War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [811]
35. the Slobodsky palace: The seat of the Assembly of the Nobility in Moscow. The details come from Notes of the Year Twelve, by Sergei Glinka, who was present (see note 31 above).
36. contrat social: See note 17 to Volume I, Part One.
Part Two
1. an unpopular German: See note 21 to Volume III, Part One.
2. minister: Barclay de Tolly was the Russian minister of war from 1810 to 1812.
3. patriotic letters from Moscow: Like all upper-class young women of her time, Julie has difficulty writing in Russian and constantly lapses into French words and syntax.
4. lint: See note 24 to Volume II, Part Two.
5. Directive…to…Baron Asch: Tolstoy quotes from Barclay’s actual directive of 20 August 1812, which is cited in A History of the Fatherland War of 1812, by M. I. Bogdanovich, published in Petersburg in 1859.
6. the miracle-working icon of Smolensk: It was customary in times of war, epidemic, or natural disaster to “take up” an icon of the Mother of God and carry it in procession, stopping on the way to serve offices of prayer for deliverance. The icon of the Smolensk Mother of God, the prototype of which was sent to Russia by the Byzantine emperor Constantine Monomakh in the eleventh century, has long been considered miracle-working.
7. Bagration…wrote…to Arakcheev: Bagration’s letter was published in the appendix to Volume 2 of A History of the Fatherland War of 1812 (see note 5 above).
8. gunpowder…those who invented it: See note 10 to Volume I, Part Two.
9. un homme de beaucoup de mérite: The “man of great merit” is generally thought to be the philosopher Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), author of Soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg (1821), who served in Russia as ambassador of the king of Sardinia from 1803 to 1817. Tolstoy drew on his correspondence for details of this particular soirée.
10. mania for ‘fronding’: Prince Vassily makes a Russian verb out of the French verb fronder (“to criticize by mockery, to defy”). A fronde is a sling. Historically, the Fronde was a power struggle that took place in France during the minority of Louis XIV (1648–53).
11. Joconde: One of the early, licentious Contes (“Tales”) by the French poet and fabulist Jean de La Fontaine (1621–95).
12. Thiers, recounting this episode: See note 17 to Volume I, Part Two. The details of the impression Napoleon makes on the Cossack were most probably invented by Thiers himself.
13. kissed…the hand of the old prince: It was customary in Russia to lay a body out on a table before the coffin arrived. The floor was strewn with juniper boughs for the sake of their strong fragrance. It is also customary to kiss the hand of the deceased in leavetaking before the burial.
14. Pyotr Feodorovich…seven years: Tolstoy uses the archaic spelling “Feodorovich” here, as with the dowager empress Maria Feodorovna. Peter III reigned for only six months before his assassination. The mysterious circumstances of his death gave rise to rumors among the people that he had escaped and would one day return to the throne, and Russian history knew a number of false Peters, the most famous being the Cossack rebel Emelyan Pugachev.
15. the partisan one: Denisov is modeled—a little too closely, as Tolstoy himself admits (see Appendix)—on the famous Russian soldier-poet Denis Davydov, an older friend of Pushkin’s, who initiated the partisan war against the retreating French army and afterwards published an Essay Towards a Theory of Partisan Warfare (1821).
16. bread and salt: See note 14 to Volume II, Part Two.
17. Les chevaliers du Cygne: The full title is Les chevaliers du Cygne, ou la cour de Charlemagne (“The Knights of the Swan, or the Court of Charlemagne”), a three-volume Gothic novel by Mme de Genlis, published in 1797 in Hamburg, while the author was living in exile in Berlin.
18. Kamensky…thirty thousand men: The gifted young general N. M. Kamensky (1778–1811) took part in several stormings of fortresses