12 The old Russian greeting was an embrace and an exchange of three kisses on the cheeks.
13 By Thomas Mayne Reid, English novelist (1818–1883), who wrote adventure stories for boys, set in the most exotic places on the globe.
14 Latin: Speak well of the dead, or say nothing. This is garbled by Shamraev in The Seagull.
15 Latin: Speak the truth of everything, or say nothing.
16 Innovative ordnance with a sliding breech mechanism, developed in the German factories of Alfred Krupp.
17 On the Orthodox calendar, June 29.
18 Diana, the Roman goddess of hunting, equivalent of the Greek Artemis.
19 Hannibal (247–182 B.C.), Carthaginian general, who led the forces against Rome in the Second Punic War. His father, Hamilcar Barcas (d. 228 B.C.), was a commander-in-chief of the Carthaginians in the First Punic War.
20 French: probably, no doubt.
21 Latin: silver nitrate; distilled water.
22 Latin: a simple product.
23 Russky kuryor, a Moscow daily newspaper in circulation from 1879 to 1891.
24 A reference to Hamlet’s “O frailty, thy name is woman!”
25 George Gordon, Lord Byron, English poet and lover (1788–1824), the paragon of the Romantic rebel, an influence on Pushkin and Lermontov.
26 Sofya Yegorovna’s ideals are those of the Russian university student of the period, devoted to the cause of freedom and progress, which she wishes to see propagated in elementary schools.
27 Shcherbuk means that the General taught him to lead the quadrille figure known as the ladies’ polonaise.
28 He spits to avert the evil eye attracted by his praise.
29 Roman god of love, son of Venus, equivalent to the Greek Eros.
30 Beelzebub is a demon. Bucephalos was the charger of Alexander the Great. The joking name is a roundabout way of saying that Shcherbuk is a malicious horse’s ass.
31 Bad French: quelque chose, in this context, quite an eyeful.
32 Literally, “the stolid Starodums and saccharine Milonovs, who ate cabbage soup all their lives from the same bowl as the Skotinins and the Prostakovs.” Characters in the comedy The Minor (1782), by Denis Fonvizin (1745–1792): Starodum (Oldsense), the prosy raisonneur; Milonov (Charmer), the sentimental love interest; the Skotinins (Beastlys) and Prostakovs (Simpletons), the crude and rapacious serf owners.
33 A line from Pushkin’s poem “The Winter Road” (1826).
34 “The number of the beast; for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.” The Revelation of John the Divine, 13:18.
35 One of the paladins or bogatyrs of Russian epic, the son of a peasant who roamed through Kievan Rus in the reign of Vladimir (980–1015), protecting it from giants and enemies. Heroes of these legendary times were supposed to be of enormous size and matchless strength.
36 Nightingale (Solovey) the Bandit, hero of Russian folk poetry, a sort of Robin Hood.
37 For the most serious crimes, criminals in tsarist Russia were exiled to prison colonies in Siberia; they were made to walk there, chained together.
38 The great seducer was familiar to Russians from both Mozart’s Don Giovanni, frequently produced on the operatic stage, and Pushkin’s rarely staged but much read verse tragedy The Stone Guest (1830).
39 Reference to a fable by Ivan Krylov (1768–1844), the La Fontaine of Russia. A flock of geese, devoid of any personal worth, boasts of its ancestors who saved Rome. The moral goes, “ ’Twould not be hard to make my moral yet more clear, / But that means vexing geese, I fear!”
40 Protagonist of Aleksandr Griboedov’s classic comedy Woe from Wit, an “angry young man” and critic of Russian high society, the odd man out who both rejects and is rejected by his peers.
41 The names of peasant girls. Platonov is emphasizing Sasha’s earthbound lack of sophistication.
42 An attempted invasion of Turkey in 1853 failed and led to the Crimean War (1853–1855), which, despite the bravery of its soldiers, Russia lost through the incompetence of its bureaucracy and serious fraud by contractors.
43 Vladimir third class, one of the medals bestowed on military and civilians for service to the state.
44 Nikolay Ivanovich Pirogov (1810–1881), a Russian surgeon and anatomist, famous for a style of amputation carried out on the battlefield.
45 Capital of the Ukraine.
46 Mispronunciation of the German Stoff und Kraft, Matter and Strength, the title of a book of popular science (1855) by Ludwig Büchner, so successful it remained in print until 1902. Karl Marx condemned it as materialist philistinism.
47 Latin: nothing.
48 In nineteenth-century Europe, baron was the lowest order of nobility, often conferred on successful financiers from obscure backgrounds who had done service to the state. The Jewish Baron Rothschild was the paradigm.
49 Triletsky misquotes Psalm 137:6.
50 Italian: Abandon all hope—the motto over the portal to Hell, according to Dante (Divine Comedy, Canto 3).
51 Latin: Hail Vengerovich.
52 French: my father.
53 French: a thousand pardons, madam.
54 Latin: a brain wave.
55 Mispronunciation of French mon cher, my dear.
56 The week between Palm Sunday and Easter.
57 Trinity Monastery was located in Zagorsk, north of Moscow. New Jerusalem was a monastery in the Zvenigorod district of Moscow guberniya, founded in 1636. Kharkov is the university town in Ukraine which, in Chekhov, usually stands for provincial boredom.
58 Russians required identity papers when traveling internally. The mispronunciation “patchport” comes from Gogol’s Dead Souls.
59 The fourteenth and lowest rank in the bureaucratic hierarchy. As a public-school teacher, Platonov has to belong to the civil service.
60 Although Leopold Ritter von Sacher-Masoch (1835–1895) is best known for lending his name to the concept of “masochism,” he also wrote works of social criticism, including the one Sasha is reading: Ideals of Our Time, translated into Russian in 1877. Chekhov knew his play These Slavs of Ours (Unsere Sclaven). Sacher-Masoch’s attempt to describe the sexual instinct without moralizing may be what leads Platonov to recommend him to his wife.
61 A protozoa found in decaying animal or vegetable matter. Platonov is calling Sasha a tiny creature that battens on his rotting flesh. “Maggot” might serve as a substitute.
62 Literally, “let the world stand on whales and the whales on pitchforks,” a medieval Russian belief.
63 A reference to the plays of Aleksandr Ostrovsky, which depicted the typical Russian merchant as a samodur, a term that conflates “homegrown tyrant” with “complacent fool.”
64 Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin (1799–1837) and Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov (1814–1841) are considered Russia’s greatest lyric poets.
65 Berthold Auerbach (1812–1882), prolific German writer on Judaism and freedom of religion; Heinrich Heine (1797–1856), Germany’s greatest lyric poet; and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), the towering figure of German literature and culture.
66 From the chorus of the “gypsy” ballad “In a fatal hour.”
67 On his travels home to Ithaca from the Trojan War, Odysseus was menaced by the sirens, sea creatures who sang men to their doom. Odyssey, Book XII.
68 A misquoted line from G. R. Derzhavin’s poem “Chorus for a quadrille,” written in 1791 to celebrate the taking of Izmail and set to music by O. A. Kozlovsky.
69 French: let’s go!
70 Nikolay Alekseevich Nekrasov (1821–1878), Russian lyric poet, devoted to radical reform of the social structure; Petrin is paraphrasing a line from the poem “The Beggar Girl and the Fashion Plate.” Nekrasov also makes an appearance in The Wood Goblin, Act Four, The Seagull, Act One, and The Cherry Orchard, Act Two.