6. molvo sugar … Bobrinsky factory: Y. N. Molvo ran a sugar refinery in Petersburg during the early nineteenth century. Count Alexei Alexeevich Bobrinsky (1800–68) was also one of the first sugar refiners in Russia. William B. Edgerton, in Satirical Stories of Nikolai Leskov (New York, 1969) suggests that “Molvo” was a Russified form of the French name Mollevaut and comments, “If this supposition is true, then the irony of Platov’s Russian defense of ‘Mollevaut’ sugar becomes all the sweeter.”
7. Zhukov tobacco …: Vasily Zhukov produced pipe tobacco in his Petersburg factory from the 1820s to the 1850s.
8. The emperor Nikolai Pavlovich … at his ascension: Nikolai Pavlovich is the emperor Nicholas I (1796–1855). The “disturbances at his ascension” were the events of the Decembrist uprising of December 14, 1825, when young officers in Petersburg mutinied during the confusion following the death of Alexander I and demanded democratic reforms in Russia.
9. holy Athos: The mountain and peninsula of Athos is home to twenty Orthodox monasteries, among them the Russian Orthodox monastery of St. Panteleimon.
10. “Evening Bells”: “Evening Bells” is a song by the Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779–1852), published in 1818, with the subtitle “The Bells of St. Petersburg.” Moore claimed it was based on a Russian original, but the source is unknown. In 1828, the Russian poet Ivan Kozlov (1779–1840) translated Moore’s poem into Russian. His version became immensely popular and is still widely sung. The musical setting by Alexander Alyabyev (1787–1851) is indeed “painted out.”
11. Count Nestlebroad: That is, Count Karl Vasilievich Nesselrode (1780–1862), of Baltic German birth, who entered the Russian navy and then the diplomatic service under Alexander I, becoming foreign minister in 1816 and remaining in that capacity for more than forty years.
12. our lace: The city of Tula had four specialties: firearms, samovars, gingerbread, and lace.
13. Count Kleinmicheclass="underline" Count Pyotr Andreevich Kleinmichel (1793–1869) served from 1842 to 1855 as chief administrator of highways and public buildings under Nicholas I.
14. Commandant Skobelev: In 1839, General Ivan Nikitich Skobelev (1778–1849) was commandant of the Peter-and-Paul Fortress in Petersburg, which served as a prison.
15. Martyn-Solsky: The narrator’s variant on the name of Martyn Dmitrievich Solsky (1793–1869), doctor in a guards regiment and member of the medical council of the ministry of internal affairs.
16. Count Chernyshev: Count Alexander Ivanovich Chernyshev (1786–1857), cavalry general and statesman, served as minister of war under Nicholas I from 1826 to 1852.
17. “deeds … of old”: A reference to lines from Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820), a narrative poem by Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837).
The Spirit of Madame de Genlis
(1881)
1. A. B. Calmet: Leskov is mistaken about the middle initial. Antoine Augustin Calmet (1672–1757) was a Benedictine monk. His most well-known work, Dissertations on Apparitions, Angels, Demons, and Spirits, and on Ghosts and Vampires in Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia (Paris, 1746; re-edited in 1951), was published in Russia in 1867.
2. Mmes de Sévigné … de Genlis: Leskov gives a list of six famous letter writers or memoirists of the reign of Louis XIV, all ladies, before he comes to Mme de Genlis. He misspells most of the names, but we give them in their correct form. Mme de Genlis (Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de St. Aubin Brûlart, marquise de Sillery, comtesse de Genlis, 1746–1830) first entered the royal palace as lady-in-waiting to the duchesse de Chartres and became the governess of her children, one of whom, Louis Philippe d’Orléans (1773–1850), later became king. She wrote verse, novels, plays, treatises, and some important memoirs.
3. Voltaire … criticism: Mme de Genlis met Voltaire at his estate in Ferney, near Geneva, and noted in her memoirs that he was a tasteless, ill-bred man with a love of crude flattery.
4. Kardec’s theory of “mischievous spirits”: Allan Kardec was the pen name of Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail (1808–69), a French schoolteacher and a prime mover of the spiritualist vogue in the mid-nineteenth century (see note 3 to “The White Eagle”). Among other things, he coined the word “spiritism” and produced a five-volume theoretical synthesis, The Spiritual Codification.
5. Prince Gagarin: Prince Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin (1814–82) was serving as secretary of the Russian legation in Paris when, in 1842, he converted to Catholicism and became a Jesuit. He lived the rest of his life in Paris, where Leskov met him in 1875.
6. Heine’s “Bernardiner und Rabiner”: The reference is to the poem “Disputation,” from Romanzero (1851), by Heinrich Heine (1797–1856). The poem, which is set in medieval Toledo, presents a dispute between a Capuchin friar and a rabbi about whose God is the true God. It is resolved by the young Doña Blanka, who says “I don’t know which of them is right, but they both stink.”
7. Mme du Deffand … Gibbon: Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du Deffand (1697–1780), was a prolific letter writer who corresponded with many notable people of her time, including Voltaire and Horace Walpole, with whom she formed an enduring attachment. The English historian Edward Gibbon (1737–94) is most famous for his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88).
8. Lauzun: Armand Louis de Gontaut, duc de Lauzun (1747–1793), took part in the American War of Independence on the side of the colonists and in the French revolutionary wars. He was arrested and guillotined during the Reign of Terror.
9. Gibbon was … “vile joke”!: Leskov quotes this passage, with cuts and alterations, from the Russian edition of the memoirs of Mme de Genlis, Memoirs of Felicia L***, published in Moscow in 1809.
The Toupee Artist
(1883)
1. February 19, 1861: The date of the imperial manifesto proclaiming the emancipation of the serfs.
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 Oreclass="underline" 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.