6. Father Afanasy represents an exaggeration of the view of Roman Catholics (such as Poles and Lithuanians) taken by the Ukrainians, who belong to the Eastern Orthodox Church.
7. The Zaporozhye (meaning "beyond the rapids" on the Dnieper River) was a territory in the southeastern Ukraine where the Cossacks lived and pre- served some measure of independence from the Russian state during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.
8. The Cossacks customarily shaved their heads but grew a topknot on the top of the head, priding themselves on its length.
9. That is, the feast in honor of the nativity of Saint John the Baptist, celebrated on June 24; in folklore the night before the feast is a time of magic and mystification.
10. "Yaga" is the second half of the name Baba-yaga, the wicked witch of Russian folktales, here used generically.
11. A Ukrainian folk dance and the music for it.
12. Probably a slighting reference to the Jews, who often kept taverns in the Ukraine.
The Night Before Christmas
1. See note 5 to "St. John's Eve."
2. See note 1 to "St. John's Eve."
3. The period of fast preceding the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul on June 29.
4. A panikhida is an Orthodox prayer service in memory of the dead.
5. A Zaporozhets was a Cossack from the Zaporozhye (see note 7 to "St. John's Eve").
6. The only food permitted on the last day of the Advent fast (i.e., Christmas Eve).
7. The Setch was the sociopolitical and military organization of the Ukrainian Cossacks in the Zaporozhye-a form of republic headed by a chief. The freedoms of the Setch were gradually curtailed in the eighteenth century, and in 1775 it was finally abolished.
8. The term hetman (from the German Hauptmann) originally referred to the commander in chief of the Polish army. The Cossacks used it as the title of their own elected chief. It is comically misapplied here.
9. Grigory Alexandrovich, Prince Potemkin (1739-91), field marshal and statesman, in 1774 became the favorite of the empress Catherine II (1729-96) and thereafter guided Russian state policy.
10. The Italian carabinieri were members of an army corps also used as a police force-a degrading function in the opinion of the Cossacks.
11. On "Crimeans" see note 4 to "St. John's Eve." The allusion is to the Russian conquest of the Crimea from the Turks in 1771.
12. The empress is addressing the dramatist Denis Fonvizin (1745-92), whose plays The Brigadier and The Minor are classics of the Russian theater and the best Russian prose comedies before Gogol's own Inspector General.
13. Jean de La Fontaine (1621-95), the great French poet and fabulist.
14. The iconostasis is an icon-bearing partition with three doors that spans the width of an Orthodox church, separating the sanctuary from the body of the church.
The Terrible Vengeance 1. See note 5 to "The Night Before Christmas."
2. Ksiedzy is the plural of ksiadz, Polish for priest; adopted by Russian, the word acquired pejorative connotations as referring to Roman Catholic priests (see note 6 to "St. John s Eve"). Rebaptizing implied that the priests did not consider the Orthodox Ukrainians to be Christians.
3. The Zaporozhtsy under the leadership of Sagaidachny (see note 2 to "St. John's Eve") campaigned against the Crimean Tartar khanate, remnant of the Golden Horde of the Mongols, and fought them on the shore of the Sivash (the "Salt Lake") in 1620.
4. See note 1 to "St. John's Eve."
5. The Uniates are adherents of the so-called Union of Brest (Unia in Latin), declared at the church council at Brest in 1595, by which western Russian churches were placed under the jurisdiction of the pope of Rome, with the understanding that, while accepting the dogmas of Roman Catholicism, they would retain the rites of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Unia aroused great dissension at the time, and has been a cause of struggle in the Ukraine and elsewhere to this day.
6. The Pospolitstvo was the combined nobility of Poland and Lithuania, united under one scepter in 1569.
7. See note 8 to "The Night Before Christmas."
8. The enemy of Christ whose appearance in the "last days" is prophesied in Revelation (11:7), and of whom Saint John writes in his first epistle: "… and as you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come…" (1 John 2:18).
9. See note 4 to "The Night Before Christmas." It is a popular belief that the soul does not leave this world until forty days after death.
10. See note 2 to "St. John's Eve" and note 3 above.
11. See footnote (author's note) on p. 15.
12. The Liman (an inlet of the Black Sea near Odessa) and the Crimea are in the very south of the Ukraine, as far as possible from Kiev; Galicia, extending to the northern slopes of the Carpathians, is now divided between the western Ukraine and eastern Poland; geographically, it is to the right, not the left, looking south from Kiev.
13. See note 10 above. Bogdan Khmelnitsky (1593-1657), hetman of the Ukrainian Cossacks, rose up against the Poles in 1648.
14. That is, Stefan Batory, a Hungarian prince who was king of Poland from 1575 to 1586.
Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt
1. Pirozhki (plural of pirozhok) are small pastries with sweet or savory fillings.
2. A tax farmer was a private person authorized by the government to collect various taxes in exchange for a fixed fee.
3. Latin for "knows," meaning that the student has learned the lesson.
4. A concentrate produced by allowing wine to freeze and then removing the frozen portion.
5. See note 1 to "St. John's Eve."
6. Adult male serfs were known in Russia as "souls." Censuses for tax purposes were taken at intervals of as much as fifteen years, between which the number of souls on an estate might of course increase (or decrease).
7. The feast of Saint Philip falls on November 14 and marks the beginning of the Advent fast.
8. A book entitled The Journey of Trifon Korobeinikov, an account written by the Moscow clerk Trifon Korobeinikov of his journey to Mount Athos with a mission sent by the tsar Ivan IV ("the Terrible"). First published in the eighteenth century, it went through forty editions, testifying to its immense popularity. Korobeinikov also wrote Description of the Route from Moscow to Constantinople after a second journey in 1594.
Old World Landowners
1. Mythological symbol of conjugal love, Philemon and Baucis were a Phrygian couple who welcomed Zeus and Hermes, traveling in disguise, when their compatriots refused them hospitality. In return, they were spared the flood that the divinities sent the Phrygians as a punishment. Their thatched cottage became a temple in which they ministered, and they asked that one of them not die without the other. In old age they were changed into trees.
2. Ukrainian (Little Russian) names frequently end in 0, which would be Russified by the addition of a v.
3. Peter III (1728-62) became emperor of Russia in 1762 and was assassinated at the instigation of his wife, the empress Catherine II, who thereafter ruled alone.
4. Louise de La Baume Le Blanc, Duchess of La Valliere (1644-1710), was a favorite of Louis XIV. She ended her life as a Carmelite nun.
5. A volunteer defense force in the Ukraine during the war with Napoleon in 1812.
6. See note 1 to "Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt."
7. A dish made from grain (wheat, buckwheat, oats, rye, millet) boiled with water or milk.
8. See note 1 to "St. John's Eve."
9. The armies of Catherine II fought successfully against the Turks in the latter part of the eighteenth century.
10. It was customary in Russia to lay a dead person out on a table until the coffin was prepared.
11. See note 5 to "St. John's Eve."
12. The final hymn of the Orthodox funeral service.
13- "Small open," a French card-playing term.
14. Patties of cottage cheese mixed with flour and eggs and fried.
Viy
1. Russian seminary education was open to the lower classes and was often subsidized by state scholarships; seminarians were thus not necessarily preparing for the priesthood.