Leo Tolstoy
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24 threw all difficult questions over his right shoulder…: Refers to a character by the name of Mr John Podsnap in Charles Dickens’s novel Our Mutual Friend (1865).
25 two loves: The two loves discussed by the participants in Plato’s Symposium are typified by two aspects of the goddess Aphrodite: earthly, sensual love (Aphrodite Pandemos) and heavenly love free of sensual desire (Aphrodite Urania). The latter came to be known as ‘platonic love’.
26 some sort of courses: In 1872 a school of continuing education for women was opened in Moscow, where girls with a high–school diploma could study literature, history, art history and the history of civilization, foreign languages, physics, mathematics and hygiene.
27 table–turning and spirits: Tolstoy was very interested in the fashion of spiritualism, which reached Russia in the 1870s. His earliest criticism of it appears here in Levin’s argument with Vronsky; in 1890 he wrote a satirical comedy on spiritualism entitled The Fruits of Enlightenment, performed in 1892 by the Maly Theatre in Moscow. (See Nabokov’s delightful note to this same place.)
28 Corps of Pages: An elite military school connected to the imperial household, made up of one hundred and fifty boys drawn mostly from the court nobility. After four or five years in the Corps of Pages, those who passed the examination were accepted as officers in whatever regiment they chose, and the top sixteen pupils each year were attached to various members of the imperial family. Enrolment in the Corps of Pages was thus considered the start of a brilliant career in the service.
29 bezique: A card game (besique in French), introduced in the seventeenth century, that came back into fashion in the 1860s.
30 Château des Fleurs: The name of a Moscow restaurant and amusement spot featuring singers, dancers, cyclists, gymnasts and the like.
31 Honi soit…: ‘Shamed be he who thinks evil of it’ – motto of the Order of the Garter, the highest order of English knighthood, founded by Edward III c. 1344.
32 sole provider …: Frequent and spectacular accidents in the early days caused widespread public fear of the railways, whose owners were not required to pay indemnities to victims or their families. These problems were much debated in the press of the time.
33 cast a stone: ‘He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her’ (John 8:7).
34 public theatre: The first public theatre was opened in Moscow in 1873. Prior to that, the theatres of Moscow and Petersburg all functioned under the control of the Department of Imperial Theatres.
35 without cuffs or collar: A sign of poverty. Women’s dresses had detachable cuffs and collars, which could be changed and laundered frequently. A woman would normally have a good supply of them in her wardrobe.
36 Nikolai Dmitrich: Nabokov notes that Masha addresses Nikolai Levin formally, by his first name and patronymic (and in the second person plural), as a respectful petty bourgeois wife would address her husband, while an aristocratic woman like Dolly, when she refers to her husband in the same way, deliberately chooses it as the most distant and estranged way to speak of him.
37 Sunday schools: In the early 1870s revolutionaries organized Sunday schools in the factories to give workers the rudiments of education. In 1874 strict control over these schools was introduced, and many students were expelled from the universities for participating in them.
38 rug sleigh: ‘A type of rustic comfortable sleigh which looked as if it consisted of a rug on runners’ (Nabokov).
39 book by Tyndall: John Tyndall (1820–93 ). British physicist; in 1872, Tolstoy read his book Heat as a Mode of Motion (1863), translated and published in Petersburg in 1864.
40 third bell… sleeping car: Three bells signalled the departure of a train in Russian stations: the first fifteen minutes before, the second five minutes before, and the third at the moment of departure. (See Nabokov’s detailed note on Russian sleeping cars and first–class night travel.)
41 Petersburg face: The soft water of the Neva and the salt air of Petersburg were considered good for the complexion.
42 Pan–Slavist: The Pan–Slavists saw the future of Russia in an eastward–looking political and spiritual union of all the Slavs, rather than in a closer rapprochement with the West. This is referred to in Part Eight as ‘the Eastern question’.
43 Duc de Lille: The name Tolstoy gives to the poet is a play on the name of the French poet Leconte de Lisle (1818–94), leader of the Parnassian school; the title of the book also parodies the titles of a number of French books of the time, including Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. For the fullest expression of Tolstoy’s dislike of the new art of his time see his What Is Art? (1898).
44 slave–girl Rebecca genre: That is, the Semitic type of beauty, which had became fashionable in the nineteenth century as an alternative to the classical type.
Part Two
1 Great Lent: The forty–day fast period preceding Holy Week and Easter in the Orthodox liturgical calendar, called ‘great’ to distinguish it from several ‘lesser’ fasts at other times of the year.
2 famous singer: The singer, as we learn later, is Swedish soprano Christiane Nilsson (1843–1927). She had great success on the stages of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow and the Mariinsky Theatre in Petersburg between 1872 and 1885.
3 Blessed are the peacemakers …: Cf. Matthew 5:9: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.’
4 young men are out driving …: The story that follows was told to Tolstoy by his brother–in–law, Alexander Bers. Tolstoy found it ‘a charming story in itself and asked permission to use it in his novel.
5 titular councillor and councilloress: Titular councillor was ninth of the fourteen ranks of the imperial civil service established by Peter the Great, equivalent to the military rank of staff–captain.
6 Talleyrand: Charles–Maurice de Talleyrand–Périgord (1754–1838), French diplomat and political figure, served in a number of important capacities throughout the period of the revolution, the empire and the restoration, perhaps most brilliantly at the Congress of Vienna (1814–15).
7 unable to continue standing: There are no pews in Orthodox churches; people stand through the services, which can be very long.
8 Kaulbach: The German painter Wilhelm Kaulbach (1805–74), director of the Munich Academy of Art, was considered the last representative of idealism. Actors and opera singers of the time studied his monumental biblical and historical compositions in order to learn stage gestures and movements.
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 mécontent de son esprit’, a line by the French pastoral poet Mme Antoinette Deshoulières (1637–94).
12 Bouffe: Opéra bouffe (from the Italian opera buffa, ‘comic opera’) became popular in the eighteenth century. The Opéra–bouffe in Paris was opened at the Théatre Montmartre in 1847. In 1870 a French comic opéra theatre called the Opéra 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 Réaumur scale, which was used in Russia at that time, a temperature of –70 is the equivalent of –9° C (16° 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: Château Lafite, one of the finest red Bordeaux wines.
6 kvass: A sort of home–made beer made from fermented rye.
7 corvée: 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 Hélène: 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: Tolstoy 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 eve
n 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.