2. Herodias, wife of Herod the tetrarch and mother of Salome, ordered the beheading of John the Baptist (Matthew 14:1-11); Potiphar, an officer of the Egyptian pharaoh, bought Joseph as a slave and made him overseer of his house; his wife falsely accused Joseph of trying to lie with her (Genesis 39).
3. See note 7 to "Old World Landowners."
4. See note 8 to "St. John's Eve."
5. Earlier of the two summer fasts (see note 3 to "The Night Before Christmas").
6. "Master" in Latin.
7. Thus in the original. The French bon mot means a clever or witty saying.
8. See note 14 to "The Night Before Christmas."
9. See note 4 to "The Night Before Christmas."
The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich
1. A word of Hungarian origin meaning a frock coat, caftan, or jacket lined with fur.
2. A Tartar word referring, in different regions, to different sorts of jackets- here, probably a simple caftan trimmed with leather on the hem, cuffs, and front.
3. Moscow printers and publishers of the early nineteenth century.
4. In Russian, the godfather and godmother of the same person call each other kum and kuma, as do all others thus related through the same baptism.
5. A zertsalo was a small three-faced glass pyramid bearing an eagle and certain edicts of the emperor Peter the Great (1682-1725) that stood on the desk in every government office.
6. A special dorsal section of flesh running the entire length of a salmon or sturgeon, removed in one piece and either salted or smoked; considered a great delicacy in Russia.
7. The fourth-century saints Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and John Chrysostom, sometimes venerated together by the Orthodox Church.
8. St. Philips Day marks the beginning of the six-week Advent fast (see note 7 to "Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt").
9. In chapter I his last name is Pupopuz, meaning something like "bellybut-ton." Golopuz means "bare belly."
10. See note 14 to "Old World Landowners."
PETERSBURG TALES
Nevsky Prospect 1. The Neva River divides into three main branches as it flows into the Gulf of Finland, marking out the three main areas of the city of St. Petersburg: on the left bank of the Neva is the city center; between the Neva and the Little Neva is Vasilievsky Island; and between the Little Neva and the Nevka is the Petersburg side. The Vyborg side, Peski ("the Sands") and the Moscow gate, neighborhoods well within the limits of present-day Petersburg, were once quite remote from each other.
2. Ganymede, the son of King Tros, after whom the city of Troy was named, was the most beautiful of young men and was therefore chosen by the gods to be Zeus's cupbearer.
3. An extremely tall, needle-shaped spire topped by a figure of a ship on the Admiralty building, one of the landmarks of Petersburg.
4. The reference is to the image of the Madonna in the fresco The Adoration of the Magi, in the chapel of Santa Maria dei Bianchi in Citta della Pieve, painted by the Italian master Pietro Vannucci, called II Perugino (1446-1523).
5. The star figured on the decoration of a number of Russian military and civil orders.
6. The cemetery in Okhta, a suburb of Petersburg on a small tributary of the Neva.
7. An amusingly ironic assortment of names: F. V. Bulgarin (1789-1859) and N. I. Grech (1787-1867), journalists and minor writers of much influence in their time, were editors of the reactionary and semiofficial magazine The Northern Bee, and at least one of them (Bulgarin) was also a police informer. They were archenemies of Russia's greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), who enjoyed mocking them in epigrams. A. A. Orlov (1791-1840) was the author of primitive, moralistic novels for 'a popular audience, derided by Bulgarin and Grech, though, as Pushkin pointed out in an article, Bulgarin's novels differed little from Orlov's.
8. The reference is to vaudevilles about simple folk popular in the 1830s, featuring a character named Filatka.
9. Dmitri Donskoy is a historical tragedy by the mediocre poet Nestor Kukol-nik (1809-68), a great success in its day. Woe from Wit, a comedy in verse by Alexander Griboedov (1795-1829), stands as the first real masterpiece of the Russian theater.
10. Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805), poet, playwright, historian, and literary theorist, is one of the greatest figures of German literature. The fantastic tales of E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) are known the world over.
11. In Russian, the German word Junker, meaning "young lord," refers to a lower officer's rank open only to the nobility (and thus, of course, not to the tinsmith Schiller).
12. A junior clerk was expected to call at his superior's home to wish him good health on his name day and feast days, and to leave his card as evidence of having done so.
13. Marie-Joseph, Marquis de Lafayette (1757-1834), French general and statesman, took the side of the Colonies in the American war of independence, and was active as a liberal royalist in the French revolutions of 1789 and 1830.
The Diary of a Madman
1. See note 7 to "Nevsky Prospect."
2. The lines are in fact by the minor poet and playwright N. P. Nikolev (1758-1815).
3. Ruch was a prominent Moscow tailor of the time.
4. See note 8 to "Nevsky Prospect."
5. The German title Kammerjunker ("gentleman of the bedchamber") was adopted by the Russian imperial court.
6. The reference is to the problem of royal succession in Spain following the death of Ferdinand VII in 1833. His three-year-old daughter, Isabella II, was put on the throne and ruled for thirty-five years, despite the efforts of the king's brother, Don Carlos, to depose her.
7. Under the stern and very Catholic Philip II (1527-98), the Inquisition reached its height in Spain. The Capuchins were Franciscan friars of the new rule established in 1528.
8. Jules-Armand, Prince de Polignac (1780-1847), French politican, was minister of foreign affairs under Charles X (1757-1836).
The Nose
1. In the first version of the story, the date was April 25th. The date Gogol finally chose, March 25th, is that of the feast of the Annunciation, one of the major feasts in the Christian calendar. This fact has seemed to support commentators seeking a specifically religious and even apocalyptical significance in "The Nose."
2. Bribery and other administrative abuses evidently worked more quickly in the Caucasus than in the capital or the Russian provinces.
3. See note 7 to "Nevsky Prospect."
4. The denominations of Russian paper currency were distinguished by color: a blue banknote had a value of five roubles, a red of ten roubles.
5. Gogol's slip, perpetuated in all Russian editions; her name is, of course, Palageya.
6. A fashionable shop in Petersburg, located on the corner of Nevsky Prospect and Bolshaya Morskaya Street.
7. Grand admiral and later grand vizier of the Ottoman empire under the sultan Mahmud II (1785-1839), Khozrev-Mirza came to Petersburg in August 1829 at the head of a special embassy, following the murder in Teheran of the Russian ambassador, the poet Alexander Griboedov (see note 9 to "Nevsky Prospect"). During his stay, he lived in the Tavrichesky Palace.
The Carriage
1. Marshal of the nobility was the highest elective office in a province before the reforms of the 1860s. Governors and administrators were appointed by the tsar.
2. That is, in the war against Napoleon.
The Portrait
1. See note 7 to "The Nose."