Anna Karenina

‘I’ll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I’ll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I’ll fail in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray - but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!’

The End

Notes

The following notes are indebted to the commentaries in the twenty-two-volume edition of Tolstoy’s works published by Khudozhestvennaya Literatura (Volumes VIII and IX, Moscow, 1981-2) and to Vladimir Nabokov’s notes to Part One of Anna Karenina, in Lectures on Russian Literature (London and New York, 1981). Biblical quotations, unless otherwise specified, are from the King James version.

Epigraph

Romans 12:19. St Paul refers to Deuteronomy 32:35: ‘To me belongeth vengeance, and recompence.’

Part One

1 Il mio tesoro: Probably the aria ‘Il mio tesoro’ sung by Don Ottavio in Act II, scene ii of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

2 physiology: Reflexes of the Brain, by I. M. Sechenov (1829-1905), was published in 1863. There was widespread interest at the time in materialistic physiology, even among those who knew of it only by hearsay.

3 newspaper: Stepan Arkadyich probably reads The Voice, edited by A. Kraev sky, the preferred newspaper of liberal functionaries, known as ‘the barometer of public opinion‘, or possibly, as Nabokov suggests, the mildly liberal Russian Gazette.

4 Rurik: Chief (d. 879) of the Scandinavian rovers known as Varangians, he founded the principality of Novgorod at the invitation of the local populace, thus becoming the ancestor of the oldest Russian nobility. The dynasty of Rurik ruled from 862 to 1598; it was succeeded by the Romanovs.

5 Bentham and Mill: Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), English philosopher and jurist, founded the English utilitarian school of philosophy. John Stuart Mill (1806-73), philosopher and economist of the experimental school, was the author of the influential Principles of Political Economy, published in 1848.

6 Count Ferdinand von Beust: (1809-86), prime minister of Saxony and later chancellor of the Austro-Hungarian empire, a political opponent of Bismarck, he was frequently mentioned in the press. Wiesbaden, capital of the German province of Hesse, was famous for its hot springs. Von Beust visited Wiesbaden in February 1872 (see Nabokov’s extensive note).

7 kalatch: A very fine white yeast bread shaped like a purse with a handle; pI. kalatchi.

8 zertsalo: A three-faced glass pyramid bearing an eagle and certain edicts of the emperor Peter the Great (1682-1725) which stood on the desk in every government office.

9 kammerjunker: The German title (‘gentleman of the bed-chamber’) was adopted by the Russian imperial court.

10 zemstvo: An elective provincial council for purposes of local administration, established in Russia in 1865 by the emperor Alexander II (1818-81).

11 his opinion: Levin expresses a widely shared opinion of the time, that zemstvo activists commonly abused their position in order to make money.

12 psychological and physiological phenomena: In 1872-3 there was a heated debate in the magazine The Messenger of Europe about the relations between psychological and physiological phenomena, one side saying there was no known connection (but possibly a ‘parallelism’) between the two, the other that all psychic acts are reflexes subject to physiological study. Tolstoy, like Levin, took his distance from both sides.

13 origin of man: In the early 1870s works by Charles Darwin (1809-82) were published in Russian and his theories of natural selection and the descent of man from the animals were discussed in all Russian magazines and newspapers.

14 Wurst, Knaust, Pripasov: Tolstoy invented these names for comic and parodic effect; they mean, respectively, ‘sausage’, ‘stingy’ and ‘provisions’.

15 leaning on chairs: Chairs on runners were provided for beginners and occasionally for ladies to hold on to or be pushed around in.

16 Tartars: One of the ‘racial minorities’ of the Russian empire, they are a people originally native to Central Asia east of the Caspian Sea. Tolstoy seems to have no special intention in having them work as waiters in the Hotel Anglia (an actual hotel of the time, located on Petrovka, which enjoyed a dubious reputation as a place for aristocratic assignations).