The Adolescent

52. See Hamlet’s soliloquy about the player (Act II, Scene ii, ll. 553–563): “Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect / A broken voice, and his whole function suiting / With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing! / For Hecuba? / What’s Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba / That he should weep for her?” The comparison does not quite fit Kraft’s case.

53. See Luke 15:11–32, the parable of the prodigal son. Arkady totally confuses the meaning of the parable.

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

55. Court councillor was seventh in the table of ranks established by Peter the Great, equivalent to the military rank of major.

56. A condensed quotation of Matthew 5:25–26 (King James Version).

57. Céladon, the hero of the pastoral novel Astrée, by Honoré d’Urfé (1607–1628), is a platonic and sentimental lover.

58. See Luke 15:32 (King James Version). This is now Arkady’s third reference to the parable of the prodigal son. In the parable, however, these words are spoken of the son by the father; Arkady reverses the relations.

59. The lines are from Pushkin’s poem “The Hero” (1830).

60. The fig (figue in French, fica in Italian) is a contemptuous gesture made by inserting the thumb between the first and second fingers of the fist; also used in verbal form, as in the saying, “I don’t care a fig.” Obsolete in English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary , its use has continued in Russia, where a special covert form known as “a fig in the pocket” was developed, especially among intellectuals, as a sign of dissent during Soviet times.

PART TWO

1. Borel’s restaurant in Petersburg, named for its French founder, was already famous in Pushkin’s time. The plural implies “Borel and the like.”

2. Titular councillor was ninth in the table of ranks, equivalent to the military rank of staff-captain. The type of the titular councillor entered Russian literature in the person of the wretched copying clerk Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, hero of Gogol’s story “The Overcoat.”

3. That is, under the emperor Nicholas I (1796–1855).

4. The Duma referred to in this case is the city council, elected from the nobility.

5. The first railway in Russia, the Tsarskoe Selo line from Petersburg to Pavlovsk, was opened in 1838. Tsarskoe Selo (literally “Tsar’s Village”) was an aristocratic suburb about fifteen miles south of Petersburg; Pavlovsk, named for the emperor Paul (1754– 1801), who had a palace there, is slightly further south.

6. The Cathedral of St. Isaac in Petersburg was begun in 1819 and completed in 1858, on plans by the French architect Auguste Ricard de Montferrand (1756–1858).

7. Alexander Suvorov (1729–1800), who served under Catherine the Great (1729–1796), was the only Russian military man to bear the title of generalissimo until Joseph Stalin (1879–1953) awarded himself the title during World War II. Suvorov’s successes against the French revolutionary army in Italy gained him the additional titles of count of Italy and prince of Rimini, but they were not hereditary.

8. Zavyalov was a Russian merchant and manufacturer.

9. King Charles XI of Sweden (1655–1697) was said to have had a vision of an assembly in a brightly lit hall in which unknown men were cutting the throats of a great number of young people under the eyes of a fifteen-year-old king seated on his throne. The vision was spread through the Russian court under Alexander I (1777–1825) by the Swedish ambassador, a freemason by the name of Stedding.

10. See Part One, note 7. According to a popular anecdote, the “somebody” was in fact the emperor Alexander I himself.

11. Pavel Bashutsky (1771–1836) was an officer who fought in the campaigns against the French, was promoted to general, and from 1814 until his death served as military commandant of Petersburg.

12. Alexander Chernyshov (1785–1857), who distinguished himself at Austerlitz and as a partisan leader in 1812, went on diplomatic missions for Alexander I, was made a count by Nicholas I, and served as minister of war from 1827 to 1852.

13. A quotation from Luke 8:17 (King James Version).

14. See Matthew 4:3, Christ’s temptation in the wilderness, where the devil asks him to prove he is the son of God by turning stones into bread.

15. See Part One, note 33.

16. According to legend, during the reign of the third king of Rome, Tullus Hostilius (seventh century B.C.), the three sons of Horatius fought for Rome against three champions of the city of Alba Longa, in the presence of the two armies, to decide which of the two peoples would command the other. The only survivor of the six was one of the Horatii, who thus gave the victory to Rome.

17. See Part One, note 11.