Lectures on Russian literature
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No. 58 That gentleman in Dickens . . .
The reference is to the pompous and smug Mr. John Podsnap in Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, which had first appeared in London in twenty monthly parts from May 1864 to November 1865. Podsnap, who was "happily acquainted with his own merit and importance, [had] settled that whatever he put behind him he put out of existence. . . . [He] had even acquired a peculiar flourish of the right arm in often clearing the world of its most difficult problems by sweeping them behind him . .
." (p.50).
No. 59 Plato's "Symposium"
In this dialogue Plato, a notorious Athenian philosopher (died in 347 b.c. at the age of eighty), has several banqueters discuss love. One of them rhetorically distinguishes earthly from heavenly love; another sings of Love and Love's works; a third, Socrates, speaks of two kinds of love, one ("being in love") which desires beauty for a peculiar end, and the other enjoyed by creative souls that bring into being not children of their body but good deeds (culled from an old edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica) (p.51).
No. 60 The dinner bill
This literary dinner had cost twenty-six rubles including the tip, so Lyovin's share was thirteen rubles (about ten dollars of the time). The two men had two bottles of champagne, a little vodka, and at least one bottle of white wine (p.52).
No. 61 Princess Shcherhatski had been married thirty years ago
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A slip on Tolstoy's part. Judging by Dolly's age, it should be at least thirty-four (p.53).
No. 62 Changes in the manner of society
In 1870, the first institution of higher learning for women (the Lubianski Courses: Lubyanskie Kursy) was inaugurated in Moscow. In general it was a time of emancipation for Russian women. Young women were claiming a freedom they did not have until then—among other things the freedom to choose their own husbands instead of having their parents arrange the match (p.54).
No. 63 Mazurka
One of the dances at balls of the time ("Gentlemen commencing with left foot, ladies with right, slide, slide, slide, slide, bring feet together, leap-turn" etc.). Tolstoy's son Sergey, in a series of notes on Anna Karenin (Literaturnoe nasledstvo, vols.
37-38, pp. 567-590, Moscow, 1939), says: "The mazurka was a favorite with ladies: to it the gentlemen invited those ladies to whom they were particularly attracted"(p.55).
No. 64 Kaluga
A town south of Moscow in the Tula direction (Central Russia) (p.60).
No. 65 Classic, modern
"Classic" (klassicbeskoe) education in reference to Russian schools meant the study of Latin and Greek, whereas "Modern"
(realnoe) implied their replacement by living languages, with the stress laid on the "scientific" and practical in other subjects (p.62).
No. 66 Spiritualism
The talk (at the Shcherbatskis) about table turning in part one, chapter 14, with Lyovin criticizing "spiritualism" and Vronski suggesting they all try, and Kitty looking for some small table to use—all this has a strange sequel in part four, chapter 13, when Lyovin and Kitty use a card table to write in chalk and communicate in fond cipher. This was a fashionable fad of the day—ghost rapping, table tilting, musical instruments performing short flights across the room, and other curious aberrations of matter and minds, with well-paid mediums making pronouncements and impersonating the dead in simulated sleep (p.62). Although dancing furniture and apparitions are as old as the world, their modern expression stems from the hamlet Hydesville near Rochester, New York State, where in 1848 raps had been recorded, produced by the ankle bones or other anatomical castanets of the Fox sisters. Despite all denouncements and exposures, "spiritualism" as it unfortunately became known fascinated the world and by 1870 all Europe was tilting tables. A committee appointed by the Dialectical Society of London to investigate "phenomena alleged to be spiritual manifestations" had recently reported thereon—and at one seance the medium Mr. Home had been "elevated eleven inches." In a later part of the book we shall meet this Mr. Home under a transparent disguise, and see how strangely and tragically spiritualism, a mere game suggested by Vronski in part one, will affect Karenin's intentions and his wife's destiny.
No. 67 Ring game
A parlor game played by young people in Russia and presumably elsewhere: the players form a circle all holding the same string, along which a ring is passed from hand to hand while a player in the middle of the circle tries to guess whose hands conceal the ring (p.65).
No. 68 Prince
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Princess Shcherbatski's way of addressing her husband as knyaz (Prince) is an old-fashioned Moscovism. Note also that the Prince calls his daughters "Katenka" and "Dashenka" in the good Russian manner, i.e., having no use, as it were, for new-fangled English diminutives ("Kitty" and "Dolly") (p.66).
No. 69 Tyutki
A plural noun applied by the gruff Prince to the young scatterbrains, with connotations of fatuousness and foppery. It does not really suit Vronski whom Kitty's father seems to have in mind here; Vronski may be vain and frivolous but he is also ambitious, intelligent, and persevering. Readers will note the curious echo of this fancy word in the name of the hairdresser ("Tyutkin coiffeur") whose sign Anna reads with a roaming eye on the day of her death while driving through the streets of Moscow (p. 885); she is struck by the absurd contrast of "Tyutkin," a Russian comedy name, with the stiff French epithet
"coiffeur," and for a second reflects she might amuse Vronski by making a joke of this (p.66).
No. 70 Corps of pages
Pazbeski ego imperatorskogo velichestva korpus (His Imperial Majesty's Corps of Pages), a military school for the sons of noblemen in old Russia, founded 1802, reformed 1865 (p.68).
No. 71 Chateau des Fleurs, can-can
Allusion to a night restaurant with vaudeville performances on a stage. "The notorious can-can ... is only a quadrille danced by gross people" (Allen Dodworth in Dancing and its Relations to Education and Social Life, London, 1885) (p.69).
No. 72 The station
The Nikolaevski or Peterburgski railway station in the north-central part of Moscow. The line was built by the government in 1843-1851. A fast train covered the distance between Petersburg and Moscow (about 400 miles) in twenty hours in 1862
and in thirteen hours in 1892. Leaving Petersburg around 8 p.m., Anna arrived in Moscow a little after 11 a.m. the following day (p.70).
No. 73 Ah, your Serenity
An inferior—servant, clerk, or tradesman—would address a titled person (prince or count) as "your Serenity," vashe siyatel'stvo (German "Dur-chlaucht"). The use which Prince Oblonski (who is a siyatel'stvo in his own right, of course) makes of the term in greeting Count Vronski is playfully patronizing: he mimics an elderly attendant stopping a young scapegrace in his tracks, or—as more precisely, perhaps—acts the staid family man speaking to a flighty bachelor (p.70).
No. 74 Honi soit qui mal y pense
The motto of the Order of the Garter, "Shame to him who thinks evil of it," as pronounced by Edward the Third in 1348
when rebuking the mirth of some noblemen over a lady's fallen garter (p.70).
No. 75 Diva
This Italian word ("the divine one") was applied to celebrated singers (e.g., la diva Patti); by 1870, in France and elsewhere, the term was often used in reference to flashy ladies of the variety stage; but here I think a respectable singer or actress is implied. This diva, reflected and multiplied, takes part in Oblonski's dream—the dream from which he awakes Friday at 8
a.m., February 11 (p. 4). Here, on page 71 Oblonski and Vronski talk of the supper to be given in her honor next day, Sunday, February 13. On page 77 Oblonski talks about her ("the new singer") with Countess Vronski at the station, that same Saturday morning, February 12. Finally, on page 90, he tells his family, at 9:30 p.m. the same Saturday, that Vronski has just 142
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called to inquire about the dinner they are to give next day to a celebrity from abroad. It seems that Tolstoy could not quite make up his mind whether the occasion was to be formal or frivolous (p.71).
It should be noted that at the end of part five, the appearance of a famous singer (the diva Patti, this time she is named) occurs in a critical passage of Anna's romance with Vronski.
No. 76 Through the frosty haze one could distinguish a number of railway workers, wearing short sheepskin coats and felt snowboots, in the act of stepping across the rails of the curving tracks
Here commences a sequence of subtle moves on Tolstoy's part aiming at bringing about a gruesome accident and, simultaneously, adducing the impressions from which later a crucial nightmare seen both by Anna and Vronski will be formed. The poor visibility among the frosty vapors is connected with various muffled-up figures such as these railway workers and, a little further, the muffled-up, frost-covered engine driver. The death of the railway guard which Tolstoy is preparing occurs on page 77: "a guard . . . too much muffled up against the severe frost had not heard a train backing [the optical haze becomes an auditory one] and had been crushed." Vronski views the mangled body (p.77) and he (and possibly Anna) has also noticed a peasant with a bag over his shoulder emerge from the train (p.72)—a visual impression that will breed. The theme of "iron" (which is beaten and crushed in the subsequent nightmare) is also introduced here in terms of a station platform vibrating under a great weight (p.71).
No. 77 The locomotive came rolling by
In the famous photograph (1869) of the first two transcontinental trains meeting at Promontory Summit, Utah, the engine of the Central Pacific (building from San Francisco eastward) is seen to have a great flaring funnel stack, while the engine of the Union Pacific (building from Omaha westward) sports but a straight slender stack topped by a spark-arrester. Both types of chimneys were used on Russian locomotives. According to Collignon's Chemins de Fer Russes (Paris, 1868), the seven and a half meters long locomotive, with wheels oOOo, of the fast train connecting Petersburg and Moscow had a straight funnel two and a third meters high, i.e., exceeding by thirty centimeters the diameter of its driving wheels whose action is so vigorously described by Tolstoy (p.72).
No. 78 This lady's appearance . . .
It is not necessary for the reader to look at Anna with Vronski's eyes, but for those who are anxious to appreciate all the details of Tolstoy's art, it is necessary to realize clearly what he meant his heroine to look like. Anna was rather stout but her carriage was wonderfully graceful, her step singularly light. Her face was beautiful, fresh, and full of animation. She had curly black hair that was apt to come awry, and gray eyes glistening darkly in the shadow of thick lashes. Her glance could light up with an enchanting glow or assume a serious and woeful expression. Her unpainted lips were a vivid red. She had plump arms, slender wrists and tiny hands. Her handshake was vigorous, her motions rapid. Everything about her was elegant, charming and real (p.73).
No. 79 Oblonski! Here!
Two men of fashion, close friends or messmates, might call each other by their surnames, or even by their titles—count, prince, baron—reserving first names or nicknames for special occasions. When Vronski calls to Steve "Oblonski!" he is using an incomparably more intimate form of address than if he had shouted out Stepan Arkadyevich's name and patronymic (p.74).
No. 80 Vous filez le parfait amour. Tant mieux, mon cher
You are engrossed in perfect love-making. So much the better, my dear
(p.75).
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No. 81 Unusual color, unusual event
There is of course no actual connection between the two, but the repetition is characteristic of Tolstoy's style with its rejection of false elegancies and its readiness to admit any robust awkwardness if that is the shortest way to sense. Cp. the somewhat similar clash of "unhasting" and "hastily" some fifty pages further on. The station master's cap was of a bright red color (p.76).
No. 82 Bobrishchevs
We may infer that they were giving this particular ball (p.86).
No. 83 Anna's dress
Perusal of an article on "Paris fashions for February" in the London Illustrated News, 1872, reveals that whereas toilettes de promenade just touched the ground, an evening dress had a long square-cut train. Velvet was most fashionable, and for a ball a lady would wear a robe princesse of black velvet over a skirt of faille, edged with chantilly lace, and a tuft of flowers in the hair (p.93).
No. 84 Waltz
Sergey Tolstoy, in the series of notes already mentioned (see note 63), describes the order of dances at a ball of the type described here: "The ball would start with a light waltz, then there would come four quadrilles, then a mazurka with various figures. . . . The final dance would be a cotillion . . . with such figures as grand-rond, chaine, etc., and with interpolated dances — waltz, galop, mazurka."
Dodworth in his book (Dancing, 1885) lists as many as two hundred and fifty figures in the "Cotillion or German." The grand-rond is described under Nr. 63 as: "Gentlemen select gentlemen; ladies select ladies; a grand round is formed, the gentlemen joining hands on one side of the circle, the ladies on the other; the figure is begun by turning to the left; then the conductor who holds his lady by the right hand, advances, leaving the other [dancers] and cuts through the middle of the round . . . [then] he turns to the left with all the gentlemen while his partner turns to the right with all the ladies, continuing down the side of the room, thus forming two lines facing. When the last two have passed out [!] the two lines advance, each gentleman dancing with opposite lady." Various "chains" —double, uninterrupted, etc. —can be left to the reader's imagination (p.95).
No. 85 People's theatre
According to a note in Maude's translation, a people's theatre (or more exactly a privately financed theatre—Moscow having only State theatres at that time) was initiated "at the Moscow Exhibition of 1872" (p.95).
No. 86 She had refused five partners
She had also refused Lyovin a few days before. The whole ball (with its wonderful break [p.95] "the music stopped") is subtly emblematic of Kitty's mood and situation (p.97).
No. 87 . . . Enchanting [was] the firm-fleshed neck with its row of pearls [zhemchug] . . . enchanting [her] animation
[ozhivlenie] but there was something terrifying [uzhasnoe] and cruel [zhestokoe] about her charm This "zh" repetition (phonetically coinciding with "s" in "pleasure"—the buzzing ominous quality of her beauty—is artistically followed up in the penultimate paragraph of the chapter: "... the uncontrollable [neuderzhimy], quivering
[drozhashchi] glow of her eyes and smile burned [obzhog] him. . . ." (pp.98-99).
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No. 88 Dance leader
"The conductor [or "leader"] should exercise constant watchfulness and be ever on the alert to urge the tardy, prompt the slow, awake the inattentive, signal those occupying the floor too long, superintend the preparatory formation of the figure, see that each dancer is on the proper side of his partner, and, if simultaneous movement is required, give the signal for that movement to commence etc. He is thus compelled to fulfill the duties of a 'whipper-in,' as well as those of conductor, instructor, and superintendent." Toned down by the social position and expert dancing of the people involved in the present ball, this was more or less Korsunski's function (p.99).
No. 89 There is some gentleman, Nikolay Dmitrich
Nikolay's lowly mistress uses the first name and abridged patronymic as a respectful wife would in a petty bourgeois household (p. 101).
When Dolly, in speaking of her husband calls him by his first name and patronymic, she is doing something else: she chooses the most formal and neutral manner of reference to him to stress the estrangement.
No. 90 And the birches, and our schoolroom
With keen nostalgic tenderness recalling the rooms in the ancestral manor, where as boys he and his brother used to have lessons with a tutor or a governess (p. 107).
No. 91 Gypsies
Night restaurants had Gypsy (Tzygan) entertainers who sang and danced. Good-looking female Gypsy performers were extremely popular with Russian rakes (p. 108).
No. 92 His low-slung carpet sleigh
A type of rustic comfortable sleigh which looked as if it consisted of a rug on runners (p. 109).
No. 93 Heated
Lyovin's manor house was heated by means of wood-burning Dutch stoves, a stove per room, and there were double windows with wads of cotton wool between the panes (p.112).
No. 94 Tyndall
John Tyndall (1820-1893), author of Heat as a Mode of Motion (1863 and later editions). This was the first popular exposition of the mechanical theory of heat which in the early sixties had not reached the text books (p. 113).
No. 95 Third hell
The three Russian station bells had already become in the seventies a national institution. The first bell, a quarter of an hour before departure, introduced the idea of a journey to the would-be passenger's mind ; the second, ten minutes later, suggested the project might be realized; immediately after the third, the train whistled and glided away (p. 118).
No. 96 Car
Roughly speaking, two notions of night-traveling comfort were dividing the world in the last third of the century: the Pullman system in America, which favored curtained sections and which rushed sleeping passengers feet foremost to their 145
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destination; and the Mann system in Europe, which had them speed sidewise in compartments; but in 1872, a first-class car (euphemistically called sleeping-car by Tolstoy) of the night express between Moscow and Petersburg was a very primitive affair still wavering between a vague Pullman tendency and Colonel Mann's "boudoir" scheme. It had a lateral corridor, it had water closets, it had stoves burning wood; but it also had open-end platforms which Tolstoy calls "porches"