War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [807]
Part Four
1. in the sweat of our face: In cursing Adam, God says, “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground: for out of it wast thou taken” (Genesis 3:19).
2. get an Anna: The Order of St. Anna, named for the mother of the Virgin Mary, was founded in 1735 by Karl-Friedrich, duke of Schleswig-Holstein, in honor of his wife, Anna Petrovna, daughter of the Russian emperor Peter the Great. It had four degrees, two civil and two military.
3. Vain…Russians: The first line of P. I. Kutuzov’s “cantata” (see note 10 to Volume II, Part One).
4. raising his cap: A conventional sign among hunters indicating that the game has been sighted.
5. represented Diana: The Roman goddess Diana, daughter of Jupiter, was a huntress.
6. “Barinya”: The title of this popular song means “lady” or “mistress.”
7. the musician Dimmler: E. K. Dimmler is mentioned a number of times in Zhikharev’s Diary of a Student (see note 34 to Volume I, Part One). He gave piano lessons in Moscow in the early nineteenth century.
8. The Water-Carrier: The opera Les Deux journées (“The Two Days”), better known as The Water-Carrier, by Luigi Cherubini (1760–1842), who directed the Paris Conservatory for twenty years and was known for his religious works, operas, and quartets. It was first produced in Vienna in 1805 and was much admired by Beethoven.
9. Monsieur Field: John Field (1782–1837) was an Irish-born composer who made his career in Petersburg, where he lived from 1804 to 1831. He was the first composer of “nocturnes” for the piano, which had a great influence on Chopin.
10. quietly pouring wax: A method of divination by pouring melted candle wax into water and interpreting the resulting shapes (which Tolstoy calls “shadows”).
Part Five
1. Iverskaya Chapel: The Iverskaya Chapel, built on to the Voskresensky Gate of Red Square in Moscow, houses a copy—made in 1648 at the request of the tsar Alexei Mikhailovich (1629–76)—of a miracle-working icon known as the Iverskaya Mother of God, thought to have been painted in Byzantium in the eighth century and kept in the Iveron (“Iberian”) Monastery on Mount Athos. One of the holiest sites in Moscow, the chapel was demolished in Soviet times and replaced by a statue of a worker, but it was rebuilt in 1999 and the icon has been put back.
2. an illegitimate wife: In 1809, Napoleon managed to annul his marriage to Josephine Beauharnais (1763–1814). After making unsuccessful overtures for the hand of the Russian grand duchess Ekaterina Pavlovna, in 1810 he married the archduchess Maria-Louisa of Austria (1791–1847), whose father, the emperor Franz I, had suffered a serious defeat in his last war with Napoleon and hoped that the marriage would improve the position of his empire.
3. The Spanish…the fourteenth of June: The reference is probably to the battle of Talavera de la Reina in July 1809, at which the French were defeated by a coalition of Spanish, Portuguese, and English troops under the command of Wellington.
4. Astrea…Manna Seekers…an authentic Scottish rug…charters: “Astrea” and “Manna Seekers” were the names of two Masonic lodges in Petersburg. One of the necessary accessories of a Masonic lodge was a rug with symbolic images, and each lodge sought to obtain such a rug from a venerable Masonic organization (the first lodges emerged in England and Scotland), along with “charters” listing the rites and regulations of the order.
5. the duke of Oldenburg: In 1810 Napoleon abolished the independence of the Hanseatic towns of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck, in the north of Germany, because they did not or could not observe the strictures of his continental blockade, and for the same reason he drove out the duke of Oldenburg and seized his lands. The duke had been hastily married to the sister of Alexander I to make it impossible for her to marry Napoleon (see note 2 above), and this conflict, which broke the Tilsit accord, greatly displeased the Russian court. The emperor sent a note of protest to all the courts of Europe.