72: The Journalists’ Café
fn1 Cossack Stenka Razin (1630–71) led a major rebellion against tsarist Russia; Yemelyan Pugachëv (1742–75), ataman of the Yaik Cossacks, waged a bloody insurrection in the reign of Catherine the Great; ‘releasing the red cock’ is a peasant term for arson.
fn2 Andrei Bely (1880–1934), poet and novelist, best known for his Symbolist novel Petersburg; Lev Chërny (1878–1921), revolutionary and prominent Russian anarchist; Maria Petrovskaya (stage name Roxanova) (1874–1958), actress best known for her work with the Moscow Art Theatre.
fn3 Nikolai Agnivtsev (1888–1932), poet, playwright and prolific children’s author.
fn4 François Élie Jules Lemaître (1853–1914), French poet, dramatist and influential critic.
fn5 Mikhail Prishvin (1873–1954), nature writer and author of children’s books.
fn6 An international language created by a German priest, Johann Martin Schleyer, in 1880, later supplanted by the rise of Esperanto.
fn7 Anatoly Lunacharsky (1875–1933), writer, critic and Soviet commissar of enlightenment.
fn8 Major Persian poets and writers: Abū Muhammad Muslih al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shiīrāzī, known as Saadi of Shiraz (1210–91); Omar Khayyam (1048–1131); Khwāja Shams-ud-Dīn Muḥammad Ḥāfeẓ-e Shīrāzī, better known as Hafiz or Hafez (1315–90).
fn9 ‘Abdu’l-Bahá (1844–1921), born ‘Abbás in Tehran, leader of the Bahá’í faith 1892–1921.
73: The Hall with a Fountain
fn1 A minority faction broke from the Socialist Revolutionaries in 1917 to form the Left SRs, who abandoned support of the Provisional Government in favour of the Bolsheviks and a radicalisation of the revolution. The Left SRs themselves split with the Bolsheviks after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
fn2 Yakov Sverdlov (1885–1919), early Bolshevik and chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets.
fn3 Fëdor Dan (1871–1947), a founder of the Menshevik Party, opponent of the Bolshevik coup.
75: Revolt
fn1 Maria Spiridonova (1884–1941), longtime revolutionary, key figure in the Left SRs, imprisoned by the Bolsheviks in 1918, executed under Stalin.
76: Material for a History of Russian Houses
fn1 Nestor Makhno (1888–1953), Ukrainian anarchist and commander of the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine during the civil war.
77: A Few Explanations
fn1 Pavlo Skoropadskyi (1873–1945), Ukrainian aristocrat, general in the Russian Imperial Army, hetman of Ukraine in 1918.
78: The Riga–Orël Goods Wagon
fn1 A derogatory name for the early Soviet state from the Russian Sovet Narodnykh Deputatov – the Soviet of People’s Deputies.
fn2 First stanza of Lermontov’s poem ‘I walk out Alone on to the Road’ (1841), set to music by composer Yelizaveta Shashina (1805–1903) in 1861.
80: Our Rag-Tag Hetman
fn1 Symon Petlyura (1878–1926), Ukrainian independence leader, supreme commander (ataman) of the Ukrainian army, president of the Ukrainian People’s Republic 1918–21.
fn2 Reference to Pushkin’s 1830 drama of the same name.
fn3 Popular 1913 play by the Russian writer Mikhail Artsybashev (1878–1927), best known for his scandalous novel Sanin (1907).
fn4 Alexander Vertinsky (1889–1957), famous cabaret artist, actor, poet and composer.
fn5 Common anti-Semitic slur of the time with reference to three Jews: Vulf Vysotsky (1824–1904), successful tea merchant; Israel Brodsky (1823–88), founder of one of Russia’s largest sugar manufactories; and Bolshevik Leon Trotsky (1879–1940).
81: The Violet Ray
fn1 The Haidamaki (Haidamaks) were Ukrainian Cossack military groups that arose in the early eighteenth century.
fn2 Volodymyr Vynnychenko (1880–1951), Communist revolutionary, writer, head of the Ukrainian government 1917–18, died in exile.
fn3 Opening line of a poem by Glafira Mamoshina (1873–1942, pen-name Galina Galina) written in response to state suppression of a radical Kievan university movement.
fn4 Ivan Nikiforovich Dovgochkhun, one of the petty noble landowners in Gogol’s ‘The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarrelled with Ivan Nikiforovich’ (1834).
fn5 Shevchenko’s epic historical poem from 1841 that tells the story of a bloody eighteenth-century Ukrainian rebellion known as the Koliivshchyna.
82: The Bolshevik and the Haidamachka
fn1 Varvara Panina (1872–1911), popular singer of Gypsy songs and early recording star.
fn2 Mikhail Koltsov (1898–1940), Bolshevik, powerful Soviet journalist, arrested and executed as an enemy of the people; Yefim Zozulya (1891–1941), journalist and war correspondent killed covering World War II.
fn3 Anton Denikin (1872–1947), former tsarist general, leader of the Volunteer Army against the Bolsheviks.
83: Crimson Riding Breeches
fn1 The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combatting Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (known by the abbreviation Cheka), the Soviet secret police, forerunner of the KGB.
fn2 From ‘A Prisoner’s Song’ (1826) by Fëdor Glinka, set to music by Nikolai Devitte (1811–44).
85: A Cry in the Night
fn1 Vasily Shulgin (1878–1976), prominent nationalist and conservative politician in the last years of tsarist Russia, publisher, ideologue of the White Movement.
87: Firinka, Running Water and a Bit of Danger
fn1 Dmitry Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky (1853–1920), noted linguist, literary scholar and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
fn2 Mishka Yaponchik (1881–1919, b. Moisei Volfovich Vinnitsky), legendary Jewish gangster, revolutionary and Soviet military commander, killed in the civil war.
fn3 Osip Runich (1889–1947, b. Osip Fradkin), early silent film star who acted alongside Vera Kholodnaya. Runich left Russia after her death in 1919 for Europe and then Africa.
fn4 Vera Inber (1890–1972), poet and translator, especially remembered for her diary of the Leningrad blockade.
fn5 Opening stanza of an untitled poem from 1830 by Pushkin.
Note on the Translation
fn1 Barnes’s publication comprises only the first three volumes of Paustovsky’s Story.
fn2 See the thorough discussion in Munir Sendich, ‘Problems of Literary Translations: Inaccuracies in Rendering from Russian – Joseph Barnes’ Translation The Story of a Life of Konstantin Paustovsky’s Povest’ o zhizni’, Russian Language Journal/Russkii iazyk, 25:91 (1971), 21–40. Similar complaints were made by Helen Muchnic in her review for the New York Review of Books, ‘A Russian Soul’, 20 Aug. 1968. Nevertheless, Barnes was awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize in 1965.
fn3 Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, translated by Constance Garnett, revised by Humphrey Higgins, abridged by Dwight Macdonald, introduction by Isaiah Berlin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973); Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, translated by Thomas P. Whitney and Harry Willetts, abridged by Edward E. Ericson Jr (New York: Harper & Row, 1985).
fn4 Author’s note, Novyi mir, 3 (1955), 3; Konstantin Paustovskii, Povest’ o zhizni (Moscow: TERRA, 2017), 1:551–2.
fn5 Paustovskii, Povest’ o zhizni, 1:554.