42. Count Samoilov: Nikolai Andreevich Samoilov (1800–1842), an officer in the Preobrazhensky regiment, was the cousin of the younger Raevskys (see note 4 above).
43. titular councilors…assessor: In the ascending order of the Russian table of ranks (see note 3 to “The Stationmaster”), titular councilor was ninth, equivalent to captain, and collegiate assessor was eighth, equivalent to major. In his story “The Nose” (1836), Pushkin’s young friend Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852) speaks of “collegiate assessors who are made in the Caucasus,” meaning made quickly.
44. General Sipyagin: Nikolai Martyanovich Sipyagin (1785–1828) was the military governor of Tiflis before his sudden death.
45. General Strekalov: Stepan Stepanovich Strekalov (1782–1856), who took over as military governor of Tiflis in 1828, arranged with the authorities to keep Pushkin under surveillance while he was in the city.
46. the slain Griboedov: See note 7 to “The Blizzard” and note 34 above. The Georgian drivers’ distortion of the name, “Griboed,” means “Mushroom-eater.” They of course had no idea who Griboedov was.
47. Buturlin: Nikolai Alexandrovich Buturlin (1801–1867), aide-de-camp to the Russian minister of war, Alexander Ivanovich Chernyshev (1786–1857), was sent to keep an eye on former Decembrists in the Caucasus, including Pushkin and Raevsky, and delivered a detailed report on them when he returned to Petersburg in 1829.
48. a poem to a Kalmyk girl…: Verses Pushkin jotted down on the occasion of his meeting with the “Circe of the steppe” described early in chapter 1:
The Kalmyk Girl
Farewell, my dear Kalmyk girl!
Thwarting all my plans,
Drawn on by my laudable habit,
I almost followed your kibitka
Off into the steppe.
Your eyes, of course, are narrow,
Your nose flat, your brow wide,
You do not babble in French,
Your legs are not squeezed into silk,
You do not crumble your bread
English-style by the samovar,
You do not admire Saint-Mars,
Give little value to Shakespeare,
Do not fall into reverie,
Since there’s not a thought in your head,
You do not sing: Ma dov’é,
Do not leap in the galop at dances.
Who cares? For a whole half-hour,
While they were hitching my horses,
My mind and heart were taken
With your gaze and your savage beauty.
Friends, is it not all one
For your idle soul to be lost
In a splendid hall, the dress circle,
Or in a nomadic kibitka?
49. General Burtsov: Ivan Grigorievich Burtsov (1794–1829) took part in the Napoleonic Wars and was then involved in the early stages of the Decembrist movement, but withdrew before the uprising. Imprisoned for six months all the same, he was then transferred to the Caucasus, where he served with distinction in the wars with the Persians and the Turks and was killed in action. Pushkin had made Burtsov’s acquaintance years earlier, while he was still at the lycée in Tsarskoe Selo (see note 41 to The Captain’s Daughter).
50. our Volkhovsky: Vladimir Dmitrievich Volkhovsky (1798–1841), Pushkin’s fellow student at the lycée, joined the Decembrists and as a result was sent in 1826 to serve on Paskevich’s staff in the Caucasus.
51. Mikhail Pushchin: Mikhail Ivanovich Pushchin (1800–1869), brother of one of Pushkin’s closest friends at the lycée, and like his brother a Decembrist, was broken to the ranks in 1826 and sent to serve in the Caucasus. By the time of their meeting in Tiflis, he had been made an officer again and served with the army engineers.
52. Semichev: Nikolai Nikolaevich Semichev (1792–1830), also a Decembrist. After six months in prison, he was sent to the Caucasus as a captain in the Nizhegorodsky grenadier regiment. At one point, when Pushkin recklessly threw himself into combat, General Raevsky sent Semichev to drag him away from the front line.
53. young Osten-Sacken: A captain of the Nizhegorodsky grenadiers, the younger brother of Dmitry Erofeevich Osten-Sacken (1789–1881), who at that time was chief of staff of the Detached Caucasus Corps under Paskevich. The Osten-Sackens were a distinguished Baltic German family.
54. Yazidis…devil worshippers: The Yazidis are Kurdish-speaking people settled from ancient times in what is now northern Iraq. Their monotheistic religion has ties to Zoroastrianism; its somewhat Manichaean vision of good and evil has led other monotheists to persecute them wrongly as “devil worshippers.”
55. Colonel Frideriks…General Muravyov…Colonel Simonich: Colonel B. A. Frideriks (1797–1874), mentioned earlier, commanded the Erevan Light Cavalry Regiment. General Nikolai Nikolaevich Muravyov (1794–1866) was Raevsky’s immediate superior, and, like Raevsky and Osten-Sacken, sympathized with the Decembrists serving in the Caucasus, which displeased Paskevich, who eventually had them all dismissed from the army. Count Ivan Osipovich Simonich (1792–1851), from Dalmatia, fought on the French side in the Napoleonic Wars, was captured by the Russians in 1812, and later joined the Russian army. In the Caucasus he commanded the Georgian grenadier regiment; in 1836 he was sent as Russian minister to Persia, replacing the murdered Griboedov.
56. Salvator Rosa: Italian Baroque painter (1615–1673), considered a “proto-Romantic” because of the dramatic lighting effects of his landscapes and portraits.
57. Hakki Pasha: Ismail Hakki Pasha (1798–1876) was a Turkish general and statesman, later briefly the governor of Arzrum.
58. Colonel Anrep: Roman Romanovich von Anrep (d. 1830), of a noble Swedish-Russian family, commanded an uhlan regiment in the Caucasus and was a close friend of Paskevich. A few years earlier, he and Pushkin had paid court to the same girl.
59. Franks: In Armenia Roman Catholics were referred to as “Franks,” a custom that dated back to the time of the Crusades.
60. the poet Yuzefovich: Mikhail Vladimirovich Yuzefovich (1802–1889) was a cavalry captain and aide-de-camp to Raevsky. He left memoirs of his meetings with Pushkin during the campaign of 1829.
61. Arnauts: Turkish for Albanians.
62. the battle of Poltava: See note 11 to The Moor of Peter the Great. Pushkin gives the date according to the old (Julian) calendar, which was still used in Russia. By the Gregorian calendar it was July 8.
63. Theodosius the Second: Theodosius II (401–450) became emperor of the Eastern (Byzantine) Empire in 408, at the age of seven.
64. Hajji-Baba…calf’s ears…: Pushkin is drawing on the three-volume novel The Adventures of Hajji-Baba of Ispahan, by the former diplomat James Justinian Morier (1780–1849), published in London in 1824, and in Russian translation in 1830. In the third volume, the Persian ambassador, whom Hajji-Baba serves as secretary, catches a courier who has stolen from him while passing through Arzrum. The ambassador orders the courier’s ears cut off, against the local governor’s protests, but the servants trick the ambassador, giving him two pieces of goat meat instead.
65. Tournefort…the city: Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656–1708), botanist and traveler, makes this observation in the eighteenth letter of his Relation d’un voyage en Levant (“An Account of a Journey to the Levant,” 1717).
66. the time of Godfrey: Godfrey de Bouillon (1060–1100), directly descended from Charlemagne, lord of Bouillon and later Duke of Lower Lorraine (Lotharingia), took part in the first crusade in 1095, and in 1100 was made “king of Jerusalem.” He died there in the same year. Godfrey became the subject of a number of medieval French chansons de geste, and Torquato Tasso (1544–1595) made him the hero of his epic poem Jerusalem Delivered (1581).
67. composed by the janissary Amin-Oglu: A fictitious personage; the verses are by Pushkin himself.
68. Sukhorukov: Vasily Dmitrievich Sukhorukov (1795–1841), officer in the Cossack guards regiment and military historian, was close to the Decembrists. After the uprising, the rich materials he had collected on the Don Cos
sack army were taken from him and never returned, and he was removed from his regiment and sent to serve in the Caucasus. There he gathered materials for a history of the campaign of 1829, but these, too, were confiscated in 1830. On his return to Petersburg, Pushkin tried unsuccessfully to recover them.
69. Bey-bulat, the terror of the Caucasus: In 1825 Bey-bulat Taymazov led the Caucasian mountaineers in a revolt against the Russians, but in 1829 he went over to the Russian side.
70. Mr. Abramovich: Pushkin gives only the initial A. The Russian editors of the 1975 edition followed here give the name Abramovich this first time, following the suggestion of the ethnographer Evgeny Gustavovich Veydenbaum in his Travels in the Northern Caucasus (1888), though others say that the cavalry captain Abramovich was not serving in the Caucasus at that time.
71. Konovnitsyn: Pyotr Petrovich Konovnitsyn (1802–1830) was the son of a distinguished general and count who fought in the Napoleonic Wars and ended as minister of war under Alexander I. The young Konovnitsyn joined the Decembrists, was broken to the ranks in 1826 and sent first to Semipalatinsk and then to the Caucasus. In 1828 he was promoted to ensign.
72. Dorokhov: Rufin Ivanovich Dorokhov (1801–1852) was broken to the ranks in 1820 for unruly behavior and dueling. From 1828 to 1833 he served in the Nizhegorodsky dragoons; in 1829 he was promoted to ensign. He was one of three models for Tolstoy’s Fyodor Ivanovich Dolokhov in War and Peace. Pushkin addressed an epigram to him:
You’re lucky with charming little fools,
In the service, at cards, and at feasts.
You’re St. Priest in caricatures,
You’re Neledinsky in verse;
You’ve been shot up in duels,
You’ve been cut up in war—
You may be a real, true hero,
But you’re a thorough-going rake.
FRAGMENTS AND SKETCHES
The Guests Were Arriving at the Dacha (1828–1830)
1. “One of our poets…beauty”: The poet Nikolai Ivanovich Gnedich (1784–1833) was most famous for his translation of the Iliad, which Pushkin greatly admired. The line is a slightly altered quotation from his idyll “The Fishermen” (1822).
2. Hussein Pasha: Hussein Dey (1765–1838), the last Ottoman ruler of Algeria.
3. a last game of écarté: A French card game for two players, in which each player can set aside (écarter) some of the cards dealt to him and draw others before starting to play.
4. the English Embankment: Then one of the most fashionable streets in Petersburg, along the left bank of the Neva. It was named for the British embassy and church located there. The emperor would have been Alexander I.
5. Les Liaisons dangereuses…Jomini: Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), an epistolary novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (1741–1803), portrays the decadence of the French aristocracy before the revolution. Antoine-Henri Jomini (1779–1869), a Swiss businessman and officer, joined the French army in 1805, but later went over to the Russian side and became a general and advisor to the emperors Alexander I and Nicholas I. His writings on military theory were widely used in European and American military academies.
6. Rurik and Monomakh: For Rurik, see note 7 to The History of the Village of Goryukhino. Vladimir II Monomakh (1053–1125) was grand prince of Kievan Rus from 1113 to 1125.
7. Peter and Elizabeth: Peter the Great (1672–1725) became tsar of Russia in 1682 and the first Russian emperor in 1721. His daughter, the empress Elizabeth (1709–1762), came to power in 1741.
8. the duc de Montmorency…Clermont-Tonnerre: Two of the most noble French families, the first going back to the tenth century, the second to the eleventh century. The lords of Montmorency bore the title of “first baron of Christendom” until 1327. The first duke was Anne de Montmorency (1493–1567), who became marshal and constable of France. The house of Clermont-Tonnerre furnished many important military leaders and statesmen.
9. Karamzin…history: See note 4 to Roslavlev.
A Novel in Letters (1829)
1. Lamartine: Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869), poet, writer, and statesman, was a major figure of French Romanticism. One of his finest poems is the elegy “Solitude,” published in a collection in 1823.
2. Krestovsky Island: One of the islands in the mouth of the River Neva that make up St. Petersburg. The nobility used to have dachas there.
3. Clarissa Harlowe: The heroine of the epistolary novel Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady (1748), by Samuel Richardson (see note 6 to “The Young Lady Peasant”). Pushkin found Richardson’s work tedious, but it was very popular among young ladies.
4. Lovelace…Adolphe: Robert Lovelace is the villain of Richardson’s Clarissa, who abducts and eventually rapes the heroine. The eponymous hero of the novel Adolphe (1816), by the Swiss-born writer and liberal activist Benjamin Constant (1767–1830), was a shy and introspective young man.
5. the English Embankment: See note 4 to “The Guests Were Arriving at the Dacha.”
6. Bellecourt…Charlotte: Pushkin takes these as typical names in eighteenth-century French novels.
7. Vyazemsky and Pushkin: For Vyazemsky, see note 1 to “The Stationmaster.” There are “provincial young ladies” in several of the Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin; perhaps the most perfect example in Pushkin’s work is Tatyana Larina, the heroine of his novel in verse, Evgeny Onegin (1825–1832).
8. the Herald of Europe: A biweekly journal published in Petersburg from 1802 to 1830. It began in a liberal spirit but turned more and more conservative, consistently attacking Pushkin’s work, especially in the jeering personal critiques by Nikolai Ivanovich Nadezhdin (1804–1856) of the long poems Poltava and Count Nulin.
9. Fornarina…tableaux vivants: The Portrait of a Young Woman (1518–1520), by Raphael (1483–1520), known as La Fornarina (“The Baker Woman”), is said to be the portrait of the artist’s Roman mistress, Margherita Luti, who appears in several of his paintings. The parlor game of tableaux vivants (“living pictures”), in which live people would simulate famous paintings, was popular in the nineteenth century.
10. Minin…Pozharsky: In 1818 a bronze sculpture was set up on Moscow’s Red Square to commemorate Prince Dmitry Pozharsky and the merchant Kozma Minin (see note 8 to Roslavlev).
11. collegiate assessor: See note 43 to Journey to Arzrum.
12. La Bruyère: Jean de La Bruyère (1645–1696), moralist and philosopher, is known essentially for one book, Les Caractères (1688), a collection of portraits forming a chronicle of the French seventeeth century and its mores, written with a sylistic sharpness and perfection that has served as a model ever since its publication, not least for Pushkin himself.
13. Fonvizin…Prostakovs and Skotinins: For Fonvizin, see note 1 to The Tales of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin. The names Prostakov and Skotinin, while perfectly normal in Russian, are suggestive of simple-mindedness and brutishness respectively.
14. “And that’s…patriots”: From act 2, scene 5 of Griboedov’s Woe from Wit (see note 7 to “The Blizzard”).
15. The first line refers to Pierre Terrail, the Chevalier Bayard (1475–1524), called by one of his fellow soldiers le bon chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, an embodiment of French chivalric ideals. The second line is from the device of Enguerrand III de Coucy (1182–1242) and his descendants. The full version reads Je ne suis roy, ne prince, ne comte aussi, / Je suis le sire de Coucy.
16. Faublas…women: The Loves of the Chevalier de Faublas (1787) was the first of a trilogy of novels about Faublas by Jean-Batiste Louvet de Couvrai (1760–1797), journalist, novelist, playwright, and revolutionary activist.
17. hoarse-voiced guardsman of 1807: According to Vyazemsky (see note 1 to “The Stationmaster”), the boastfulness and haughtiness of young Russian officers were combined with an affected huskiness of voice, a practice that began in 1807, the year of Napoleon’s war with East Prussia, which ended with the treaty of Tilsit. Another explanation attributes the huskiness to the wearing of extremely tight-waist
ed uniforms.
18. Adam Smith: Scottish philosopher and economist (1723–1790). His book The Wealth of Nations (1776), setting forth the free market theory, was and remains a fundamental work in modern political economics.
Notes of a Young Man (1829–1830)
1. the prodigal son: See note 4 to “The Stationmaster.”
My Fate Is Decided. I Am Getting Married…(1830)
1. “My native land, adieu”: The words (in English) are an inexact quotation of an inserted lyric from canto 1, stanza 13, of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818), a long poem by Lord Byron: “Adieu, adieu! my native shore / Fades o’er the waters blue […] / My Native Land—Good Night!”
2. Mlle Sont The soprano Henriette Sontag (1806–1854), born in Koblenz, Germany, made her début in 1821 and went on to become internationally famous.
A Romance at the Caucasian Waters (1831)
1. Boston: Already referred to in previous stories, Boston is a card game similar to whist, which became very popular in Europe during the later eighteenth century. It was probably named after the capital of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, birthplace of the American Revolution. At any rate, the game was not played by the British.
2. Bukharans: The Bukharans were inhabitants of the Muslim khanate of Bukhara, in the region of Uzbekistan, at that time a Russian protectorate.
3. from Basmannaya to the Arbat: At that time, Basmannaya Street and the Arbat were on opposite sides of Moscow.
A Russian Pelham (1834–1835)
1. Pelham: Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873), English writer and parliamentarian, published his best-selling novel Pelham: or the Adventures of a Gentleman in 1828.