Anna Karenina

36 Nikolai Dmitrich: Nabokov notes that Masha addresses Nikolai Levin formally, by his first name and patronymic (and in the second person plural), as a respectful petty bourgeois wife would address her husband, while an aristocratic woman like Dolly, when she refers to her husband in the same way, deliberately chooses it as the most distant and estranged way to speak of him.

37 Sunday schools: In the early 1870s revolutionaries organized Sunday schools in the factories to give workers the rudiments of education. In 1874 strict control over these schools was introduced, and many students were expelled from the universities for participating in them.

38 rug sleigh: ‘A type of rustic comfortable sleigh which looked as if it consisted of a rug on runners’ (Nabokov).

39 book by Tyndall: John Tyndall (1820-93), British physicist; in 1872, Tolstoy read his book Heat as a Mode of Motion (1863), translated and published in Petersburg in 1864.

40 third bell ... sleeping car: Three bells signalled the departure of a train in Russian stations: the first fifteen minutes before, the second five minutes before, and the third at the moment of departure. (See Nabokov’s detailed note on Russian sleeping cars and first-class night travel.)

41 Petersburg face: The soft water of the Neva and the salt air of Petersburg were considered good for the complexion.

42 Pan-Slavist: The Pan-Slavists saw the future of Russia in an eastward-looking political and spiritual union of all the Slavs, rather than in a closer rapprochement with the West. This is referred to in Part Eight as ‘the Eastern question’.

43 Duc de Lille: The name Tolstoy gives to the poet is a play on the name of the French poet Leconte de Lisle (1818-94), leader of the Parnassian school; the title of the book also parodies the titles of a number of French books of the time, including Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. For the fullest expression of Tolstoy’s dislike of the new art of his time see his What Is Art? (1898).

44 slave-girl Rebecca genre: That is, the Semitic type of beauty, which had became fashionable in the nineteenth century as an alternative to the classical type.

Part Two

1 Great Lent: The forty-day fast period preceding Holy Week and Easter in the Orthodox liturgical calendar, called ‘great’ to distinguish it from several ‘lesser’ fasts at other times of the year.

2 famous singer: The singer, as we learn later, is Swedish soprano Christiane Nilsson (1843-1927). She had great success on the stages of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow and the Mariinsky Theatre in Petersburg between 1872 and 1885.

3 Blessed are the peacemakers ... : Cf. Matthew 5:9: ‘Blessed are the peacemakers: for they shall be called the children of God.’

4 young men are out driving ... : The story that follows was told to Tolstoy by his brother-in-law, Alexander Bers. Tolstoy found it ‘a charming story in itself’ and asked permission to use it in his novel.

5 titular councillor and councilloress: Titular councillor was ninth of the fourteen ranks of the imperial civil service established by Peter the Great, equivalent to the military rank of staff-captain.

6 Talleyrand: Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754-1838), French diplomat and political figure, served in a number of important capacities throughout the period of the revolution, the empire and the restoration, perhaps most brilliantly at the Congress of Vienna (1814-15).

7 unable to continue standing: There are no pews in Orthodox churches; people stand through the services, which can be very long.

8 Kaulbach: The German painter Wilhelm Kaulbach (1805-74), director of the Munich Academy of Art, was considered the last representative of idealism. Actors and opera singers of the time studied his monumental biblical and historical compositions in order to learn stage gestures and movements.

9 diable rose: In 1874 the French Theatre in Petersburg produced a play by E. Grange and L. Thiboux entitled Les Diables roses (The Pink Devils).

10 a man deprived of a shadow: There is no such tale in the collection of the Brothers Grimm. The motif of the lost shadow belongs to The Extraordinary Adventures of Peter Schlemihl, by Adalbert Chamisso (Adalbert de Chamisso de Boncourt, 1781-1838), a German Romantic writer of French origin. But Princess Miagky may be thinking of ‘The Shadow‘, by Hans Christian Andersen (1805-75), published in Russian translation in 1870.