Anna Karenina (Penguin) - Leo Tolstoy [478]
11 panikhida: A memorial service for the dead.
12 Lucca: Paulina Lucca (1841-1908), an Italian-born opera singer who made her career in Austria, visited Russia in the early 1870s. She had great successes as Zerlina in Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Carmen in Bizet’s Carmen.
13 folle journée: The French phrase, taken from the comedy La Folle journée, ou le Mariage de Figaro, by Beaumarchais (1732-99), came to be applied to all sorts of carnivals and festive evenings.
14 foreigner ... to exile abroad: In October 1875 a commercial credit bank in Moscow was suddenly closed, and its directors and board members were arrested. The chief cause of the scandal was a certain foreign negotiator whose fraudulent dealings led to the bank’s collapse. His trial lasted until November 1876, when he was found guilty and banished from Russia, a ‘punishment’ which aroused widespread indignation.
15 Krylov’s fables: The poet Ivan Krylov (1769-1843) was the father of the Russian fable. Levin’s phrase is modelled on the line, ‘And the pike was thrown into the river’, from the fable ‘The Pike’, in which a corrupt court punishes the guilty pike by throwing it into the river.
16 ‘Rejoice, O Isaiah’: See note 18, Part Five.
17 Bible illustrations . . . : The French graphic artist Gustave Doré (1832-93) is most famous as an illustrator of classics such as The Divine Comedy, Don Quixote, and Gargantua and Pantagruel. In 1875 a luxury edition of the Bible with Doré’s illustrations went on sale in Russia. Tolstoy disapproved of Doré’s illustrations for being ‘merely aesthetic’.
18 Zola, Daudet: Tolstoy is thinking of the naturalist movement in French literature in the latter half of the nineteenth century, headed by Émile Zola (1840-1902), based on the exact reproduction of life and the total absence of novelistic fiction. For a time Alphonse Daudet (1840-97) was also an adherent of naturalism. Tolstoy criticized the movement for its lack of ‘spiritualizing’ ideas.
19 United Agency ... Banking Institutions: The title of the post is a parody conflating the names of two actually existing institutions of the time: The Society of Mutual Land Credit and The Society of Southwestern Railways.
20 Rurik: See note 4, Part One.
21 ... face of fire: The simile is borrowed from Psalm 68:2: ‘as wax melteth before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the presence of God’ - which is sung in the Orthodox Easter service and has thus become proverbial.
22 Landau ... Bezzubov: Influential mediums were a feature of society life at that time. Landau resembles the medium Douglas Hume, who travelled and ‘prophesied’ in America and Europe, enjoyed the sympathy of Napoleon III and was received at the court of Alexander II. Hume had surprising success in Russia, married the daughter of Count Bezborodko (‘Beardless’) and thus became a count himself. Tolstoy parodies his success by having Landau adopted by Countess Bezzubov (‘Toothless’).
23 Saul: The reference is to the conversion of Saul (the apostle Paul) recounted in Acts 9:3-9.
24 Apostle James: Oblonsky quotes from James 2:26: ‘For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.’ This teaching seems to be a contradiction of St Paul’s notion of ‘justification by faith’ (see Romans 4, Galatians 3), so much so that Martin Luther, who (like Karenin and Countess Lydia Ivanovna) preached justification by faith, wanted to have the Epistle of James removed from the Bible. The two apparently contradictory assertions are in fact complementary.
25 ... Under the Wing: Titles, which Tolstoy gives in English, of pious tracts in the spirit of the ‘new mystical trend’ connected with the sermons of the Protestant missionary Lord Radstock (Granville Augustus William Waldgrave, Lord Radstock, 1831-1913), who visited Russia twice, in 1874 and 1878, and was a popular figure in the high-society salons of Moscow and Petersburg. Lord Radstock, a graduate of Eton and Oxford, was invited to Russia by Countess Chertkov, the mother of Vladimir Chertkov, who later became the