War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [818]
3. the Confederation of the Rhine: See note 6 to Volume III, Part One.
4. Ioann IV…Kurbsky: Tolstoy uses the Church Slavonic form of the name of the tsar Ivan IV, the Terrible (1530–84). Prince Andrei Mikhailovich Kurbsky (1528–83) was at first the tsar’s close friend and adviser, then his bitter opponent. After Kurbsky fled to Lithuania, he and the tsar engaged in a remarkable correspondence (1564–79), alternating between invectives and profound reflections on the nature of power and the relations between the autocratic tsar and his boyars. Kurbsky also wrote a history of the reign of Ivan IV.
5. Godefroys and Louis…Peter the Hermit: Godefroy IV de Boulogne (1061–1100), known as Godefroy de Bouillon, one of the leaders of the second expedition of the First Crusade (1096–99), was proclaimed king of Jerusalem in 1099. Louis VII led the Second Crusade (1147–49), together with the Holy Roman Emperor Conrad III, and Louis IX led the Seventh Crusade (1248–54). Peter the Hermit (ca. 1050–1115) was a monk who led the first expedition of the First Crusade, which was decimated by the time it reached Asia Minor and was destroyed there by the Turks, though Peter himself survived. The minnesingers mentioned further on were medieval German courtly poets, who sang epic songs about Godefroy de Bouillon among others.
6. Napoleon III gives the command…submit to the Bourbons: In 1862 Napoleon III sent French troops to Mexico to intervene in the civil wars there. After some initial successes, he installed the archduke of Austria, Maximilian, as emperor of Mexico, but then abandoned him in 1867. Maximilian was overthrown and executed that same year. In the Austro-Prussian war of 1866, Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), chancellor of Wilhelm I of Prussia, seized lands in Bohemia that had formerly been part of the Austrian empire. The Bourbons were restored to the French throne in the person of Louis XVIII, younger brother of the executed Louis XVI, by the first treaty of Paris (1814), negotiated on strict terms by the allies under Alexander I.
7. Joshua, son of Nun: In the Old Testament book of Joshua, 10:12–13, Joshua, who succeeded Moses in leading the Israelites to the Promised land, commands the sun and moon to stand still and they obey him.
Appendix
1. the author’s view of his work: This article appeared in the journal Russian Archive, March 1868, when the first four of the then-projected six volumes of the novel had been published and Tolstoy was working on the fifth.
2. Dead Souls…Dead House: Tolstoy makes a parallel between the titles of works by Nikolai Gogol and Fyodor Dostoevsky: the title of Dostoevsky’s semifictional account of his term at hard labor in Omsk is generally mistranslated into English as Notes from the House of the Dead. Notes from a Dead House (1860) was one of the very few works that Tolstoy later admitted to the category of “good art.”
3. Saltychikha: A scornful variant of the last name of Darya Nikolaevna Saltykova (1730–1801), a notorious landowner who, widowed in 1756, abused her power by torturing to death a large number of serfs (the figures vary from 60 to 160), mainly women and young girls. She was denounced to the empress Elizaveta I in 1762, tried and condemned in 1768, pilloried for a day on Red Square, and imprisoned for life in a convent.
4. Voronovo house: Rastopchin’s suburban estate near Moscow.
HISTORICAL INDEX
Alexander I (1777–1825): The emperor Alexander Pavlovich Romanov came to the Russian throne in 1801, following the assassination of his father, Paul I. He began his reign in a spirit of liberal reform, but later allowed conservative advisers to dictate policy, and in 1815 formed the Holy Alliance of Russia, Prussia, and Austria to oppose the revolutionary and