Anna Karenina

1 foreign prince ... to Petersburg: In January-February 1874, Petersburg was host to princes from Germany, England and Denmark, invited on the occasion of the wedding of Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, to Maria Alexandrovna, daughter of Alexander II.

2 Athenian night: The Roman writer Aulus Gellius (second century AD) was the author of a collection of dialogues on various branches of knowledge known as Athenian (or Attic) Nights, the title of which in Russian became proverbial for gatherings marked by licentious behaviour.

3 portfolio ... pushed her away: According to the law of that time, Karenin, as head of the family, had the right to read the correspondence of his wife and any other member of his household.

4 legal profession ... placed: The legal profession emerged in Russia together with the institution of open courts, as a result of the judicial reforms of 1864. Lawyers became prominent public figures and their profession both profitable and fashionable.

5 in a frock coat: That is, dressed more casually, not in the formal tailcoat usually called for on such occasions.

6 ‘Be not so stern ...’: A jumbled quotation of the first two lines of the poem ‘From Hafiz’ by Afanasy Fet (1820-92), a friend of Tolstoy’s and one of his favourite poets.

7 russification of Poland: Portions of Poland came under Russian domination through the three partitions of 1772, 1793 and 1798. The national insurrections that broke out in 1830 and 1863 were cruelly repressed, and ‘Russian’ Poland remained under Russian domination until 1914.

8 Attic salt: Refined wit thought to be typical of Athenian conversation, as represented in the many ‘dialogues’ of classical and Hellenistic literature.

9 education ... disputes ... : In 1871 the Russian minister of national education, Count D. A. Tolstoy, proposed establishing two sorts of schools, so-called ‘real’ high schools and classical gymnasiums. The distinction was intended to limit the teaching of natural science, which was seen as a source of dangerous materialistic and atheistic notions. It was hoped that classical studies would cure young people of revolutionary ideas.

10 anti-nihilistic: The term ‘nihilism’, first used philosophically in German (Nihilismus) to signify annihilation, a reduction to nothing (attributed to Buddha), or the rejection of religious beliefs and moral principles, came via the French nihilisme to Russian, where it acquired a political meaning, referring to the doctrine of the younger generation of socialists of the 1860s, who advocated the destruction of the existing social order without specifying what should replace it. The great Russian lexicographer V. I. Dahl (1801-72), normally a model of restraint, defines ‘nihilism’ in his Interpretive Dictionary of the Living Russian Language as ‘an ugly and immoral doctrine which rejects everything that cannot be palpated’.

11 women’s education: In the 1860s women were allowed education only as teachers or midwives, but by the 1870s women’s struggle for intellectual and social independence had been clearly expressed and higher studies in many fields were opened to them. (See note 26, Part One.)

12 long hair, short ... : The full saying is: ‘Long on hair, short on brains’.

13 choral principle: Pestsov here borrows a favourite notion of the Slavophiles, proponents of Russian national culture and Orthodoxy, originally expressed by the writer K. S. Aksakov (1817-60), about the peasant village commune being a sort of ‘moral chorus’ in which each voice is heard, but in harmony with all other voices.

14 ... never mind, silence!: Levin quotes, consciously or unconsciously, the unmistakable words of the lovelorn and mad Mr Poprishchin in The Diary of a Madman, by Nikolai Gogol (1809-52).

15 Fomin’s ... Fulde’s: Fomin’s was an actual florist’s shop in Moscow, and Fulde’s was an actual jewellery shop.

16 Froom: That is, Froom’s Railway Guide for Russia and the Continent of Europe, published in English in 1870.

17 that holy martyr ... : Anna is thinking of St Mary of Egypt, a fifth-century saint much venerated in the Orthodox Church, a prostitute who converted to Christianity and withdrew to the Egyptian desert, where she spent more than forty years in solitude and repentance.

18 Yeliseev’s: The Yeliseev brothers owned famous delicatessen shops in Petersburg and Moscow which have survived to this day.

Part Five