War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [812]
19. Rastopchin’s little posters: The aim of the posters devised by the military governor of Moscow was both to inform people of the state of affairs and to stir up patriotic feelings. They did neither: the information they contained was false, and their style was artificially jovial and folksy.
20. Vassily Lvovich Pushkin: Vassily Lvovich Pushkin (1767–1830), uncle of Russia’s greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin (1799–1835), was a poet of light verse, famous for his epigrams, madrigals, and doggerel to set rhymes (bouts-rimés).
21. une barque de Charon: In Greek mythology, Charon is the ferryman who carries the shades of the dead across the river Styx to the house of Hades.
22. Count Wittgenstein had beaten the French: Count Wittgenstein with a corps of 25,000 men was protecting the road to Petersburg. On 30 July 1812 he repelled an attack of the French under Marshal Oudinot.
23. hot-air balloon…Leppich: Franz Leppich, a Dutch peasant, went to Moscow in 1812 to convince Rastopchin that he could build a hot-air balloon that would enable the Russians to attack the French from the air. (Leppich had made the same proposal a year earlier to Napoleon, who had ordered him removed from French territory.) When the balloon was finally tried out, it failed to rise, and nothing more was seen of its inventor.
24. the Shevardino barrow: The Kurgan or Barrow people (kurgan is Russian and Turkish for “barrow”) were a Bronze Age culture that is thought to have originated in Russia and spread across northern Europe in the fifth to third millennia b.c., characterized by their practice of burying their dead in mounds or barrows, which survive to this day. The word kurgan, like barrow, may also mean a hill or hillock, and by extension a hill fort of the kind also built by the Kurgan people.
25. the plan…is as in the map opposite: Tolstoy spent two days in September 1867 studying the battlefield of Borodino and comparing the terrain with historical accounts of the battle, after which he sketched a map correcting the descriptions of the historians, which is the basis of the map included here.
26. The Iverskaya…The Smolenskaya Mother of God: See note 1 to Volume II, Part Five and note 6 above. The icons in question would have been copies.
27. You’ll be a teacher in the corps…: S. N. Marin, imperial adjutant to Alexander I, was known for his parodies and comic verses. G. V. Gerakov was a teacher of history at the Petersburg Cadet Corps and a writer of ultrapatriotic works. Marin’s verses read: “You’ll be a writer, yes, you will, / And with words your readers drill, / You’ll be a teacher in the corps, / You’ll be a captain evermore.”
28. fought at Salamanca: See note 17 to Volume III, Part One.
29. Beausset…with a cloth: The following passage is generally borne out by the memoirs of Beausset himself, but, as he does with other sources, Tolstoy adds an irony not found in the original.
30. bilboquet: A child’s toy made up of a ball with a hole in it attached by a string to a stick with a peg at the tip. The point of the game is to catch the ball by landing the hole on the peg.
31. This disposition…was the following: The text of Napoleon’s disposition is taken word for word from Bogdanovich’s History of the Fatherland War of 1812 (see note 5 above).
32. the viceroy’s: The reference is to Napoleon’s stepson, Eugène de Beauharnais, whom Napoleon made viceroy of Italy in 1805, when he created the “kingdom of Italy” with himself as king (see note 14 to Volume I, Part One). The viceroy took part in the battles of Borodino and Maloyaroslavets at the head of the army of Italy.
33. 6th September 1812: French documents and reports cited by Tolstoy give dates according to the Gregorian calendar (the “New Style”), which in the nineteenth century was twelve days ahead of the Julian calendar (the “Old Style”) still used in Russia. Elsewhere he gives the dates by the Julian calendar, according to which the