War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [799]
24. the name day of the Natalyas: On the day commemorating a certain saint, everyone bearing the name of that saint would celebrate.
25. Forty thousand souls: Before the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, Russian estates were evaluated in terms of the number of adult male serfs, or “souls,” living on them. Forty thousand souls was a very large number; they would have been divided among a number of estates.
26. a raspberry-colored collar: Russian university students wore uniforms with stiff round collars, the color of which denoted their subject or school of study.
27. in the archives and all: Comfortable posts in the state archives were given to young noblemen at the end of their studies, while they waited to make a career.
28. as a junker: In the Russian army, the German term Junker, the equivalent of the English cadet, was used for young gentlemen who entered the service without a commission.
29. the straw-laid street: It was an old custom in Russia and Europe to lay straw over the cobblestones of a street where a person lay gravely ill in order to deaden the noise of carriage wheels.
30. his last duty: A dying man’s “last duty” was to confess to a priest and receive holy communion and extreme unction.
31. Boulogne expedition…Villeneuve: In 1805–1806 Napoleon set up a large military camp in Boulogne, on the English Channel, and prepared for a landing of troops in England. In the fall of 1805 he ordered Admiral Villeneuve to move his ships from the Mediterranean to the Channel and join the squadron already there, but Villeneuve, blockaded in the Mediterranean by the English, was unable to carry out the order. On 21 October 1805, at the battle of Trafalgar, Admiral Nelson destroyed the allied French-Spanish fleet, and at the same time news came that Russia was sending troops to aid the Austrians, at which point Napoleon abandoned the Boulogne expedition and moved his army to Austria.
32. manifesto…recruitment: The manifesto of Alexander I about the war and recruitment was announced in Moscow on 1 September 1805, but on 10 August the Russian army, under Kutuzov’s command, had already left Petersburg and gone to join the Austrians. Thus the manifesto could be talked about at the Rostovs’ party on 26 August before its official announcement.
33. when chance smiled on him: Tolstoy uses a special eighteenth-century expression for men who made quick careers at court. During the reign of Catherine the Great, such men were usually her lovers.
34. the achievement of that intention: An actual quotation from the September 1 manifesto, taken from the entry for 7 September 1805 in Diary of a Student, by S. P. Zhikharev, which Tolstoy had in the library of his estate at Yasnaya Polyana.
35. Take Suvorov: Shinshin has in mind the Swiss campaign of 1799, in which the allied forces of Russia and Austria were defeated. In fact, however, though Suvorov and his 20,000 men were surrounded in the Alps by 80,000 French, they managed to break through and avoid capture.
36. “The Spring”: A vocal quartet in the Italian style sometimes attributed to Mozart. Tolstoy himself used to sing it with the pupils of the school at Yasnaya Polyana.
37. the metropolitan himself: Marriage between cousins was permitted by the Russian Orthodox Church only with special permission. A metropolitan is a bishop having jurisdiction over all the bishops of a given area.
38. a song he had just learned: The words of the song are by Dmitri Alexandrovich Kavelin (1778–1851), director of the Chief Pedagogical Institute and its Pension for Nobility, and of St. Petersburg University. Pushkin refers to him in a letter as “doctor of theology Kavelin” (July 9, 1819, to A. I. Turgenev). He was an amateur versifier and member of the literary group Arzamas, as was Pushkin himself. Tolstoy found the words in Zhikharev’s Diary of a Student.
39. trepak: One of the fastest of Russian folk dances, with stamping of the heels and sudden bends.
40. a blank confession: