjoyed until then by the nobility. The plans for this reform were debated in the press during the early 1870s.
15 seven below: On the Reaumur scale, which was used in Russia at that time, a temperature of -70 is the equivalent of -9deg C (16deg F).
16 Krasnaya Gorka: In Russian popular tradition, the day known as Krasnaya Gorka (literally 'Pretty Little Hill'), the Tuesday following St Thomas's Sunday (the first Sunday after Easter), is a day of commemoration of the dead.
17 ploughs and harrows: Russian peasants used ploughs and harrows of hardened wood - hence the knock of axes. Tolstoy will later show Levin's frustration at their resistance to the introduction of iron implements.
18 before Lent: That is, two months earlier.
19 polotok: Polotok is split and dried or smoked chicken; like home-made herb liqueurs and nettle soup, it is typical of Russian country fare.
20 preserves: Fruit preserves (more liquid than our jams) were commonly served in little dishes after dinner with coffee or tea.
21 Ossianic: That is, like the heroines of the Romantic forgery Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760), which the author, James Macpherson (1736-96), claimed he had translated from the Gaelic of a bard named Ossian.
22 'To count the sands ...': Oblonsky quotes, not quite accurately, from the famous ode 'God', by Gavrila Derzhavin (1743-1816), the major Russian poet of the age preceding Pushkin.
23 icon: According to custom, every room in a Russian house should have an icon, if not several icons, usually in the corner to far right of the door. Lower-class people, merchants and tradesmen, would still look for the icon and cross themselves on entering a room, a habit enlightened aristocrats like Oblonsky and Levin have lost.
24 electric light everywhere: In the early 1870s electric light was still a great rarity and was generally considered impracticable. However, it could be found as a technical novelty in some amusement establishments.
25 Wertherian: Werther is the hero of The Sorrows of Young Werther, a semi-autobiographical novel in letters about unhappy love and suicide, by the German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832.).
26 Krasnoe Selo: 'Beautiful Village', originally some fifteen miles southwest of Petersburg, by 1973 was incorporated into the city itself. At the turn of the nineteenth century, wooden palaces were built there for members of the imperial family; the imperial residences of Tsarskoe Selo and Gatchina were also nearby. From 1823 until the revolution, the village housed a military school and a guards corps (hence Vronsky's presence). In 1861 a racetrack was built there and the place became a fashionable summer suburb for the Petersburg aristocracy.
27 Thule: Or Ultima Thule, was the Greek and Latin name of a legendary land some six days' sail north of Britain, thought to be the northernmost place in the world. The line is from the opera Faust, by French composer Charles Gounod (1818-93), based on Goethe's monumental drama of the same title.
28 Peterhof: An imperial residence and park on the Bay of Kronstadt, built in 1711 by Peter the Great.
29 ... thought of her son...: In Russia before the revolution divorce was granted by an ecclesiastical court and was very difficult to obtain. Only the injured party could sue for divorce, and the offending party was denied custody of the children and the right to remarry.
30 provincial marshal: The provincial marshal of nobility was the highest elective office in a Russian province; governors and other administrative officers were appointed by the tsar.
31 Widows' Home: A philanthropic institution for poor, sick and old widows opened in Moscow and Petersburg in 1803.
32 Slavonic: Church Slavonic, linguistically based on Old Bulgarian, was and remains the liturgical and scriptural language of the Orthodox Church in Slavic countries.
33 ... turn the other cheek ...: Loose paraphrase of Luke 6:29: 'And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also' (cf. Matthew 5:39-40).
34 Pietists: Pietism was a seventeenth-century reform movement within the Lutheran Church, but the prince is referring here to a more general current of piety in the Russian aristocracy of the time, favouring inner peace and prayer over external ritual, with more than a touch of smug sanctimoniousness.
35 they've beaten everybody: The colonel is referring to the series of Prussian military successes, culminating in the victory over France in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), through which Bismarck consolidated the German empire.
Part Three
1 St Peter's: That is, the feast of Sts Peter and Paul on 29 June.
2 council member: A member of the zemstvo council.
3 criminal courts: Open courts and trial by jury were first introduced in Russia by the judicial reforms of 1864.
4 day of the Trinity: The Russian name for the feast of Pentecost, on the occasion of which churches and homes are decorated with flowers and branches of greenery.
5 Lafite: Chateau Lafite, one of the finest red Bordeaux wines.
6 kvass: A sort of home-made beer made from fermented rye.
7 corvee: Under serfdom, the unpaid labour owed by serfs to the lord.
8 not received communion for more than a year: At that time, the normal practice was to take communion twice a year - at Christmas and Easter. Dolly's children have missed two Easters and one Christmas, and have thus gone an unusually long time without communion.
9 three fasts: The child was born before St Peter's fast the previous year and was thus nursed through three fast periods - St Peter's in June, the Dormition fast in August, and the Advent fast in November - and weaned before the beginning of the Great Lent. (See note i, Part Two.)
10 visit often: It was a common situation for peasant men to be hired in a local town, in the provincial capital, or even in another province, wherever there were jobs to be had. Hence Dolly's question about visiting.
11 St Philip's: St Philip's day, 14 November, is the eve of the forty-day Advent fast. Since weddings are not permitted during fast periods, the boy got married just before.
12 La Belle Helene: An operetta by Jacques Offenbach (1819-80), based on the story of Helen of Troy; Menelaus is of course the cuckolded husband. The operetta had been performed recently in Petersburg.
13 Eugubine Tables: Seven bronze tablets inscribed in Umbrian and Latin, dating back to the second or first century BC, discovered in Gubbio, Italy (ancient Iguvium, later Eugubium), in 1444. In 1874 the French Revue des deux mondes published an article on the Eugubine Tables, which may be what Karenin is reading.
14 Zaraysk province: T
olstoy may have in mind the numerous projects for irrigating the fields in Samara province after the famine of 1873, which drew large government subsidies regardless of their practicability.
15 settling of racial minorities: Abuses were widespread in cases of the resettlement of unoccupied lands, for instance the thirty million acres belonging to the Bashkir people in Orenburg province. In the 1860s the government began to encourage the leasing of Bashkir land to displaced peoples from Central Asia, which led to shady speculations involving officials in the provincial administration itself.
16 Les sept merveilles du monde: The seven wonders of the world, the seven most remarkable works of antiquity: the pyramids of Egypt, the hanging gardens of Semiramis in Babylon, the statue of Olympian Zeus by Phidias, the Colossus of Rhodes, the temple of Artemis in Ephesus, the mausoleum of Halicarnassus, and the lighthouse of Alexandria. The Petersburg circle adopted this name in hyperbole.
17 unexpected young guest...: This unnamed guest, as Tolstoy's son Sergei observed in his memoirs, was apparently one of the young grand dukes, the sons of the emperor, on whose entrance even elderly ladies were required to rise.
18 Decembrist: The sudden death of the emperor Alexander I on 19 November 1825 was followed by a period of confusion about the succession. A conspiratorial group of officers and noblemen, opposed to imperial absolutism and favouring a constitutional monarchy or even a republican government, seized the occasion and gathered their forces in the Senate Square of Petersburg on 14 December 1815. Hence the name 'Decembrists'. The uprising was promptly quashed by loyal contingents of the Imperial Guard; one hundred and twenty-one men were arrested, of whom five were executed and the rest stripped of their rights and fortunes and exiled to Siberia.
19 one of the most expensive regiments: A commanding officer received symbolic pay and was expected to outfit his regiment at his own expense.
20 Serpukhovskoy ... back from Central Asia: In 1873 the Khiva khanate was united with Russia. Events in Central Asia, judging by the press of the time, aroused considerable international interest. Quick and brilliant military careers could be made in the Turkestan of the 1870s, of which Serpukhovskoy is a typical example.
21 Russian communists: Various radical groups of the 1860s, including the followers of the writer N. G. Chernyshevsky (1828-89), advocated forms of communism based on the theories of French socialists such as Charles Fourier (1772-1837) and Saint-Simon (1760-1825), prior to the emergence of Marxian communism.
22 Helene: See note 12, Part Three.
23 justice of the peace: The legal reform of 1864 handed all local civil disputes over to the justices of the peace. Their hearings were open, contentious, oral and equitable. The nobility considered this a loss of power, and complaints about justices of the peace were common among landowners of the time.
24 serf... emancipation: The Russian serfs were emancipated by the emperor Alexander II in 1861.
25 Peter, Catherine, Alexander: The emperors Peter the Great (1672-1725) and Alexander II (1818-81) and the empress Catherine the Great (1729-96) were the most important reformers of the Russian empire. The potato, for instance, was forcibly introduced by Catherine the Great. The period 'before the tsars' was that of the princedoms of Novgorod, Kiev and Moscow.
26 Tosscan... Bitiug: 'Tosscan' appears to come from 'Toscan' (i.e. 'Tuscan'), punningly distorted by Nikolai Ivanych. Percherons are a great breed of work and draft horses from La Perche in Normandy; the Bitiug, named after an affluent of the Don, is a Russian breed of strong, heavy-set cart horses.
27 Mulhouse system: In the 1850s the German economist Hermann Schulze-Delitsch (1808-83) proposed an arrangement of independent banks and cooperatives, with the idea of reconciling the interests of workers and owners. Companies organized on his principles appeared in Russia in 1865. Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-64), a German socialist, was the founder of the German Universal Workers' Union. Instead of Schulze-Delitsch cooperatives, he favoured manufacturing associations supported by the state. The 'Mulhouse system' refers to a society for the improvement of workers' lives founded by a factory-owner named Dolfuss in the Alsatian city of Mulhouse. A commercial undertaking with philanthropic aims, it built houses which were sold to workers on credit.
28 Frederick: Poland was first partitioned between Russia, Austria and Prussia in 1772. The king of Prussia at that time was Frederick the Great (1712-86).
29 Spencer: British philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), founder of the evolutionary school, believed that education does not lead to national prosperity but that prosperity is a necessary condition for the development of education. A Russian translation of an article by Spencer on education was published in 1874.
30 Mill: See note 5, Part One. Mill's book on political economy was translated into Russian by the radical writer N. G. Chernyshevsky (see note 21, Part Three), author of the influential novel What Is to Be Done? (1863).
31 Kauffmann, Jones, Dubois, Miccelli: These are invented names, parodying the pedantic manner of referring to obscure authorities.
32 Franklin: Benjamin Franklin (1706-90), American writer, inventor, patriot and statesman. As a young man, Tolstoy kept a diary in the manner of Franklin's, in which he chronicled his own moral shortcomings and exhorted himself to improve.
33 anointed: The Orthodox sacrament of the anointing of the sick is a sacrament of healing which, like the Roman Catholic sacrament of extreme unction, has come to be associated with terminal illness.
Part Four
1 foreign prince ... to Petersburg: In January-February 1874, Petersburg was host to princes from Germany, England and Denmark, invited on the occasion of the wedding of Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, to Maria Alexandrovna, daughter of Alexander II.
2 Athenian night: The Roman writer Aulus Gellius (second century ad) was the author of a collection of dialogues on various branches of knowledge known as Athenian (or Attic) Nights, the title of which in Russian became proverbial for gatherings marked by licentious behaviour.
3 portfolio ... pushed her away: According to the law of that time, Karenin, as head of the family, had the right to read the correspondence of his wife and any other member of his household.
4 legal profession ... placed: The legal profession emerged in Russia together with the institution of open courts, as a result of the judicial reforms of 1864. Lawyers became prominent public figures and their profession both profitable and fashionable.
5 in a frock coat: That is, dressed more casually, not in the formal tailcoat usually called for on such occasions.
6 'Be not so stern ...': A jumbled quotation of the first two lines of the poem 'From Hafiz' by Afanasy Fet (1820-92), a friend of Tolstoy's and one of his favourite poets.
7 russification of Poland: Portions of Poland came under Russian domination through the three partitions of 1772, 1793 and 1798. The national insurrections that broke out in 1830 and 1863 were cruelly repressed, and 'Russian' Poland remained under Russian domination until 1914.
8 Attic salt: Refined wit thought to be typical of Athenian conversation, as represented in the many 'dialogues' of classical and Hellenistic literature.
9 education... disputes ...: In 18 71 the Russian minister of national education, Count D. A. Tolstoy, proposed establishing two sorts of schools, so-called 'real' high schools and classical gymnasiums. The distinction was intended to limit the teaching of natural science, which was seen as a source of dangerous materialistic and atheistic notions. It was hoped that classical studies would cure young people of revolutionary ideas.
10 anti-nihilistic: The term 'nihilism', first used philosophically in German (Nihilismus) to signify annihilation, a reduction to nothing (attributed to Buddha), or the rejection of religious beliefs and moral principles, came via the French nihilisme to Russian, where it acquired a political meaning, referring to the doctrine of the younger generation of socialists of the 18 60s, who advocated the destruction of the existing social order without specifying what should replace it. The great Russian lex
icographer V. I. Dahl (1801-72), normally a model of restraint, defines 'nihilism' in his Interpretive Dictionary of the Living Russian Language as 'an ugly and immoral doctrine which rejects everything that cannot be palpated'.
11 women's education: In the 1860s women were allowed education only as teachers or midwives, but by the 1870s women's struggle for intellectual and social independence had been clearly expressed and higher studies in many fields were opened to them. (See note 26, Part One.)
12 long hair, short...: The full saying is: 'Long on hair, short on brains'.
13 choral principle: Pestsov here borrows a favourite notion of the Slavophiles, proponents of Russian national culture and Orthodoxy, originally expressed by the writer K. S. Aksakov (1817-60), about the peasant village commune being a sort of 'moral chorus' in which each voice is heard, but in harmony with all other voices.
14 ... never mind, silence!: Levin quotes, consciously or unconsciously, the unmistakable words of the lovelorn and mad Mr Poprishchin in The Diary of a Madman, by Nikolai Gogol (1809-52).