Anna Karenina

17 shchi: Cabbage soup, and kasha, a sort of thick gruel made from various grains, most typically buckwheat groats, are the two staple foods of Russian peasants.

18 Levins are wild: In a letter to his aunt Alexandra A. Tolstoy (1817-1904), his elder by only ten years, Tolstoy spoke of the ‘Tolstoyan wildness’ characteristic of ‘all the Tolstoys’, meaning originality of behaviour and freedom from conventional rules. She in turn used to call him ‘roaring Leo’.

19 ‘Bold steeds ...’: Oblonsky quotes (imprecisely) the poem ‘From Anacreon’ (1835), by Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837). Later he will quote it, again imprecisely, in a conversation with Vronsky.

20 ‘with disgust reading over my life...’ : Levin now quotes Pushkin‘s poem ’Remembrance‘ (1828), one of Tolstoy’s own favourites.

21 ‘Himmlisch ist’s ...’: ‘Heavenly it would be to conquer/My earthly lusts;/But though I’ve not succeeded,/I still have lots of pleasure’ - a stanza from the libretto of Die Fledermaus, an operetta with music by Johann Strauss (1825-99).

22 lovely fallen creatures: The words are a paraphrase from a speech by Wal singham in Pushkin’s ‘little tragedy’ The Feast During the Plague (1830).

23 words ... misused They are referring to Luke 7:47: ‘Wherefore I say unto thee, Her sins, which are many, are forgiven; for she loved much’ - a passage often quoted out of context as a justification for loose behaviour.

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 (bésique 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.