No. 36 Zoological Garden
Tolstoy has in view a skating rink on the Presnenski Pond or some part of it, just south of the Zoo, in the north-west corner of Moscow (p.26).
No. 37 Red stockings
According to my source (Mode in Costume, by R. Turner Wilcox, New York, 1948, p. 308) purple and red in petticoats and stockings were great favorites with Parisian young ladies around 1870—and fashionable Moscow, of course, followed Paris. The shoe in Kitty's case would probably be a buttoned bottine of fabric or leather (p.28).
No. 38 A very important philosophical question
Tolstoy did not bother to go very far for a suitable subject. Problems of mind versus matter are still discussed all over the world; but the actual question as defined by Tolstoy was by 1870 such an old and obvious one, and is stated here in such general terms, that it hardly seems likely a professor of philosophy would travel all the way (over 300 miles) from Kharkov to Moscow to thrash it out with another scholar (p.30).
No. 39 Keiss, Wurst, Knaust, Pripasov
Although according to the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (Leipzig, 1882), there was a German educator Raimond Jacob Wurst (1800-1845) and a sixteenth-century song-maker Heinrich Knaust (or Knaustinus), I can find no Keiss, let alone Pripasov, and prefer to think that Tolstoy wittily invented wholesale that string of materialistic philosophers with—in plausible percentage—one Russian name in the wake of three German ones (P-31).
No. 40 The skating ground
Ever since the beginning of history, when the first skates were fashioned from the cannon bone of a horse, boys and young men used to play on the ice of frozen rivers and fens. The sport was extremely popular in old Russia, and by 1870 had become fashionable for both sexes. Club-skates of steel, round-toed or pointed, were strapped to the shoe and kept firm by clamps, spikes, or screws that entered the sole. This was before the time that special skating-boots, with skates permanently fixed to them, were used by good skaters (p.34).
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No. 41 The old curly birches of the garden, with all their branches weighed down by snow, seemed decked in new festive vestments
As previously noted, Tolstoy's style, while freely allowing the utilitarian ("parabolic") comparison, is singularly devoid of poetical similes or metaphors intended to appeal primarily to the artistic sense of the reader. These birch-trees (with the
"sun" and "wild rose" comparisons further) are an exception. They will presently cast a few spicules of their festive frost onto the fur of Kitty's muff (p.35).
It is curious to compare Lyovin's awareness of these emblematic trees here, at the commencement of his courtship, with certain other old birches (to be first mentioned by his brother Nikolay), that are worried by a crucial summer storm in the last part of the book.
No. 42 Behind chairs
A beginner might toddle along in his awkward skates
clinging to the back of a chair painted green, on wooden
runners, and in these same chairs ladies might be driven
around by a friend or paid attendant (p.35).
No. 43 Russian garb
This lad, a gentleman's son, wears for skating the winter
attire of the lower classes, or a stylized version of it—high
boots, short belted coat, sheepskin cap (p.36).
No. 44 We are at home on Thursdays. . . . "Which means to-
day?" said Lyovin
This is a slip on Tolstoy's part; but then, as previously
mentioned, Lyovin's time throughout the book is prone to
lag behind the time of the other characters. The Oblonskis,
and we, know it is Friday (chapter 4), and later references
to Sunday confirm this (p.40).
No. 45 The Hotel d'Angleterre or the Ermitage
Nabokov's drawing of a costume such as Kitty wore when she
The Ermitage is mentioned but not chosen, since it would
skated with Lyovin.
have been hardly seemly for a novelist to advertise one of
the best Moscow restaurants (where, according to Karl Baedeker, writing in the nineties, i.e., twenty years later, a good dinner minus wine cost two rubles twenty-five, or a couple of old-time dollars). Tolstoy mentions it, along with his invented Angleterre, merely to point out the latter's gastronomic rank. It will be noted that dinner is at the old-fashioned time between five and six (p.40).
No. 46 Sleigh
Cabs for hire as well as private vehicles other than the kareta (a closed carriage on wheels, such as Oblonski used) were more or less snug sleighs for two people. Snow permitting the use of sleighs covered the streets of Moscow and Petersburg approximately from November to April (p.40).
No. 47 Tatars
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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature
Or, less, correctly, Tartars—a name given to nearly three million inhabitants of the former Russian Empire, chiefly Moslems and mostly of Turkic origin, remnants of the Mongol (Tatar) invasions of the thirteenth century. From the Province of Kazan, East Russia, a few thousand migrated in the nineteenth century to Petersburg and Moscow where some of them pursued the calling of waiters (p.41).
No. 48 The French girl at the buffet board
Her job would be to supervise the buffet, and sell flowers (p.41).
No. 49 Prince Golitsyn
A generalized gentleman here. The moralist in Tolstoy had such a distaste for "inventing" (although actually the artist in him invented a greater number of plausible people than any man before him except Shakespeare) that often in his drafts we find him using "real names" instead of the slightly camouflaged ones he superimposed later. Golitsyn is a well-known name, and in this case Tolstoy apparently did not bother to twist it into Goltsov or Litsyn in his final text (p.42).
No. 50 Oysters
Flensburg oysters: these came from German beds (on the North Sea coast of Schleswig Holstein, just south of Denmark), which from 1859 to 1879 were rented to a company in Flensburg on the Denmark border.
Ostend oysters: ever since 1765 seed oysters had been brought from England to Ostend in Belgium.
Both "Flensburg" and "Ostend" were small products in the seventies, and these imported oysters were highly esteemed by Russian epicures (p.42).
No. 51 Cabbage soup and groats
Shchi—z soup consisting mainly of boiled cabbage—and grechnevaya kasha— boiled buckwheat meal—were, and presumably still are, the staple food of Russian peasants, whose rustic fare Lyovin would partake of in his capacity of gentleman farmer, man of the soil, and advocate of his simple life. In my time, forty years later, to slurp shchi was as chic as to toy with any French fare (p.42).