monad: A spiritual being, substance, or soul that is indivisible, indestructible, and impenetrable; monads are “windowless”; neither substance nor accident can come into a monad from the outside.
Iverian Chapel: The tiny chapel of the Iverian icon of the Mother of God (1669), sandwiched between the twin archways of the Resurrection Gate leading to Red Square; one of the holiest shrines in Russia; demolished in 1929 and rebuilt in 1995.
Vedanta and the Sankhya: Two of the six orthodox systems of Indian philosophy. Vedanta forms the basis of most modern schools of Hinduism. Sankhya is a nontheistic school that instills principles relating to the dualism between matter and soul.
Purvapakshin: “A most excellent institution in Indian philosophy, this Purvapakshin is an imaginary person who is privileged in every disputed question to say all that can possibly be said against the view finally to be upheld. He is something like the man of straw whom modern writers like to set up in their arguments in order to be able to demolish him with great credit to themselves.” F. Max Muller, Theosophy or Psychological Religion (1903).
Vyãsa: A legendary, semidivine sage supposed to have compiled the Mahãbhãrata (c. fourth century AD), one of the two great epic poems of ancient India.
Patanjali: An Indian philosopher (c. second century BC); the author of the Yogasūtra, the basic text of Yoga, one of the six orthodox systems of Indian philosophy.
rishi: A holy Hindu sage, saint, or inspired poet.
Ashoka: The last major emperor (c. 265–238 BC) of the Mauryan Empire in ancient India; renounced military aggression and promoted Buddhism.
Specialist: Here meaning someone with a vocational or higher education from a non-proletarian family.
nonparty member of the intelligentsia . . .i) jammed into a class, ii) forced out, etc.: Lenin maintained that the intelligentsia was not an actual class but a stratum between classes, between “toilers” and “exploiters.”
a high white wall with names half plastered over and immured: MARAT—ROBESPIERRE—GRACCHUST: This refers to the wall around the Revolutionary Military Council (RVS) on the corner of Znamenka Street and Prechistensky Boulevard. Created in 1918, the RVS was chaired by Trotsky, then the most powerful man in the Soviet government after Lenin. But by the mid-1920s, when this story was written, Stalin’s campaign to displace Trotsky was well under way. Trotsky had been relieved of his post as chairman of the RVS and his name, perhaps, “half plastered over”: MARAT—ROBESPIERRE—GRACCHUS—T(ROTSKY).
Marat: Jean Paul Marat (1743–1793), a radical French revolutionary.
Robespierre: Maximilien de Robespierre (1758–1794), the revolutionary who ran France during the Reign of Terror.
Gracchus: François-Noël Babeuf (1760–1797), a French political journalist and agitator who took the name Gracchus in tribute to the Gracchi (champions of agrarian reform in ancient Rome). The world’s first militant communist, Babeuf saw the French Revolution as “only the forerunner of another revolution far greater, far more solemn, which will be the last.” Trotsky traced the Communist International back to Babeuf.
Prechistensky Boulevard: Now Gogolevksy Boulevard.
omniphlegmia: A neologism derived from “phlegm” in its medieval physiological sense. One of the four bodily humors, phlegm was described as cold, moist, and white.
sentenced to “minus 1”: A reference to the Soviet system of internal exile. Beginning in 1918, repressed residents of Moscow, Petrograd (St. Petersburg), and Kiev were sentenced to “minus 3,” prohibiting them from living in those three cities. By the late 1920s, the number of minuses being handed down by Soviet courts had increased to as many as 12.
that unblinking eye fixed on his life, peering through its mystical triangle: The all-seeing eye, a Christian symbol of God.
urban boulevard: The Moscow boulevards (named and unnamed) to which Krzhizhanovsky refers all have parks running down the middle of them, with shade trees, benches, sandy paths, and the occasional playground.
in folktales . . .they practice witchcraft with footprints: “Another law of magic is the transfer of a part to the whole. To cause a person to die, one had only to obtain a few hairs from his head or his footprint in the ground or, better yet, both. When the person walked by, someone would follow him and take his footprint—a fistful of earth from under his foot. This earth was then put into a small sack and hung in the stove, while the hairs . . .were smeared with clay in the stovepipe. The earth would begin to dry, and the clay to crack—and the person would shrivel or waste away.” Andrei Sinyavsky, Ivan the Fool: Russian Folk Belief (Moscow: Glas, 2007), 150.
a trio of waifs who might have passed the night with the asphalt and footsteps in one of those cauldrons: War, revolution, and famine had created an estimated seven million waifs in Russia by 1922. In Moscow, in cold weather, they would scramble into the still-warm empty asphalt cauldrons to sleep at night.
Vindava Station: Now the Riga Station.
in place of syllogisms: According to his wife, Anna Bovshek, Krzhizhanovsky thought in images, out of which he constructed syllogisms.
Eckhart: Johann Georg Eckhart (1664–1735), a German historian and linguist; the author of a memoir of Leibniz.
preestablished harmony: A harmony said by Leibniz to be established eternally in advance between all monads, but especially between mind and matter.
the Tatar graveyard: In tsarist times, people of different religions were buried in different graveyards. This rule became moot under atheistic Soviet rule.
to lose a tempo: In chess a “tempo” is a turn. When a player takes one more move than necessary to achieve his aim, he “loses a tempo.”
THE COLLECTOR OF CRACKS
playbill pillars: The Moscow equivalent of Paris’s Morris columns, large sidewalk cylinders for posting playbills and the like.
night song: The seventh and last of the canonical hours; the last liturgical prayer of the day said after nightfall or just before re-tiring.
Lövenix: A nickname for Leibniz (see note on Leibniz for “Seams”). As an old man in Hanover, Leibniz had the reputation of an unbeliever and some Hanoverians called him Lövenix (“believer in nothing”).
ophthalmoscope: An instrument for viewing the interior of the eye.
Hering: Ewald Hering (1834–1918), a German physiologist who studied color vision.
Heine: Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), a German poet and prose writer. Krzhizhanovsky is evidently referring here to a passage from The Baths of Lucca: “Ah, dear reader, if you would complain of discordance, let your complaint be that the world is rent in pieces. For as the heart of the poet is the central point of the world, it must in times like these be miserably divided and torn.” (Translated by Edward Dowden.)
Descartes’s Meditations: Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), rewritten in textbook form as Principles of Philosophy (1644). Principle XXI says: “Time is such that its parts do not depend on each other and never co-exist. So from the fact that we exist now, it does not follow that we shall exist at the immediately succeeding instant, unless some cause (namely the same cause as first created us) continuously re-creates us, as it were, or conserves us . . . And he who has enough power to conserve us as beings distinct from himself, is all the more able to conserve himself as well . . .that being is God.” (Translated by George MacDonald Ross.)
terza rima: A verse form composed of three-line stanzas, the middle line of each rhyming with the first and third lines of the next; used by Dante in The Divine Comedy.
THE LAND OF NOTS
“Being cannot not be without becoming Nothing . . .”: In his Science of Logic (1812–1816), Hegel maintains that one cannot have the quality of Being unless one also considers Nothing. It is impossible to conceive of Being without Nothing being included in the thought.
time (which, as the wisest Nots have proven, does not exist per se): These “wisest Nots” would include the German mathematician Hermann Minkowski (1864–1909), the first to mathematically elabora
te the space-time continuum.
Ethics: A work in five parts by Spinoza (1632–1677), the Dutch Jewish philosopher.
“I think, therefore I am”: Cogito ergo sum. Descartes took his formulation to be irrefutable evidence of the existence of the mind.
Scholarly Nots . . .typically divide their all into “I” and “not-I”: In Foundations of Natural Right (1796–1797), the German idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte maintains: “The rational being is, only insofar as it posits itself as being, i.e., insofar as it is conscious of itself. All being, that of the I as well as of the not-I, is a determinate modification of consciousness; and without some consciousness, there is no being.” (Translated by Michael Baur.)
the outside world is a just a bad habit of the so-called nervous system: In his Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), the Irish philosopher George Berkeley argues that the outside world exists only through being perceived: “All the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, in a word all those bodies which compose the mighty frame of the world, have not any subsistence without a mind, their being is to be perceived or known.”
The Nots invented the legend of the ship Argo, but isn’t their imaginary life a tale of the wreck of ergo: “In an early article, ‘Argo and Ergo’ (1918), Krzhizhanovsky remarks on the difference between the route of the poet—the Greek galley Argo, sailing away into a land of myths—and the realm of the scientist, whose duty it is to bring a thing ever closer to its explanation (‘ergo’: the result of a cause or a because).” Caryl Emerson, introduction to Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, The Letter Killers Club (NYRB, 2011), viii.
panlogism: The thesis that whatever is real is rational and that whatever is rational is real.
THE RUNAWAY FINGERS
spur stone: See note on same for “Autobiography of a Corpse.”
THE UNBITTEN ELBOW
The Unbitten Elbow: The title of this story derives from a Russian idiom—blizok lokot, da ne ukusish: literally, “your elbow is near, but you can’t bite it”—used to denote something that seems easily doable and within reach but is actually undoable and out of reach. “So near and yet so far” is the rough English equivalent.
every day two rather stupid fellows sat down: An apparent reference to the Capablanca–Alekhine World Championship Match that played out over two and a half months in 1927 in Buenos Aires. Against all odds, the Russian-born Alekhine won.
Kant understood this too: Kant used his concept of the thing-in-itself as a limiting or boundary concept (Grenzbegriff).
thing-in-itself: Used by Kant to denote an object as it is conceived to exist independently of any relation to a knowing subject.
the age-old gnoseological drama: Exploring the limits of knowledge. Gnoseology is the philosophic theory of knowledge: inquiry into the basis, nature, validity, and limits of knowledge.
Stirnerism: Extremely radical individualism. See note on Stirner for “Autobiography of a Corpse.”
the length of sixty cubits stated in the Bible: 1 Kings 6:2. “And the house which King Solomon built for the Lord, the length thereof was threescore cubits.”
cubit: An ancient measure of length from the elbow to the tip of the longest finger. In Russian, the word for “cubit” is the same as that for “elbow”: lokot.
neo-Lamarckism: A return to the ideas of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829), the French biologist who claimed that acquired traits could be inherited.
Spencer’s [argument] with the dead Kant: Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), the English philosopher and social scientist, rejected Kant’s claim that space and time are subjective conditions.
YELLOW COAL
the vicariate of the senses: The substitution of the senses, as in the sharpened remaining senses of a blind man.
Krause: Wilhelm Krause (1833–1910), a German anatomist.
bellum omnium contra omnes: The natural state of man, according to Hobbes, before civil society and the social contract.
BRIDGE OVER THE STYX
veiling either eye with a membrane: The nictitating membrane, found beneath the lower lid of the toad’s eye and capable of extending across the eyeball, protects the eye without interfering with eyesight.
Juvenal: A Roman poet and satirist (c. 60–c. 140). “That there are such things as spirits of the dead and infernal regions, the river Cocytus, and the Styx with inky frogs in its waters, that so many thousands cross the stream in a single skiff, not even children believe, unless they’re still in the nursery.” The Satires, Satire II, trans. Niall Rudd (Oxford University Press, 2008), lines 148–52.
one obol: In classical mythology, the fare charged by Charon to ferry spirits of the dead across the Acheron to the kingdom of the dead.
the purest waters of all, the waters of the Styx: The waters of the Styx were said to possess magical properties. Thetis took her son Achilles by the heel and dipped him in the Styx to make him invulnerable.
allow me to refer to Hegel: In his Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1840), Hegel holds that “History requires Understanding—the power of looking at an object in an independent objective light, and comprehending it in its rational connection with other objects. Those peoples therefore are alone capable of History . . .who have arrived at that period of development . . .at which individuals comprehend their own existence as independent, i.e., possess self-consciousness.” (Translated by J. Sibree.)
Seymour: Robert Seymour (1798–1836), a prolific British illustrator who drew the frontispiece and first seven plates for Dickens’s Pickwick Papers.
the waters of the Cocytus, Lethe, Acheron, and Styx: In Greek mythology, four of the five rivers separating the underworld from the world above, the rivers of lamentation, forgetfulness, woe, and the surety of oaths sworn by the gods, respectively.
the toad’s sunken eyes: When swallowing food, a toad’s eyes drop down inside its head; this movement helps push the food down the toad’s throat.
THIRTY PIECES OF SILVER
Thirty Pieces of Silver: The sum paid to Judas Iscariot for his betrayal of Christ (Matthew 26:15). Thirty silver pieces was apparently a pittance, the price of a gored slave (Exodus 21:32).
And he cast down the pieces of silver . . .: Matthew 27:5–8.
cubit: Roughly twenty inches.
Caiaphas: The high priest in Jerusalem the year Jesus was tried (John 11:47–54).
that same good publican whose record recalled the parable: The parable of the penitent publican who humbled himself before God in his prayers as opposed to the self-righteous Pharisee who exalted himself (Luke 18:9–14).
Heeding the Scripture’s advice: The advice of Jesus: “And whosoever shall offend one of these little ones that believe in me, it is better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he were cast into the sea.” (Mark 9:42)
Titus: Titus Flavius Vespasianus, the Roman emperor (79–81) who as commander of a Roman legion in Judea captured and destroyed Jerusalem (70).
John Law: A Scottish monetary reformer (1671–1729) who proposed a central bank as an agency for manufacturing money as banknotes, rather than as gold and silver.
POSTMARK: MOSCOW
that “particular imprint” (to quote Griboyedov): In Aleksandr Griboyedov’s play Woe from Wit (1822–24), Famusov remarks that “All Muscovites bear a particular imprint” (act 2, scene 5).
Bryansk Station: Now the Kiev Station.
CC RCP (B): Once located at Staraya Square, 4.
Church of Nine Martyrs: At Bolshoi Devyatinsky, 15. A stone church built in the 1730s; the three-tiered belfry was added in 1844.
PRAVDA: Daily newspaper; official organ of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Kamer-Kollezhsky Val: A twenty-three-mile-long earthen embankment around Moscow with eighteen barriers (customs checkpoints), which marked the city limits from 1742 to 1917. In the mid-nineteenth century the barriers were removed and the embankment replaced with streets that still exist today (Butyrsky Val, Gruzinsky Val, Presne
nsky Val, etc.).
white mansion at 7b Nikitsky Boulevard: Gogol spent his last winters in rooms on the ground floor; here he finished writing part two of Dead Souls and then burned it
Shenrok: Vladimir Shenrok (1853–1910), a historian of literature and a renowned Gogol expert.
“Slavophilism”: A nineteenth-century school of Russian social thought: part nationalist protest against borrowings from the West, part philosophical-historical assertions of the superiority of Russia’s Orthodox-based traditions and culture.
Khomyakov’s ramshackle house on Sobachia Square: Aleksei Khomyakov (1804–1860), the religious philosopher and apostle of Slavophilism, lived in this house near the Arbat from 1844 until his death. In the 1960s the house was razed and the square paved to make way for a new thoroughfare.
Novodevichiy: A sixteenth-century convent where Vladimir Solovyov is buried.
Vladimir Solovyov: A religious philosopher, poet, and critic (1853–1900), who embraced both Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism, envisioning a “universal church.”
three small icons of different denominations: Soon after Solovyov’s funeral, “an unseen hand put two icons on his grave: one was an icon of the Resurrection from Old Jerusalem with the Greek inscription: ‘Christ is risen from the dead,’ the other was an icon of the Ostrobram Mother of God with the Latin inscription: ‘In memoria aeterna erit Justus’ (In remembrance everlasting the just man will be).” K.V. Mochulsky, Vladimir Solovyov (Paris: YMCA Press, 1936). Neither icon survives; Solovyov’s original gravestone, like many others, was destroyed in the 1930s.
playbill pillars: See note on same for “The Collector of Cracks.”
trams A, B, and especially V: Tram A ran along Moscow’s inner Boulevard Ring, tram B along the outer Garden Ring. Tram V’s V-shaped route included the city’s eastern outskirts; it ran from Red Square south across the Moscow River to Zamoskvorechye, then east over Novospassky Bridge, northeast past Krutitsky Tower, Rogozhskaya Zastava, and Andronikov Monastery, northwest across the Yauza River, along Baumanskaya Street to Elokhovsky Cathedral, zigzagged along Krasnoselskaya Street and Krasnoprudnaya, then swung back down to the center along Myasnitskaya Street.
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