The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

20. simple Old Believers … sent far away: A list of various sectarians. For Old Believers, see note 6 to “Lady Macbeth.” The Fedoseevans were a branch of the Old Believers who rejected marriage because they thought the end of the world was at hand; the “Pilipons” (Philippians) preached suicide as a way of preserving the true faith; the “rebaptized” were those who had originally been baptized in the Orthodox Church and accepted a second baptism from the Old Believers. The Flagellants (Khlysty) held ecstatic group rituals that included flagellation; “people of God” may refer to holy fools, pilgrims, or simple vagabonds.

21. the prophet Daniel: See Daniel 9:24 (“Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins …”), where the “weeks” stand for years.

22. the “eagle’s wings” … the Antichrist: See the prophetic visions in Daniel 7:4 (“The first was like a lion, and had eagle’s wings …”) and Revelation 12:14 (“And to the woman were given two wings of a great eagle …”). For the “seal of the Antichrist,” see Revelation 13:16–18 (“And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads … and his number is Six hundred threescore and six”).

23. K. D. Kraevich: Konstantin Dmitrievich Kraevich (1833–92) was a noted physicist and the author of widely used school textbooks.

24. “I believe … invisible”: An abbreviated but perfectly correct version of the first section of the Orthodox (Nicene) Creed.

25. the poet Pope: The English neoclassical poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744). His philosophical poem, An Essay on Man, was published between 1732 and 1734. The poem is dedicated to Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke. In the couplet that follows, the second line is line 123 of Epistle I.

26. rich kulaks: Kulak is the Russian word for “fist.” It was commonly used to refer to rich peasants.

27. the emancipation of the peasants: In 1861—the first and most important of the reforms carried out by the “tsar-liberator” Alexander II (1818–81).

28. first … troubling of the water: The narrator is mistaken: cures in the troubled water occurred at the pool of Bethesda (John 5:2–9); in the pool of Siloam the man born blind goes to wash and be healed (John 9:7).

29. kibitka: See note 21 to “The Enchanted Wanderer.”

30. “aphedronian sores”: Probably hemorrhoids, from the Greek aphedron (“toilet”).

31. the cross, the spear, and the reed …: That is, the instruments of Christ’s passion.

32. “Praise the name of the Lord …”: The opening words of Psalm 135, sung at the vigil in the first part of matins.

33. the paralytic was healed … “glorifying and giving thanks”: The reference is to Luke 5:18–25, where the healed man “departed to his own house, glorifying God.”

34. a justice of conscience: A local court function established by Catherine the Great in 1775 under the influence of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws (1748). The court was made up of a justice plus six representatives, two from the nobility, two from the townspeople, and two from the peasants.

The White Eagle

(1880)

  1. Theocritus (Idyll): The line comes from Idyll XXI, “The Fisherman,” by Theocritus, the father of Greek bucolic poetry, who lived in the third century BC.

  2. “There are more things in heaven and earth”: Hamlet, act 1, scene 5, lines 166–167 (“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”).

  3. to play at spiritualism: The vogue for spiritualistic mediums and séances came to Russia in the 1870s, where it spread among members of the aristocracy in Moscow and Petersburg. Tolstoy made fun of it in part 7 of Anna Karenina, which was published in those same years.

  4. the Nevsky Lavra: That is, in the graveyard of the Trinity–St. Alexander Nevsky Monastery in Petersburg, founded by Peter the Great in 1710.

  5. Viktor Nikitich Panin: Count Panin (1801–74) served as minister of justice from 1841 to 1862. He was exceptionally tall.

  6. marshal: See note 34 to “The Enchanted Wanderer.”