by Leo Tolstoy
52. Vous êtes une habitante de Moscou?: ‘Are you a resident of Moscow?’ Et moi, je n’ai encore jamais fréquenté la capitale: ‘As for me, I have never frequented the capital before.’
53. vis-à-vis: Literally, ‘face to face’, but here meaning across from each other.
54. Rose ou hortie?: ‘Rose or nettle?’ Hortie is an older spelling of the modern ortie.
55. Il ne fallait pas danser, si vous ne savez pas!: ‘You shouldn’t dance if you don’t know how!’ Papa’s use of the formal pronoun may increase the severity of his rebuke.
56. Grossvater (grandfather): A traditional theme and dance signalling the evening’s end.
57. La belle Flamande (‘The beautiful Flemish woman’): It has been suggested that the source of this odd phrase is Laurence Sterne’s Sentimental Journey (1767), which Tolstoy was translating while he worked on ‘Childhood’, but it may be wiser – and more Tolstoyan – to look for its meaning in the personality of Papa himself and see it as a typically facetious, if not wholly intelligible allusion by him to the 1818 contredanse of the same name by the well-known Belgian maître de danse (dance master) Charles Sacré (1785–1831), who choreographed it, along with seventeen others, for balls given in Brussels by the Duke of Wellington and the Prince of Orange. With that kind of topical association, appropriate for Papa’s generation and caste, the phrase would have been both flattering and whimsically grandiose, and thus entirely in keeping with his distinctive sense of humour.
58. Benjamin: The youngest son of Jacob in the story of Joseph (Genesis 37–50).
59. band (venchik): It was a Russian Orthodox custom to place across the brow of the deceased a satin or paper ribbon containing images of the Saviour, the Theotokos and St John the Apostle.
60. Nasha (or Nashik): A shortened form of Natasha, the diminutive of Natalya. Its similarity to the feminine form of the Russian word for ‘our’ (nasha) would naturally reinforce the little girl’s usage and its intimate force – not to mention the modern reader’s perhaps anachronistic sense of dramatic irony: personal name, family member, chattel.
61. kutya: A dish of sweetened rice and raisins traditionally served at Russian Orthodox funerals and wakes, perhaps as a token of the sweetness of eternal life awaiting all true believers.
BOYHOOD
1. Serpukhov: A small town on the Oka river about sixty miles south of Moscow.
2. gouverneur: ‘governor’ or ‘tutor’. des enfants de bonne maison: ‘children from a good home’. menin: ‘inferior’ or ‘domestic’.
3. Geselle: ‘journeyman’.
4. Ulm: The Battle of Ulm of October 1805 in southern Germany (Bavaria) ended with the rout and capture by Napoleon of the Austrian army sent against him; Austerlitz: the Battle of Austerlitz of December 1805 in Moravia saw the decisive defeat by Napoleon of an Austro-Russian army led by Tsar Alexander I (1777–1825); Wagram: the Battle of Wagram near Vienna of July 1809 ended with the defeat of a third Austrian army by Napoleon.
5. aber der Franzose warf sein Gewehr und rief pardon: ‘But the Frenchman threw down his musket and asked for mercy.’
6. auf und ab: ‘back and forth’.
7. ‘Qui vive?’ sagte er auf einmal … ‘Qui vive?’ sagte er zum zweiten Mal … ‘Qui vive?’ sagte er zum dritten Mal: ‘“Who’s there?” he said all of a sudden … “Who’s there?” he said a second time … “Who’s there?” he said a third time.’
8. ‘Amalia!’ sagte auf einmal mein Vater: “Amalia!” my father said at once.’
9. Franz: After the Battle of Austerlitz, the last Holy Roman Emperor Franz II (1768–1835) dissolved that nominal empire, restyling himself, meanwhile, as Franz I, Emperor of the Austrian Empire, which he ruled from 1804 until his death.
10. Überrock: ‘overcoat’.
11. Nachtwächter: ‘night watchman’.
12. Macht auf!: ‘Open up!’
13. Macht auf im Namen des Gesetzes!: ‘Open up in the name of the law!’
14. Ich gab ein Hieb: ‘I gave him a blow.’
15. Ems (or Bad Ems): A Rhineland resort town on the Lahn river. It was in the nineteenth century a fashionable destination for the Russian nobility and other foreigners, thanks to its charm, reputedly healthful waters and social prestige. For Karl Ivanych it was thus a very good place to look for a position.
16. Lundi, de 2 à 3, Maître d’Histoire et de Géographie: ‘Monday, from 2 to 3, Teacher of History and Geography.’
17. Smaragdov: Sergey N. Smaragdov (1805–71) taught at the elite Alexander Lyceum in Tsarskoye Selo and was the author of a number of popular history texts for secondary school students, including a Guide to Understanding the Middle Ages (St Petersburg, 1841).
18. Kaydanov’s history: Ivan K. Kaydanov (1782–1843) was a distinguished Russian pedagogue who also taught at the Alexander Lyceum, where his students included Pushkin, among other later renowned literary and political figures. He, too, published several standard history textbooks for secondary school students, including a History of the Middle Ages (St Petersburg, 1831).
19. given me a two: Five was the highest mark in the Russian grading system, just as it is today. One is the lowest.
20. St Louis: Louis IX (1214–70) was crowned king of France in 1226 at the age of twelve, with his mother, Blanche of Castile, ruling as regent until his majority. He took part in two disastrous crusades: in 1248, when he was captured and ransomed, and in 1270, when he died on his way to the Holy Land.
21. Voyons, messieurs! Faites votre toilette et descendons: ‘Let’s see, gentlemen! Get straightened up and we’ll go downstairs.’
22. petits jeux: ‘drawing-room games’.
23. Lange Nase: ‘long nose’.
24. C’est bien: ‘Very well.’
25. Avgust Antonych: St-Jérôme’s Russified first name and patronymic; that is, ‘Auguste, son of Antoine’.
26. Oh mon père, oh mon bienfaiteur, donne-moi pour la dernière fois ta bénédiction et que la volonté de dieu soit faite: ‘Oh, my father, oh, my benefactor, give me your blessing for the last time and let God’s will be done!’
27. À genoux!: ‘On your knees!’
28. C’est ainsi que vous obéissez à votre seconde mère, c’est ainsi que vous reconnaissez ses bontés?: ‘This is how you obey your second mother, this is how you acknowledge her benevolence?’
29. Tranquillisez-vous au nom du ciel, madame la comtesse: ‘Calm yourself, in heaven’s name, Madame Countess.’
30. fouetter: ‘to flog’ or ‘to whip’.
31. with an accent circonflexe: Lengthening the final vowel.
32. Spaniard flea: The phrase should be taken as an example of Karl Ivanych’s characteristic malapropisms. In the Russian, Tolstoy has him say ‘Champagne fly’, with a confusion of shampanskaya (‘champagne’) and shpanskaya (‘Spaniard’) in a phrase thus intended to mean ‘Spanish fly’, possibly in the sense of an irritant, since the well-known preparation was used as a blister-inducing agent in nineteenth-century medicine.
33. mauvais sujet, vilain garnement: ‘worthless boy’, ‘nasty imp’.
34. Krohn: The brewing establishment of Abram Krohn, founded in St Petersburg in 1795 with support from Catherine the Great, produced both beer and mead, a usually mild alcoholic beverage made from honey mixed with water, hops and spices.
35. Schelling: If the German Idealist philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775–1854) never subscribed to the radical solipsism attributed to him here, he was certainly interested in the problem of the relation of subjectivity and the world, and in the nature and grounding of subjective images or representations, especially as they are embodied in art.
36. religion (zakon bozhy): Part of the basic curriculum of Russian elementary and secondary schools of the day and thus a fit subject for a university entrance examination. It included the history of the Christian church in general and the Russian Orthodox ch
urch in particular, Orthodox dogma (catechism), the forms and significance of the Orthodox liturgy and prayers, and the truths of religion and the personal ethical responsibilities that followed from them.
37. le fond de la bouteille: ‘the last drops’ or ‘dregs’.
38. jeu perlé: ‘exquisite playing’.
39. Votre grande-mère est morte: ‘Your grandmother is dead.’
40. comme il faut: There are several ways to render this key expression. Literally, it means ‘as is necessary’ or ‘as it should be’, but the broader, idiomatic sense is ‘proper’, ‘decent’ or ‘respectable’ and, in Tolstoy’s subsequent analysis, an aesthetic rather than ethical category that derives from the received taste, manners and forms of the Irtenyev milieu, and that is a decidedly negative principle in the recurring dialectic of Nikolenka’s psychological, social and moral development, as Tolstoy makes clear.
41. un homme comme il faut: ‘a respectable man’.
42. á la coq: ‘cock-style’, that is, with a pompadour or quiff like a cockerel’s crest or comb.
43. si je suis timide: ‘if I am shy.’
44. Savez-vous d’où vient votre timidité? D’un excès d’amour propre, mon cher: ‘Do you know what your shyness comes from? From too much pride, my dear.’
45. the week before Lent (maslenitsa or ‘butter week’): The seven days of partial fasting (dairy but no meat) that precede Lent or the Great Fast, as it is called in the Russian Orthodox church. It corresponds to Shrovetide, but lasts twice as long and entails different procedures and restrictions.
46. Karr: Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr (1808–90) was a French editor, critic, novelist and author of pithy aphorisms, and an enduring favourite of Tolstoy’s.
YOUTH
1. Bright week: The first week after Easter in the Russian Orthodox calendar. Thomas week: the second week after. Passion week: the first week before. fast: in nineteenth-century Russia, confession was normally made once a year and preceded by a special fast during Passion week in preparation for both confession and Communion.
2. the son coming for the father: A fracturing characteristic of Karl Ivanych, who seems to have combined it with a German idiom, of the traditional Russian expression ‘the grandson has come for the grandfather’, meaning that the fresh wet snow of winter’s end has arrived to take away the older, drier accumulation.
3. Francoeur’s: Louis-Benjamin Francoeur (1773–1849) was a distinguished French mathematician, whose Algèbre supérieure (Advanced Algebra, 1838) was widely used in Russia.
4. bricks and salt pyramids … goose wing: It was common to place salt between double window frames to absorb moisture and prevent fogging. The dusting tool is a dried goose wing.
5. droshky: A low, open carriage with a bench on which the passengers rode sideways, or else facing forward astride the seat, as on a saddle, with their feet resting on iron bars below.
6. Sparrow Hills: A Moscow park district on the south side of the Moscow river.
7. Pedotti’s: A well-known pastry shop established in the 1820s near the Kremlin on the fashionable street known as Kuznetsky Most (Blacksmith Bridge).
8. Rappo: Karl Rappo (1800–54) was an Austrian juggler and strong man who performed in Moscow in 1839 to great acclaim.
9. Mazeppa: Ivan Mazeppa (1644–1709) was a Cossack hetman who fought for Ukrainian independence and was ultimately defeated by Peter I, the Great (1672–1725), in the Battle of Poltava (1709). Mazeppa was celebrated in eponymous Romantic poems by Byron (1819) and Victor Hugo (1829) and portrayed more darkly in Pushkin’s patriotic ‘Poltava’ (1828–9). In Pushkin, the elderly Mazeppa captivates and elopes with the much younger Maria, the beautiful daughter of a wealthy nobleman.
10. Synod: Established in 1721 by Peter the Great as an instrument of control over the Russian Orthodox church and surviving until the 1917 revolution, the Holy Synod was a council of high-ranking clergy and laymen appointed by the tsar, and the ultimate authority in all religious and in many social matters, including divorce. Georgia: The Caucasian principality was at the time part of the Russian empire.
11. je puis … je peux: Alternative present indicative forms of the verb pouvoir (‘to be able’). The first variant is a less common but more formal literary usage.
12. rules (pravila): The admonitions, instructions and prayers preceding confession. Tolstoy’s use of the same term to denote two orders of moral practice – both a modern, rationalist technique of ethical self-improvement (making lists and keeping diaries, with Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography as the model) and an ancient tradition of spiritual principles, obligations and procedures – would seem to be deliberate.
13. ‘The Nightingale’ (1826): A still popular romance composed by Aleksandr Alyabev (1787–1851) with words by the poet Anton Delvig (1798–1831), a classmate of Pushkin’s at the Alexander Lyceum.
14. Shaposhnikov’s house: Tolstoy very likely had in mind the home of Kondraty Shaposhnikov (1778–1855), a prominent merchant who served as head of the Moscow city administration from 1841 to 1843 and lived in the central Moscow district of the narrative.
15. 16 April: Tolstoy seems to have forgotten that ‘Bright week came quite late in April’ the year Nikolenka took his university entrance examinations, since the date given here for their start suggests that, in fact, it came quite early.
16. gymnasium (gimnaziya): A type of German-inspired and classically oriented secondary school with a rigorous eight-year curriculum, first established in Russia at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
17. names starting with K: The names are evidently being called in reverse order.
18. Bartenyev-Mordenyev: The second part of the imagined name is mildly insulting, since it derives from morda, the Russian for ‘snout’, ‘muzzle’ or ‘ugly mug’.
19. à la moujik: ‘peasant-style’ or long and straight with a fringe.
20. star on his tailcoat: A single star on a university uniform lapel indicated the rank of state councillor, the fifth class or grade in the fourteen-grade Table of symmetrical court, civil and military ranks established by Peter the Great in 1722. In the early 1840s a state councillor was the equivalent of a major in the army.
21. self-paying: University students were of two kinds in the 1840s: ‘self-paying’ (svoyekoshtny) were those who, like the narrator, were responsible for their own tuition and expenses, while ‘state-supported’ (kazennokoshtny) were those whose educational and other expenses were paid from a variety of public funds. Since university admission was in principle merit-based (it depended on entrance-examination performance) and secured, moreover, by assistance for students who were not from propertied or wealthy families (the children of clergy or of low-ranking civil servants, for example, or those from the impoverished nobility), the university student population was – as Tolstoy makes clear in a number of ways – more diverse than in any institution or circle outside it, and thus permitted a degree of caste interaction on equal terms unusual elsewhere in mid-nineteenth-century Russian society.
22. magnetic (the archaic magnetichesky): Tolstoy has set off the adjective here and elsewhere because it is being used not in the ordinary sense of ‘highly attractive’ (as it might be in English), but rather in reference to the theory of ‘animal magnetism’ advocated by the physician and early investigator of hypnotism Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815) – in reference, that is, to the already long-discredited but still popular notion of mental and spiritual forces known as Mesmerism.
23. À vous, Nicolas: ‘Your turn, Nikolay.’
24. Cicero … Horace: Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC) was a Roman philosopher and statesman and one of Rome’s greatest orators and prose stylists. Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65–8 BC) was one of Rome’s greatest poets.
25. Zumpt: Karl Gottlob Zumpt (1792–1849) was a German philologist and professor of Latin at the University of Berlin. His Lateinische Grammatik (1818) was widely u
sed outside Germany, including in Russia, where it appeared in translation in 1835.
26. mauvais genre: ‘bad form’ or ‘boorish’.
27. Rozanov’s: A well-known Moscow tailor.
28. Bruderschaft: ‘brotherhood’, but here meaning the celebration with a drink of the decision to switch to the familiar or thou or tu form with the greater intimacy it signifies.
29. Yar’s: A celebrated French restaurant, opened on Kuznetsky Most in 1826. It was a favourite of many writers, including Alexander Herzen, Ivan Turgenev and Pushkin, who, for example, recalled its excellent cold veal and truffles in his wistful lyric ‘Highway Complaints’ (1829).
30. Victor Adam (1801–70): A popular neoclassical French painter and lithographer known for prints of historical and mythological scenes, equestrian portraits (of Russian tsars, for example) and renderings of horses and dogs.
31. Daziaro’s: The Italian Giuseppe Daziaro (1806–65) opened his first picture shop in Moscow on Kuznetsky Most in 1829, following soon afterwards with branches in St Petersburg and Paris. The shops sold, along with prints, paintings, daguerreotypes and other ‘artistic works’, art and stationery supplies, paints of the firm’s own manufacture, and drawing and writing implements and paper.
32. porte-crayon: ‘pencil-holder’, that is, a device into which leads could be inserted from either end to make the immediate ancestor of the modern mechanical pencil.
33. Zhukov’s … chibouks: Zhukov’s was a cheap tobacco packaged in the first half of the nineteenth century in the Moscow and St Petersburg factories of Vasily Zhukov (1796–1881). sultan’s: a variety of better-quality Russian-grown tobacco. Stambouline pipe: a short Turkish pipe. chibouk: a Turkish pipe with a very long wooden stem and a clay or meerschaum bowl.
34. Bostanjoglo: The oldest and largest manufacturer of tobacco products in Moscow, founded in 1820 by the Ukrainian Greek Mikhail Bostanjoglo.
