“It flings the boat back,” he thought; “she makes two steps forward and one step back; but the boatmen are stubborn, they work the oars unceasingly, and are not afraid of the high waves. The boat goes on and on. Now she is out of sight, but in half an hour the boatmen will see the steamer lights distinctly, and within an hour they will be by the steamer ladder. So it is in life. . . . In the search for truth man makes two steps forward and one step back. Suffering, mistakes, and weariness of life thrust them back, but the thirst for truth and stubborn will drive them on and on. And who knows? Perhaps they will reach the real truth at last.”
“Go—o—od-by—e,” shouted Samoylenko.
“There’s no sight or sound of them,” said the deacon. “Good luck on the journey!”
It began to spot with rain.
NOTES
shashlik: lamb kebabs, a pan-Caucasian dish.
“Your Excellency,” although he was only a civil councillor: “Civil councillor” was the fifth-highest station of the Table of Ranks, Peter the Great’s meritocratic system of fourteen grades that applied to all branches of state service. Samoylenko’s rank was therefore fairly high (on a par with, in the U.S. Army, brigade commander) but merited only the salutation vashe vysokorodie, roughly “your Lordship.”
Ah, how true Tolstoy is: By the early 1890s, Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) had written a number of invectives against modern civilization. In all likelihood, Laevsky is referring to the novella The Kreutzer Sonata or to the semi-autobiographical A Confession, both of which were outlawed by the Russian censor but nonetheless circulated widely.
Spencer: Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), the Social Darwinist who argued that societies were subject to the same laws as biological organisms, including the “law” of the “survival of the fittest” (Spencer coined the expression).
Nevsky Prospect: the central boulevard in St. Petersburg, Russia, and one of the world’s great thoroughfares.
Anfissa or Akulina: old-fashioned, demotic, and distinctly Russian-sounding names, though in fact the former is Greek and the latter Latin in origin.
Vereshtchagin has a picture: specifically, The Samarkand Prisoner Pit (Samarkandskii zindan), by Vassily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin (the usual modern spelling) (1842–1904). The painting was completed c. 1868, after Vereshchagin toured Central Asia.
samovar: a Russian contraption that heats water for tea.
Vladimir cross on a ribbon: Officially the Order of Saint Prince Equal-to-the-Apostles Vladimir, the Vladimir cross was established by Catherine the Great and awarded for distinction in either civil or military service. It was the second-highest honor in Imperial Russia.
Circassians: inhabitants of Circassia, a region in the northern Caucasus.
the little curls at the back of her head . . . what she disliked most of all was his ears: a reference to the 1877 novel Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910). The narrator repeatedly remarks on Anna Karenina’s black curls that spill forth from beneath her bonnet, and on the ears of her husband, Alexei Karenin.
Franco-Russian entente: an agreement reached in 1891 on joint action in the event of a conflict with Germany.
Great Morskaya Street, and then Kovensky Place: Like Nevsky Prospect, Great Morskaya Street and Kovensky Place are well-known streets in St. Petersburg.
Zemstvo: Zemstvos, assemblies entrusted with rural self-management, were created in 1864 during the era of “Great Reforms” in Russia.
vint: a popular complex card game, not unrelated to contract bridge, that flourished in Russia in the nineteenth century. It went out of fashion after the Revolution.
Prince Vorontsov: Mikhail Semyonovich Vorontsov (1782–1856), hero of the battle of Borodino, fought against Napoleon’s grande armée in 1812. The portrait Von Koren takes aim at was, in all likelihood, the one painted by the English artist Thomas Lawrence in 1821.
Work is not like a bear; it doesn’t run off into the woods: a common Russian saying.
Onyegin, Petchorin, Byron’s Cain, and Bazarov: Onyegin, or Onegin, is the eponymous hero of Eugene Onegin (1833), a novel in verse by Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837); Petchorin is the hero of the novel A Hero of Our Time (1840), by Mikhail Lermontov (1814–41); George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824) wrote his play Cain: A Mystery in 1821; Bazarov is one of the heroes of Fathers and Sons (1862), a novel by Ivan Turgenev. (Bazarov, a positivistic medical student, nihilist, and ascetic, is somewhat out of place in this list, since the character bears more resemblance to Von Koren than to Laevsky.)
has not the right to kiss the sole of Spencer’s foot: See note 4, above.
thirty degrees Réaumur: about 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
duhan: pan-Caucasian word of Turkic origin for a small restaurant, usually no more than a window from which tea and baked goods were sold.
char-à-banc: a light, small carriage with forward-facing seats.
Pushkin’s ‘Night in the Ukraine’: Pushkin published no poem with this title. Von Koren likely has in mind a description of an evening in the Ukraine from the second canto of Pushkin’s Poltava (1829).
kvareli: a red wine produced in the Kakhetia region of eastern Georgia.
archimandrite: the superior of a monastery in the Russian Orthodox Church, roughly analogous, in the Western Church, to an abbot.
calotte: a skullcap worn by ecclesiastics.
‘His beaver collar is silver with hoar-frost’: from Eugene Onegin (chapter 1, stanza XVI).
I am a zoologist or a sociologist, which is the same thing: a very Spencerian tautology. See note 4, above.
manu militari: (Latin) literally “with a soldier’s hand”; meaning, by force.
sitting like Stanley: Sir Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904), the first European to explore the Congo River in Central Africa; utterer, having located and rescued the missionary David Livingstone, of the famous “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”
Rudin: the eponymous protagonist of Turgenev’s 1856 novel.
Anna Karenin flung herself under the train: Distraught from the scandal over her affair with the dashing Vronsky and prey to constant doubts about his fidelity, Tolstoy’s heroine commits suicide by throwing herself under the wheels of a train.
Leskov has a story of a conscientious Danila: The story “The Conscientious Danila,” by Nikolay Semyonovich Leskov (1831–95), was published in 1887 through Tolstoy’s publishing house, The Intermediary.
fortress of St. Peter and St. Pauclass="underline" Only the most dangerous political dissidents and criminals were incarcerated within the prison of this St. Petersburg fortress, so Von Koren’s remark betrays a certain egotism.
“Upon my mind . . . those lines away”: the concluding lines of Pushkin’s 1828 poem “Reminiscences.”
Amour propre: (French) self-love, indicating either extreme vanity or a reasonable regard for one’s own rights and dignity.
the description in Lermontov . . . In Turgenev, too, Bazarov had a duel with someone: There is a detailed description of a duel in Book Five (“Princess Mary”) of Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time; in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Bazarov fights a duel with Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov, the old-fashioned uncle of one of his schoolmates.