NOTES
UKRAINIAN TALES
St. John's Eve 1. The Russian and Ukrainian stove was a large, elaborate structure used for heating and cooking, which one could also sit or sleep on and even get into in order to wash.
2. The names of three half-legendary heroes from Ukrainian history: Ivan Podkova was a Cossack leader who seized the Moldavian throne in 1578 and was later executed by the Polish king; Karp Poltora Kozhukha was hetman of the Ukraine from 1638 to 1642; Sagaidachny (Pyotr Konashevich), also a Ukrainian hetman, led Cossack campaigns against the Turks and Tartars in 1616-21.
3. A Ukrainian saying, meaning to lie at confession, as Gogol himself explains in a note to the story.
4. The Poles and Lithuanians, whose territories bordered the Ukraine, were traditional enemies of the Cossacks, though they sometimes made alliances with each other against common enemies. The narrator refers to them in somewhat familiar, disrespectful terms. "Crimeans" here refers to the Crimean Tartars, a Muslim people inhabiting the Crimean peninsula, descendants of the Mongols.
5. Kutya (pronounced koot-YAH) is a special dish made from rice (or barley or wheat) and raisins, sweetened with honey, offered to people after a church service in commemoration of the dead and sometimes also on Christmas Eve.
6. Father Afanasy represents an exaggeration of the view of Roman Catholics (such as Poles and Lithuanians) taken by the Ukrainians, who belong to the Eastern Orthodox Church.
7. The Zaporozhye (meaning "beyond the rapids" on the Dnieper River) was a territory in the southeastern Ukraine where the Cossacks lived and pre- served some measure of independence from the Russian state during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.
8. The Cossacks customarily shaved their heads but grew a topknot on the top of the head, priding themselves on its length.
9. That is, the feast in honor of the nativity of Saint John the Baptist, celebrated on June 24; in folklore the night before the feast is a time of magic and mystification.
10. "Yaga" is the second half of the name Baba-yaga, the wicked witch of Russian folktales, here used generically.
11. A Ukrainian folk dance and the music for it.
12. Probably a slighting reference to the Jews, who often kept taverns in the Ukraine.
The Night Before Christmas
1. See note 5 to "St. John's Eve."
2. See note 1 to "St. John's Eve."
3. The period of fast preceding the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul on June 29.
4. A panikhida is an Orthodox prayer service in memory of the dead.
5. A Zaporozhets was a Cossack from the Zaporozhye (see note 7 to "St. John's Eve").
6. The only food permitted on the last day of the Advent fast (i.e., Christmas Eve).
7. The Setch was the sociopolitical and military organization of the Ukrainian Cossacks in the Zaporozhye-a form of republic headed by a chief. The freedoms of the Setch were gradually curtailed in the eighteenth century, and in 1775 it was finally abolished.
8. The term hetman (from the German Hauptmann) originally referred to the commander in chief of the Polish army. The Cossacks used it as the title of their own elected chief. It is comically misapplied here.
9. Grigory Alexandrovich, Prince Potemkin (1739-91), field marshal and statesman, in 1774 became the favorite of the empress Catherine II (1729-96) and thereafter guided Russian state policy.
10. The Italian carabinieri were members of an army corps also used as a police force-a degrading function in the opinion of the Cossacks.
11. On "Crimeans" see note 4 to "St. John's Eve." The allusion is to the Russian conquest of the Crimea from the Turks in 1771.
12. The empress is addressing the dramatist Denis Fonvizin (1745-92), whose plays The Brigadier and The Minor are classics of the Russian theater and the best Russian prose comedies before Gogol's own Inspector General.
13. Jean de La Fontaine (1621-95), the great French poet and fabulist.
14. The iconostasis is an icon-bearing partition with three doors that spans the width of an Orthodox church, separating the sanctuary from the body of the church.
The Terrible Vengeance 1. See note 5 to "The Night Before Christmas."
2. Ksiedzy is the plural of ksiadz, Polish for priest; adopted by Russian, the word acquired pejorative connotations as referring to Roman Catholic priests (see note 6 to "St. John s Eve"). Rebaptizing implied that the priests did not consider the Orthodox Ukrainians to be Christians.
3. The Zaporozhtsy under the leadership of Sagaidachny (see note 2 to "St. John's Eve") campaigned against the Crimean Tartar khanate, remnant of the Golden Horde of the Mongols, and fought them on the shore of the Sivash (the "Salt Lake") in 1620.
4. See note 1 to "St. John's Eve."
5. The Uniates are adherents of the so-called Union of Brest (Unia in Latin), declared at the church council at Brest in 1595, by which western Russian churches were placed under the jurisdiction of the pope of Rome, with the understanding that, while accepting the dogmas of Roman Catholicism, they would retain the rites of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Unia aroused great dissension at the time, and has been a cause of struggle in the Ukraine and elsewhere to this day.
6. The Pospolitstvo was the combined nobility of Poland and Lithuania, united under one scepter in 1569.
7. See note 8 to "The Night Before Christmas."
8. The enemy of Christ whose appearance in the "last days" is prophesied in Revelation (11:7), and of whom Saint John writes in his first epistle: "… and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come…" (1 John 2:18).
9. See note 4 to "The Night Before Christmas." It is a popular belief that the soul does not leave this world until forty days after death.
10. See note 2 to "St. John's Eve" and note 3 above.
11. See footnote (author's note) on p. 15.
12. The Liman (an inlet of the Black Sea near Odessa) and the Crimea are in the very south of the Ukraine, as far as possible from Kiev; Galicia, extending to the northern slopes of the Carpathians, is now divided between the western Ukraine and eastern Poland; geographically, it is to the right, not the left, looking south from Kiev.
13. See note 10 above. Bogdan Khmelnitsky (1593-1657), hetman of the Ukrainian Cossacks, rose up against the Poles in 1648.
14. That is, Stefan Batory, a Hungarian prince who was king of Poland from 1575 to 1586.
Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt
1. Pirozhki (plural of pirozhok) are small pastries with sweet or savory fillings.
2. A tax farmer was a private person authorized by the government to collect various taxes in exchange for a fixed fee.
3. Latin for "knows," meaning that the student has learned the lesson.
4. A concentrate produced by allowing wine to freeze and then removing the frozen portion.
5. See note 1 to "St. John's Eve."
6. Adult male serfs were known in Russia as "souls." Censuses for tax purposes were taken at intervals of as much as fifteen years, between which the number of souls on an estate might of course increase (or decrease).