48: Paper Scraps and the Bugler
fn1 Pëtr Gnedich, author of The History of Art from Ancient Times (1885).
fn2 Painters known for their works on military themes: Jan Matejko (1838–93), Bogdan Willewalde (1819–1903), Ernst Meissonier (1815–91) and Antoine-Jean Gros (1771–1835).
52: The Great Swindler
fn1 Popular Moscow restaurant in the early 1900s known for its Gypsy choir.
fn2 Oft-quoted line from Griboedov’s Woe from Wit.
53: The Ocean Liner Portugal
fn1 From Nadson’s ‘By the Sea’ (1885). Several of his works were set to music by Sergei Rachmaninoff and César Cui.
fn2 Vera Kholodnaya (1893–1919), silent film star.
fn3 Ivan Aivazovsky (1817–1900), Russian-Armenian painter especially known for his romantic seascapes.
fn4 Mark Antokolsky (1843–1902), Jewish-Lithuanian sculptor who created many works of famous historical figures.
fn5 The Portugal was sunk on 30 March 1916 by a German submarine. Of the 273 people on board, more than 100 did, in fact, survive.
55: The Little Knight
fn1 Reflections on the Siege of Paris during the Franco–Prussian War (1871), by Francisque Sarcey (1827–99).
fn2 Opening lines of ‘The Nighttime Review’ (1836) by Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852).
58: Treason
fn1 Juliusz Słowacki (1809–49), Romantic poet and dramatist.
61: The Bulldog
fn1 Final lines of Blok’s ‘For you, there is no name, my distant one’ (1906).
62: A Dank Winter
fn1 The Constitutional Democratic Party (known as the Kadets) was a liberal political party composed chiefly of professionals and the educated elite. Yevgeny Kedrin (1851–1921), lawyer and political figure, later emigrated.
fn2 Mykhailo Tuhan-Baranovskyi (1865–1919), Ukrainian economist, professor and political figure; Pëtr Struve (1870–1944), political economist and Marxist, later critic of the Soviet state; Ferdinand Lassalle (1825–64), German philosopher, socialist organiser and activist.
fn3 Zemgor was an acronym for the United Committee for the Union of Zemstvos and Towns, created in 1915 to assist the government in the war effort.
fn4 A reference to the Polish uprising against Russian rule in 1830–31.
fn5 Pavel Muratov (1881–1950), art historian, critic, author of three-volume Images of Italy.
fn6 Vasily Svarog (born Korochkin) (1883–1946), Russian-Soviet painter.
fn7 Ivan Goremykin (1839–1917), prime minister of Russia 1914–16.
63: A Grievous Commotion
fn1 Dmitry Shchepkin (1879–1937), lawyer, economist, political figure, executed under Stalin.
fn2 Konstantin Flavitsky’s (1830–66) best-known painting, which depicts the legendary death of the eighteenth-century pretender to the Russian throne (1864).
64: The Suburb of Chechelevka
fn1 Alexander Yakubovich (1792–1845), among the Decembrists sentenced to death, later commuted. Pëtr Karatygin’s 1825 portrait of Yakubovich shows him with a dark bandage over his forehead.
fn2 Mikhail Kozlovsky (1753–1802), Neoclassical sculptor.
65: One Day
fn1 The battleship Empress Maria sank after a fire on board led to a magazine explosion in October 1915, killing hundreds of sailors. The precise cause of the explosion remains unknown.
fn2 An ancient fortified cave city, now in ruins, possibly dating back to the fifth century CE.
fn3 Konstantin Fofanov (1862–1911), popular and widely imitated poet; Mirra Lokhvitskaya (1869–1905), poet, known as the ‘Russian Sappho’.
66: The Hotel Great Britain
fn1 John Hughes (1814–89), a Welsh ironmaster, created the town of Yuzovka – Hughesovka – in the second half of the nineteenth century. London businessman and merchant Archibald Balfour lived in Russia and built himself a large estate in Yuzovka.
fn2 Popular traditional Russian card game for up to six players using thirty-six cards of a standard fifty-two-card pack.
67: Notebooks and Memory
fn1 Nikolai Shcherbina (1821–69), Russian poet of Ukrainian and Greek parents, best known for his Greek Verses (1850).
fn2 Khivrya is Cherevik’s unfaithful wife in Gogol’s short story ‘The Fair at Sorochyntsi’ from his Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1832).
fn3 Ignaty Potapenko (1856–1929), a former friend of Chekhov’s at whom, after their falling out, Chekhov poked fun with the figure of Trigorin in The Seagull; Ivan Leontiev (pen name Shcheglov) (1856–1911), author of short pieces of humour, stories on military life and several plays; Alexander Ertel (1855–1908), author of two large novels and a number of short stories; Alexander Izmailov (1779–1831), poet and publisher; Kazimir Barantsevich (1851–1927), prolific author of tales chiefly chronicling the lives of Russia’s lower-middle classes; Viktor Muyzhel (1880–1924), short-story writer and novelist whose works focused mostly on Russian peasant life.
fn4 Lines from Lermontov’s ‘In Memory of A. I. Odoevsky’ (1839); Pushkin’s ‘It’s Time, My Friend …’ (1834); Fëdor Tyutchev’s (1803–73) ‘Spring Storm’ (1828[?], completed early 1850s); Fet’s ‘Another May Night’ (1857).
fn5 José-Maria de Heredia (1842–1905), Cuban-born French poet.
fn6 Lev Mei (1822–62), Russian poet and dramatist.
fn7 First stanza of an untitled poem from Blok’s cycle ‘Invocation by Fire and Darkness’ (1907).
68: The Art of Whitewashing
fn1 A line from ‘For the Album of K. Sh ….’ (1865) by the late Romantic poet Yakov Polonsky (1819–98).
69: A Raw February
fn1 Titular character of a story by Gogol (1835, revised in 1842) about a Cossack warrior and his two sons.
fn2 Alexander Kuprin (1870–1938), writer of short fiction, novelist, friend of Chekhov and Bunin.
fn3 Vladimir Gilyarovsky (1853–1935), poet, actor, raconteur, journalist and memoirist, known for his writings on Moscow.
fn4 The ‘Time of Troubles’ was a period of political instability, famine and foreign invasion between 1598 and 1613.
fn5 Turgenev’s winged words of 1882 on ‘the great, mighty, true and free Russian language that could have been given only to “a great people”’.
fn6 Nikolai Vtorov (1866–1916), immensely wealthy entrepreneur and banker, known as the ‘Russian Morgan’.
fn7 A reference to the story ‘Kasyan of the Beautiful Lands’ in Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches (1852).
fn8 An official seventeenth-century registry, bound in red velvet, of Russia’s aristocratic elite.
fn9 Sergei Sergeev-Tsensky (1875–1958), prolific writer, poet and author of this 1909 work on the plight of rural Russia.
70: Whirlpool
fn1 Alexander Kerensky (1881–1970), lawyer, member of the SRs, served as minister of justice, minister of war and then last prime minister of the Provisional Government.
fn2 Nicholas Roerich (1873–1947), artist, writer, theosophist known for his paintings of Russia’s distant past.
fn3 Lines from a poem by Olga Belyaevskaya (active in the early 1900s), used by the Russian Symbolist Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949) as an epigraph to his poem ‘Under the Birch Tree’ (1906).
fn4 A failed military coup d’état led by General Lavr Kornilov against the Provisional Government in September 1917.
71: Blue Torches
fn1 In November, a few hundred cadets (also known as Iunkers) from local military academies took to the streets to resist the Bolshevik seizure of power in Moscow.
fn2 Nikolai Dobrolyubov (1836–61), poet, literary critic and fierce opponent of tsarist autocracy.
fn3 Gleb Uspensky (1843–1902), writer who explored themes of the peasantry and working class; Nikolai Leskov (1831–95), highly esteemed writer of many works including Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk; Ivan Nikitin (1824–61), poet, largely of the Russian landscape and peasant life.