Anna Karenina

31 Widows’ Home: A philanthropic institution for poor, sick and old widows opened in Moscow and Petersburg in 1803.

32 Slavonic: Church Slavonic, linguistically based on Old Bulgarian, was and remains the liturgical and scriptural language of the Orthodox Church in Slavic countries.

33 ... turn the other cheek ... : Loose paraphrase of Luke 6:29: ‘And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also’ (cf. Matthew 5:39-40).

34 Pietists: Pietism was a seventeenth-century reform movement within the Lutheran Church, but the prince is referring here to a more general current of piety in the Russian aristocracy of the time, favouring inner peace and prayer over external ritual, with more than a touch of smug sanctimoniousness.

35 they’ve beaten everybody: The colonel is referring to the series of Prussian military successes, culminating in the victory over France in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71), through which Bismarck consolidated the German empire.

Part Three

1 St Peter’s: That is, the feast of Sts Peter and Paul on 29 June.

2 council member: A member of the zemstvo council.

3 criminal courts: Open courts and trial by jury were first introduced in Russia by the judicial reforms of 1864.

4 day of the Trinity: The Russian name for the feast of Pentecost, on the occasion of which churches and homes are decorated with flowers and branches of greenery.

5 Lafite: Château Lafite, one of the finest red Bordeaux wines.

6 kvass: A sort of home-made beer made from fermented rye.

7 corvée: Under serfdom, the unpaid labour owed by serfs to the lord.

8 not received communion for more than a year: At that time, the normal practice was to take communion twice a year - at Christmas and Easter. Dolly’s children have missed two Easters and one Christmas, and have thus gone an unusually long time without communion.

9 three fasts: The child was born before St Peter’s fast the previous year and was thus nursed through three fast periods - St Peter’s in June, the Dormition fast in August, and the Advent fast in November - and weaned before the beginning of the Great Lent. (See note I, Part Two.)

10 visit often: It was a common situation for peasant men to be hired in a local town, in the provincial capital, or even in another province, wherever there were jobs to be had. Hence Dolly’s question about visiting.

11 St Philip’s: St Philip’s day, 14 November, is the eve of the forty-day Advent fast. Since weddings are not permitted during fast periods, the boy got married just before.

12 La Belle Hélène: An operetta by Jacques Offenbach (1819-80), based on the story of Helen of Troy; Menelaus is of course the cuckolded husband. The operetta had been performed recently in Petersburg.

13 Eugubine Tables: Seven bronze tablets inscribed in Umbrian and Latin, dating back to the second or first century BC, discovered in Gubbio, Italy (ancient Iguvium, later Eugubium), in 1444. In 1874 the French Revue des deux mondes published an article on the Eugubine Tables, which may be what Karenin is reading.

14 Zaraysk province: Tolstoy may have in mind the numerous projects for irrigating the fields in Samara province after the famine of 1873, which drew large government subsidies regardless of their practicability.

15 settling of racial minorities: Abuses were widespread in cases of the resettlement of unoccupied lands, for instance the thirty million acres belonging to the Bashkir people in Orenburg province. In the 1860s the government began to encourage the leasing of Bashkir land to displaced peoples from Central Asia, which led to shady speculations involving officials in the provincial administration itself.

16 Les sept merveilles du monde: The seven wonders of the world, the seven most remarkable works of antiquity: the pyramids of Egypt, the hanging gardens of Semiramis in Babylon, the statue of Olympian Zeus by Phidias, the Colossus of Rhodes, the temple of Artemis in Ephesus, the mausoleum of Halicarnassus, and the lighthouse of Alexandria. The Petersburg circle adopted this name in hyperbole.

17 unexpected young guest ... : This unnamed guest, as Tolstoy’s son Sergei observed in his memoirs, was apparently one of the young grand dukes, the sons of the emperor, on whose entrance even elderly ladies were required to rise.