The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

  2. Sazikov and Ovchinnikov … Heine … Worth …: Pavel Ignatyevich Sazikov (d. 1868) and Pavel Akimovich Ovchinnikov (1830–88) were well-known gold- and silversmiths with shops in Moscow and Petersburg. In his late prose work Lutezia (1854), Heine speaks not of a tailor but of a Parisian shoemaker named Sakosky, describing him as “an artist in leather footwear.” The Englishman Charles Frederick Worth (1825–95) became a famous Parisian couturier, inventor of the défilé de mode (“fashion show”).

  3. Bret Harte …: The reference is to the story “A Sleeping-Car Experience,” by Francis Brett Harte (1836–1902), published in the collection Drift from Two Shores (1878), but Leskov’s recounting of it has little to do with the original.

  4. Count Kamensky in Orel: Field Marshal Count Mikhail Fedotovich Kamensky (1738–1809) retired from the army to his estate in Orel in 1806. He was notorious for mistreating his serfs and was murdered by one of them three years later. He had two sons, both generals, Sergei (1771–1836) and Nikolai (1776–1811). Sergei retired from the army in 1822, returned to the Kamensky estate, and threw himself into running the serf theater started by his father. The troupe, including actors, dancers, and musicians, numbered about four hundred souls. Kamensky treated them quite tyrannically. Serf theaters arose in Russia in the late seventeenth century; by the nineteenth century there were more than 170 of them.

  5. Alexander Pavlovich or Nikolai Pavlovich …: See notes 1 and 8 to “Lefty.”

  6. camarine: That is, aquamarine, or blue beryl. Some of the best aquamarines come from Russia. Ironically, aquamarine is said to symbolize love, harmony, and marital happiness.

  7. Snakes … your face: A somewhat inaccurate quotation from the Serbian song “Prince Marco in Prison.”

  8. Turkish Rushchuk: The town of Ruse, on the Danube in Bulgaria, was called “Rushchuk” (“Little Ruse”) by the Ottomans, who made it a major fortress and city. It was liberated from Ottoman control in 1878.

  9. “bolyarin”: The Church Slavonic equivalent of the Russian boyarin, equivalent to the medieval “baron.”

The Voice of Nature

(1883)

  1. Faddeev … Baryatinsky: Field Marshal Prince Alexander Ivanovich Baryatinsky (1814–1879) was made commander of Russian forces in the Caucasus and then governor of the region, a post he held until his retirement in 1862. Rostislav Andreevich Faddeev (1824–83), a general and a writer on military subjects, was attached to the governor of the Caucasus from 1859 to 1864.

  2. Temir-Khan-Shura: A settlement in what is now Dagestan, founded as a fortress in 1834 and granted the status of a town in 1866.

  3. Paul de Kock: (1793–1871). A prolific French novelist, author of crude but spicy and often amusing novels about Parisian life.

A Little Mistake

(1883)

  1. Ivan Yakovlevich: Ivan Yakovlevich Koreisha (1780–1861) was an inmate of a Moscow psychiatric clinic for over forty years. His bizarre verbosity earned him the reputation of a seer, and people of all classes came to have him “prophesy” for them. Koreisha was Dostoevsky’s model for the holy fool Semyon Yakovlevich in Demons (1872).

  2. Pismovnik: Nikolai Gavrilovich Kurganov (1726–96), mathematician, teacher, and member of the St. Petersburg Academy, published his Pismovnik, a collection of writings for self-education in Russian language and literature, in 1793.

  3. a clown from Presnya: In the late eighteenth to nineteenth century, the Presnya district of Moscow was a park and picnic area with ponds and entertainments.

  4. promise … head cut off: See note 14 to “The Sealed Angel.” The tetrarch Herod Antipas was so taken with his stepdaughter Salomé’s dancing that he promised to give her whatever she asked for. At the prompting of her mother, Herodias, she asked for John the Baptist’s head.

The Pearl Necklace

(1885)

  1. the late Pisemsky: Alexei Feofilaktovich Pisemsky (1826–81), distinguished novelist and playwright, was a realist of a dark turn of mind, skeptical of the liberal reforms of the 1860s.

  2. in which … man: A slightly altered quotation from Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin, chapter 7, stanza 22.

  3. the late poet Tolstoy: See note 2 to “The Enchanted Wanderer.” The line is from stanza 35 of Tolstoy’s satirical poem “The Dream of Councilor Popov” (1873), which spread widely through Russia in handwritten copies.

  4. the altar of Themis: Themis was an ancient Greek titaness, an oracle at Delphi, the goddess of divine order and justice.