The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories

Notes

Biblical quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the King James Version.

The Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

(1865)

1. the lives of the Kievan saints: A collection of writings about monks from the Monastery of the Caves in Kiev (founded in 1015) and the history of the monastery, based on letters exchanged in the early thirteenth century by Simon, bishop of Suzdal, and the monk Polycarp.

2. include him in the communion: That is, write his name down on a list of those to be prayed for by the priest during the preparation of the bread and wine for communion.

3. the feast of the Entrance: The full title is “The Feast of the Entrance of the Mother of God into the Temple,” commemorating Mary’s first entrance as a child into the temple of Jerusalem, where she was met by the high priest Zacharias. It is celebrated on November 21.

4. St. Feodor Stratilatos: Theodore Stratilatos, or Stratelates (“the General”), military commander of the city of Heraclea Pontica, a fourth-century Greek martyr, executed by the Roman emperor Licinius for declaring himself a Christian and refusing to take part in a pagan celebration.

5. the social-democratic communes of Petersburg: The first experiments by Russian nihilists in alternative social organization. In the early 1860s, the nihilists took Leskov for their ideological opponent and vilified him in their writings—hence the sarcasm here.

6. an Old Believer: In 1656–58, Nikon, patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, introduced certain reforms to bring the Church into conformity with current Greek Orthodox practice, and also made corrections in the translation of liturgical texts. These changes were rejected by some, who held to the old ways and thus became known as Old Believers (also Raskolniki, “Schismatics”). In 1666, the Old Believers were anathematized by the Church and deprived of civil rights. Some renounced having priests and sacraments (apart from baptism), as a consequence of their break with the apostolic church; others ordained their own priests and maintained the sacraments; still others even practiced the “rebaptism” of those who joined them. Leskov was especially interested in the Old Believers, who figure prominently in a number of his stories.

7. Curse the day … die: Job’s wife actually says, “… curse God, and die” (Job 2:9). In Job 3:3, Job himself curses the day he was born.

8. A blond head … none can see: Lines from the poem “The Call” (1844), by the Russian poet and prose writer Yakov Polonsky (1819–98).

The Sealed Angel

(1873)

1. the eve of St. Basil’s: The feast day of St. Basil the Great of Caesarea in Cappadocia (ca. AD 330–379) falls on January 1.

2. on the stove: The Russian peasant stove was a large and elaborate structure that served not only for heating and cooking, but also for sleeping and even for bathing, as will be seen later.

3. the old Russian faith: See note 6 to “Lady Macbeth.” “The Sealed Angel” deals in particular with the maintaining of the tradition of icon painting among the Old Believers. Icon painting was beginning to be revived in Leskov’s time and interested him deeply. He claimed to have written “The Sealed Angel” while sitting in the studio of an icon painter in an Old Believers’ quarter in Petersburg.

4. granary: In the Old and New Testaments, granaries symbolize wealth in general (see, for instance, Luke 12:16–20, the parable of the rich man).

5. Novgorod or Stroganov icon painters: After the Mongol invasion of Russia in the thirteenth century and the fall of the capital Kiev, the center of Russian artistic culture shifted to the city of Novgorod, where the art of icon painting reached a high point in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Stroganovs were wealthy merchants from Novgorod who moved further north and brought Novgorod icon painters with them. The Stroganov school was known in particular for its use of bright colors and for its miniature icons, such as the one painted by Sevastian later in “The Sealed Angel.”

6. Deisises … wet hair: The Deisis, the central section in the iconostasis, is a triple icon representing Christ in majesty between the Virgin and St. John the Baptist. The Savior-not-made-by-hands is an icon depicting the face of Christ imprinted on a towel or cloth. According to legend, Abgar, king of Edessa, wishing to be healed of leprosy, sent his court painter to make an image of Christ, but the painter could not get close enough to do it. Christ then took a towel, wiped his face, imprinting his image on it, and had the towel sent to Abgar, who was healed by it. On some icons of this type, Christ is portrayed with wet-looking hair and beard.

7. the Indictus … Palekh: The Indictus is the icon of the first feast of the ecclesiastical year, which begins on September 1. The Council of Angels usually portrays the archangel Michael and/or Gabriel holding a round icon of the infant Emmanuel (Christ), surrounded by a host of angels. The Paternity portrays God the Father with the Christ Child on his lap holding a dove. The Six Days usually has six parts illustrating the six days of the creation; another type has six days of the week identified with certain feasts, and sometimes the two are combined. The Healers is a late type of icon (eighteenth or early nineteenth century) portraying various saints and indicating which one heals which disease. The Trinity illustrates the episode in Genesis 18:1–16 in which three angels visit Abraham, considered the first manifestation of God as the Trinity. The town of Palekh was an important center of icon painting from the sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.

8. Bezaleel: See Exodus 35:30–35. Bezaleel was one of two men called by God and Moses to build and decorate the sanctuary for the ark of the covenant.

9. famous stone bridge: Leskov has in mind the suspension bridge over the Dniepr River in Kiev, built in 1849–53, while he himself was living in Kiev.

10. Amalthea’s horn: That is, the horn of plenty. In Greek mythology, the goddess or goat-goddess Amalthea saved the infant Zeus from being devoured by his father Cronus by hiding him and nursing him on goat’s milk in a cave. Zeus accidentally broke off the goat’s (or goddess’s) horn, which then became a source of perpetual abundance.

11. an old antlion: A fantastic animal described in the medieval Russian Physiologist as having the front parts of a lion and the rear parts of an ant—probably a fanciful misinterpretation of the Latin myrmeleontid.

12. Belial: In the Old and New Testaments, Belial is one of the four princes of Hell, a demon of wickedness or impurity, or sometimes Satan himself.

13. passports: Russians were, and still are, required to have “internal passports” when moving from their registered place of residence.

14. Herodias: See Mark 6:17–29 and Matthew 14:1–12. Herodias was the wife of the tetrarch Herod Antipas; when John the Baptist condemned their marriage, she contrived by means of her daughter Salome to have his head brought to her on a platter.

15. the prophet Amos: “… they sold the righteous for silver, and the poor for a pair of shoes” (Amos 2:6).

16. the prophets … earth: “And they that dwell upon the earth shall rejoice over them, and make merry, and shall send gifts one to another; for these two prophets tormented them that dwelt on the earth” (Revelation 11:10).

17. prayer book of Pyotr Mogila: Pyotr (Petro, or Peter) Mogila (1596–1646), bishop and then metropolitan of Kiev, was a major figure in the history of the Orthodox Church under Polish domination and among other things undertook an important printing program. His Trebnik (“Prayer Book”), published in 1646, contained the texts of all the Orthodox rites and services.

18. Ushakov … Rublev … Paramshin: Semyon Ushakov (1626–86), icon painter and theorist, was the most well-known of the newer “proto-Baroque” painters from the time of Nikon’s reforms (see note 6 to “Lady Macbeth”) and enjoyed the favor of the royal family. He was also a secular artist. Andrei Rublev (ca. 1360–ca. 1430) is considered the greatest Russian icon painter and the glory of the Moscow school. He was canonized by the Orthodox Church in 1988. Paramshin (or Paramsha) was a well-known silver- and goldsmith of the fourteenth century; in 1356 he made a gilded icon and cross for the grand prince of Moscow, which was remembered for several generations afterwards in the wills of the ruling family.

19. folding icons … he sold it: Folding icons were mainly intended for travelers. In Leskov’s time, this particular folding icon was wrongly dated to the thirteenth century; later it was shown to have been painted no earlier than the second half of the seventeenth century. It was actually bought by an Italian archaeologist from a relative of the father confessor of Peter the Great, who had given it to him.

20. Prince Potemkin … as a Jew: Grigory Potemkin (1739–91) was a Russian general and statesman, a favorite of the empress Catherine the Great, who made him governor general of the newly acquired southern provinces of Russia and gave him the title of Prince of Taurida. The reference to “Christ … depicted as a Jew” is probably to the painting Christ in the Desert (1872), by Ivan Kramskoy (1837–87), one of the founders of the group known as the Peredvizhniki (“Wanderers”), who broke with the conventions of academic painting in the 1860s.

21. Joseph’s lament: The lines that follow are from an anonymous spiritual song of the same title belonging to Russian oral tradition and dating approximately to the sixteenth century. The story of Joseph is told in Genesis 37–45.

22. with one mouth and one heart: These words come from the prayer preceding the reciting of the Creed in the Orthodox liturgy. Levonty suffers because he feels separated from the “one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church” mentioned in the Creed.

23. the gates of Aristotle … the same view as theirs: The Gates of Aristotle was the title of a collection of apocryphal sayings, which was condemned by the Church in 1551, but continued to circulate in Russia until the eighteenth century. Remphan is mentioned in Acts 7:43 (“Yea, ye took up the tabernacle of Moloch and the star of your god Remphan, figures which you made to worship them”). The words, with slight changes, come from Amos 5:26.

24. All the earth … dwell in it: A slightly altered version of Psalm 24:1 (“The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein”).

25. Creed … the old way: The Old Believers (see note 6 to “Lady Macbeth”) rejected the patriarch Nikon’s revision, which removed two words from the Nicene Creed.

26. the spirit of God … nostrils: Slightly altered from Job 27:3–4 (“All the while my breath is in me, and the spirit of God is in my nostrils, my lips will not speak wickedness, nor my tongue utter deceit”).

27. the slaughter of the innocents … comforted: The event and some of the words are from Matthew 2:16–18, which in turn quotes Jeremiah 31:15.

28. heron … forbidden to eat: In Leviticus 11:13–19, the heron is included among the fowl that the Jews are forbidden to eat.

29. the spirit bloweth where it listeth: See John 3:8 (“The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit”). The Greek word pneuma can mean wind, breath, or spirit.

30. the great prokeimenon: The prokeimenon (graduale in Latin) is composed of verses sung responsively before the reading of the Gospel, approximately midway through the “all-night vigil,” which may last from two to six hours or even longer.

31. Prepare yourself … morning: The Old Believers in this story have no priests and no sacraments apart from baptism; thus, receiving communion is a part of their reintegration into the sacramental unity of the Church.

The Enchanted Wanderer

(1873)

1. Konovets … Valaam … Korela: Konovets, an island off the southwest shore of Lake Ladoga, in northern Russia near Finland, is the location of a monastery founded in the fourteenth century. Sixty miles north of Konovets is Valaam, a group of islands also famous for its monastery, probably founded at the same time. Korela was a fortress on the shore of Ladoga, first mentioned as early as the twelfth century.

2. Ilya Muromets … Tolstoy: Ilya Muromets is a bogatyr (“mighty man”) in the anonymous Russian medieval epic poems known as byliny, who defeats various enemies and monsters. Vassily Petrovich Vereshchagin (1835–1909) painted his Ilya Muromets at the Banquet of Prince Vladimir in 1871, and in that same year the poet Alexei K. Tolstoy (1817–75) published his ballad “Ilya Muromets” in The Russian Messenger.

3. the metropolitan Filaret: Filaret Drozdov (1781–1867) was one of the most influential Orthodox churchmen of his time. In 1826 he became metropolitan of Moscow (i.e., metropolitan archbishop, head bishop of a “metropolia”—a major city area, a region, or a province). Leskov was critical of his conservatism.

4. a husband … feed my family: In perpetuation of the clerical estate, the daughter’s husband would be a seminarian eligible to replace his father-in-law at the latter’s death or retirement and to continue serving the same parish.

5. St. Sergius: St. Sergius of Radonezh (1314?–92), one of the most highly revered saints of Russia, was the founder of the Trinity Monastery (later known as the Trinity–St. Sergius Monastery) in Zagorsk, sixty miles from Moscow. He was canonized in 1452.

6. stratopedarchos: New Testament Greek for military leader or camp commandant.

7. because of the “knock”: See Matthew 7:7 and Luke 11:9 (“Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you”).

8. the Trinity … the Holy Spirit: The Sunday of Pentecost, celebrating the descent of the Holy Spirit fifty days after Easter, is also known as the feast of the Trinity. The Monday following it is the day of the Holy Spirit. Traditionally, prayers for suicides were forbidden by the Orthodox Church except on the Saturday before Pentecost or in private prayer at home. This interdiction was lifted by the patriarch Kirill at a council of the Russian Orthodox Church in 2011.

9. hieromonk … hierodeacon: A hieromonk is a monk who has been ordained a priest or a priest who has become a monk; a hierodeacon is a monk who has become a deacon.

10. a cantonist: From 1721 to 1856, the sons of conscripted soldiers in Russia were educated in “canton schools” (from “canton” or recruiting district) and were obliged to serve in the army.

11. the Englishman Rarey: John Rarey (1827–66) was in fact an American horse tamer, or “horse whisperer,” who developed a gentle technique for rehabilitating mistreated or vicious horses. He came to Europe to demonstrate his method and visited Russia in 1857.

12. St. Vsevolod-Gavriil of Novgorod: Prince Vsevolod, baptized Gavriil (?1103–38), the patron saint of the city of Pskov, was prince of Novgorod from 1117 to 1136, and prince of Pskov from 1137 to 1138. He was buried in Pskov and later canonized there. His relics were said to protect the city, and his sword bore the inscription (in Latin) that Ivan Severyanych has embroidered on his belt.

13. Count K——of Orel province: That is, Count Kamensky, of whom there were several. Leskov deals more fully with them in “The Toupee Artist.” Given the date, this would be Count Sergei Mikhailovich Kamensky (1771–1835).

14. an old-style blue banknote: Blue banknotes, first issued in 1786, were worth five roubles, a considerable sum for a peasant at that time.

15. Kaffeeschenks: A court position supervising coffee and tea supplies.

16. Voronezh … relics there: St. Mitrofan of Voronezh (1623–1703) was the first bishop of Voronezh, in southwestern Russia. Relics are “revealed” when they prove to be either miracle-working or incorrupt. In 1831, Bishop Mitrofan’s relics were unearthed and found to be incorrupt; in 1832 he was canonized.

17. wanderers: The Russian word strannik (“wanderer”), as in the title of the present work, can mean anything from a real pilgrim to a simple vagabond.

18. passport: See note 13 to “The Sealed Angel.”

19. St. Mitrofan’s: Both a church and a monastery in Voronezh (see note 16 above).

20. Saracens … Prince Bova: The term “Saracen” is synonymous with “Muslim” in Russian folk tales. Eruslan Lazarevich and Prince Bova are heroes of such tales.

21. Tartars in kibitkas: In Russia, a kibitka (from the Tartar kibit) was a covered carriage or sleigh; among nomads of the steppe it was a round felt tent, sometimes mounted on a wheeled platform.

22. Ryn Sands … Khan Dzhangar: The Ryn Sands are a territory of approximately 25,000 square miles of long hummocky dunes between the lower Volga and Ural Rivers north of the Caspian Sea. Khan Dzhangar or Zhangir (d. 1845) was the last khan of the Bukey or Inner Horde of Kazakhs that moved about on the Ryn Sands. He carried on an important trade in horses and entered Russian government service in 1824.

23. from the apostle Paul: See Galatians 3:28 (“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus”). Also Colossians 3:11.

24. Holy God: The chant known as the Trisagion (“Holy God, Holy Mighty, Holy Immortal, have mercy on us”), sung during the Orthodox liturgy and in the burial procession.

25. from Khiva: The Khivan khanate, on the territory of present-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, was hostile to Russia during the earlier nineteenth century. Its capital, the city of Khiva, fell to the Russian army in 1873, after which it was made a “protectorate.”

26. Nicholas the Wonderworker: St. Nicholas (ca. 270–343), bishop of Myra in Lycia (Asia Minor), is one of the most widely venerated saints in Christendom, and obviously not a Russian.

27. the Keremet: Among the peoples of the Volga-Ural region, the Keremet or Kiremet were generally evil spirits, but the word also refers to the sacred groves the spirits lived in, where sacrifices to them were performed.

28. the Menaion: The Menaion, from the Greek word for “month,” is a collection of Orthodox liturgical texts and saints’ lives for each day of the month throughout the year.

29. banknotes … missing: Russian banknotes were distinguished by color: five-rouble notes were blue, ten-rouble notes gray, twenty-five-rouble notes red, and one-hundred- or two-hundred-rouble notes white.

30. “The Skiff”: A popular song to words by the soldier-poet Denis Davydov (1784–1839), a hero of the Napoleonic Wars.

31. Go away … burning coal?: Words from the popular song “Go Away, Don’t Look,” by Alexander Beshentsov (ca. 1811–82), first published in 1858.

32. the dragon Gorynych: A three-headed green dragon from Russian epic songs (byliny), who walks on his hind legs and spits fire.

33. Nizhny: That is, Nizhny Novgorod, a major Russian city. The fair in Nizhny, world-famous in the nineteenth century, attracted millions of visitors every year. It was also known as the Makary Fair, because it originally took place outside the walls of the monastery of St. Macarius in the Nizhny region. In 1816 a fire destroyed the buildings that housed the fair, and in 1817 it moved to Nizhny proper.

34. the marshal of the nobility: In 1785 the empress Catherine the Great issued a Charter of the Gentry, organizing the Russian nobility into provincial assemblies, each headed by a marshal chosen by his peers.

35. Alyonushka … called out to her: “Sister Alyonushka and Brother Ivanushka” is a Russian folktale in which a little brother turned into a white kid saves his sister from a wicked witch.

36. Suvorov: Field Marshal Alexander Vasilievich Suvorov (1729–1800), reputed never to have lost a battle, was one of only three Russian military men to bear the title of generalissimo. He was something of an eccentric and was much loved by his troops.

37. crown peasants: The category of “crown peasant” was created by the emperor Peter the Great, designating peasants who lived on land belonging to the crown, paid rent, but were personally free, though restricted in their movements.

38. a show-booth on Admiralty Square: Until 1873, popular shows similar to the medieval mystery and morality plays were staged in wooden booths on Admiralty Square in Petersburg during the Christmas and Easter seasons.

39. a messenger … in the flesh: A misquotation of 2 Corinthians 12:7: “there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure.”

40. “Resist … flee from you”: James 4:7.

41. the Wet Savior: Also known in Russia as the “First Savior” or the “Honey Savior,” this is the feast of the Presentation of the Cross, celebrated on August 1.

42. St. Tikhon of Zadonsk: Tikhon of Zadonsk (1724–83) was made bishop of Voronezh in 1763, but in 1769 he retired to the monastery in Zadonsk where he spent the rest of his life. An important spiritual writer and a wonderworker, Tikhon was canonized in 1861 and his “life” was published in 1862.

43. Solovki … Zosima and Sabbatius: That is, to the monastery on the Solovetsky Islands founded in the fifteenth century by Sts. Zosima and Sabbatius.

Singlemind

(1879)

1. the reign of Catherine II: Catherine II, the Great, born in Pomerania in 1729, married the Russian emperor Peter III and became empress of Russia after his assassination in 1762. She ruled until her death in 1796.

2. Prince Gagarin’s dictionary: A Universal Geographical and Statistical Dictionary, by Prince S. P. Gagarin, published in 1843.

3. “in trouble … hut on fire”: Frequently quoted lines from the poem “Red-Nosed Frost” (1863), by Nikolai Nekrasov (1821–78).

4. memorial notices for old women: That is, lists of names of the living or dead to be prayed for during the liturgy.

5. Burns or Koltsov: The Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759–96) and Alexei Koltsov (1809–42), often called the Russian Burns, were both close to simple country life and wrote stylized peasant songs.

6. Neither … frightened him: Words remarkably close to Herodotus’s praise of the Persian couriers in his Histories (8:98): “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds,” which became the unofficial motto of the U.S. Post Office.

7. The ox … against my fury: The passage is a quotation from Isaiah 1:3–24, with some modifications and a number of omissions.

8. the “dry bones” of Ezekiel’s vision: The reference is to Ezekiel 37:1–10, the prophecy on the dry bones, which is read during the Orthodox service of Holy Friday.

9. the Voltaireans … against it: An allusion to words spoken by the mayor in act 1, scene 1, of The Inspector General (1836), by Nikolai Gogol (1809–52): “That’s how God Himself made it, and the Voltaireans shouldn’t go talking against it.”

10. “In the sweat … bread”: Part of God’s curse on Adam (Genesis 3:17–19).

11. a beshmet … hooks: A beshmet is a man’s knee-length jacket, of Turkic origin, belted at the waist, open below, and fastened up to the neck with hooks or buttons.

12. The Great Lent … approaching: In the Orthodox Church, the Great Lent is the forty-day fast period preceding Holy Week and Easter.

13. that the spirit may be saved: See 1 Corinthians 5:5 (“To deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus”).

14. The Solovetsky Monastery: See note 43 to “The Enchanted Wanderer.” The monastery was sometimes used as a place of banishment and “re-education.” Under the Soviets it was turned into one of the harshest hard-labor camps.

15. Lanskoy … Kostroma: Sergei Stepanovich Lanskoy (1787–1862) was governor of Kostroma province from 1831 to 1834, and later served as minister of the interior (1855–61). In that office he was instrumental in bringing about the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, the same year in which he was made a count.

16. the zertsalo: A three-sided pyramid of mirrored glass topped by a two-headed eagle, which stood on the desk of every Russian official. It was introduced by Peter the Great as a symbol of law and order, each face of the zertsalo being engraved with words from one of his decrees.

17. my garment … wedding feast: See Matthew 22:11–12, the parable of the wedding feast (“And when the king came to see the guests, he saw there a man which had not on a wedding garment: and he saith unto him, Friend, how camest thou in hither not having a wedding garment?”).

18. principalities and powers: Words used by St. Paul in Ephesians 1:21 and Colossians 1:16 referring to the angelic hierarchy, here applied ironically to government authorities.

19. Theophany water … inheritance: The feast of Theophany (Epiphany), celebrated on January 6, includes the blessing of water for church and home use by immersing a cross in it with accompanying prayers. The quoted words, however, come from the troparion (a short hymn) for the two feasts of the Holy Cross, and ultimately from Psalm 28:9.

20. the Offenbachian mood: Meaning a frivolous spirit, from Jacques Offenbach (1819–80), the well-known French composer, author of nearly a hundred operettas full of risqué humor and contemporary satire.

21. Blessed … Lord: Words from Psalm 118:26, repeated in Luke 13:35 and Matthew 11:9 in reference to Christ, and also used in the Orthodox liturgy.

22. for a wicked servant it’s little: See the parable of the master and his three servants in Matthew 25:14–30 and Luke 19:12–27.

23. Voltaire … empress … Chrysostom … Pavel Petrovich: The empress Catherine the Great (see note 1 above) corresponded with Voltaire for fifteen years. St. John Chrysostom (349–407), archbishop of Constantinople and one of the most important Byzantine theologians, was called Chrysostomos (Greek for “golden mouthed”) in tribute to the eloquence of his preaching. Pavel Petrovich Romanov (1754–1801), the son of Catherine the Great and Peter III, became emperor in 1796 and reigned for five years before he was assassinated. In 1773, he was married to Wilhelmina of Hesse-Darmstadt (1755–76), who died in childbirth three years later.

24. stump duties … tax on timber: The newly imposed tax on timber was calculated by the number of stumps. Maria, the first daughter of the emperor Alexander I (1777–1825), lived for only a year.

25. St. Vladimir’s Cross … nobility: The Order of St. Vladimir was established in 1782 by Catherine the Great, in honor of Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev (ca. 958–1015), the “baptizer” of Russia. It was one of only two orders that granted the bearer the rights of hereditary nobility.

26. “three righteous men”: The first book publication of “Singlemind” in 1880 included the following foreword:

Without three righteous men no city can stand.

A certain great Russian writer was dying before me for the forty-eighth time. He is still alive, just as he went on living after his forty-seven previous deaths, observed by other people and in other circumstances.

He lay before me, alone, splayed out on the boundless sofa and preparing to dictate his last will to me, but instead he began to curse.

I can relate unabashedly how it went and what consequences it led to.

The writer was threatened by death through the fault of the theatrical-literary committee, which was just then killing his play with an unflinching hand. No pharmacy had any medicine against the racking pains this inflicted upon the author’s health.

“My soul is wounded and my guts are all twisted inside me,” said the sufferer, gazing at the ceiling of the hotel room, and then, shifting his gaze to me, he suddenly shouted:

“Why are you silent, as if your mouth’s stuffed with devil knows what? You Petersburgers all have some kind of nastiness in your hearts: you never say anything to console a man; he could just as well give up the ghost right in front of your eyes.”

It was the first time I had been present at the death of this extraordinary man and, not understanding his mortal anguish, I said:

“How can I console you? I can only say that everybody will be extremely sorry if the theatrical-literary committee cuts your precious life short with its harsh decision, but …”

“Not a bad beginning,” the writer interrupted. “Kindly keep talking and maybe I’ll fall asleep.”

“As you wish,” I replied. “So, are you sure that you’re now dying?”

“Am I sure? I tell you, I’m almost gone!”

“Splendid,” I said, “but have you thought well about whether this grief is worth your expiring on account of it?”

“Of course it’s worth it; it’s worth a thousand roubles,” the dying man moaned.

“Right. Unfortunately,” I replied, “the play would hardly bring you more than a thousand roubles, and therefore …”

But the dying man did not let me finish: he quickly raised himself on the sofa and cried:

“What a vile way to reason! Kindly give me a thousand roubles and then you can reason all you like.”

“Why should I pay for someone else’s sin?” I said.

“And why should I be the loser?”

“Because, knowing how things go in our theaters, you described all sorts of titled persons in your play and presented them as each one worse and more banal than the other.”

“Ahh, so that’s your consolation! According to you, one must describe nothing but good people, but I describe what I see, brother, and all I see is filth.”

“Then something’s wrong with your eyesight.”

“Maybe so,” the dying man replied, now thoroughly angry, “but what am I to do if I see nothing but abomination in my own soul and in yours? And thereupon the Lord God will now help me turn from you to the wall and sleep with a peaceful conscience, and I’ll leave tomorrow despising all my native land and your consolations.”

And the sufferer’s prayer was answered: he “thereupon” had an excellent night’s sleep, and the next day I took him to the station; but then, as a result of his words, I myself was overcome by a gnawing anxiety.

“Can it be,” I thought, “that in my or his or any other Russian soul there really is nothing to be seen but trash? Can it be that all the goodness and kindness ever noticed by the artistic eye of other writers is simply stuff and nonsense? That is not only sad, it’s frightening. If, according to popular belief, no city can stand without three righteous men, how can the whole earth stand with nothing but the trash that lives in my soul and yours, dear reader?”

That was terrible and unbearable to me, and I went in search of righteous men, vowing that I would not rest until I had found at least that small number of three righteous men without whom “no city can stand.” But wherever I turned, whoever I asked, everyone answered me in the same way, that they had never seen any righteous men, because all men are sinful, but one or another of them had occasionally met good people. I began taking notes. Whether they’re righteous or unrighteous, I thought, I must collect all this and then try to see “what in it rises above the level of simple morality” and is therefore “holy to the Lord.”

These are some of my notes.

The number of righteous men in Leskov’s work went well beyond three, as the reader will see, but the cycle as such was never published and Leskov cut the foreword in later printings.

The Devil-Chase

(1879)

1. bread and salt … metropolitan’s …: The offering of bread and salt was the traditional way of greeting important persons on their arrival. A metropolitan is an Orthodox bishop or archbishop in charge of churches in a major city or regional capital.

2. Filaret’s catechism: See note 3 to “The Enchanted Wanderer.” Metropolitan Filaret’s catechism, written in the strict manner of Roman Catholic catechisms and first published in 1823, presented the fundamentals of Orthodox teaching. It was continually reprinted until 1917 and has been republished, to the dismay of many, since the collapse of the Soviet regime in the 1990s.

3. the Yar: A famous restaurant, founded in 1826 and still in existence, located in the Petrovsky Park, which was then a suburb of Moscow.

4. neither … them: See the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, Luke 16:26 (“And beside all this, between us and you there is a great gulf fixed: so that they which would pass from hence to you cannot; neither can they pass to us, that would come from thence”).

5. the Black King in Freiligrath: Ferdinand Freiligrath (1810–76) was a German poet and liberal activist. In his poem “A Negro Chieftain,” a captured black chieftain, when forced to beat a drum at a fair, beats so furiously that he breaks the head.

6. Walpurgisnacht: The eve of May 1, the day of St. Walburga, an eighth-century English missionary and martyr. On that night, according to German tradition going back to the seventeenth century, witches hold their sabbath on Mount Brocken, the highest of the Harz Mountains.

7. Kuznetsky: Since the eighteenth century, Kuznetsky Most (literally “Blacksmith’s Bridge”) has been one of the most fashionable and expensive shopping streets in Moscow.

8. the All-Glorious: An icon of the All-Glorious Mother of God in one of Moscow’s convents.

9. the trepak: A fast Cossack dance in 2/4 time.

Deathless Golovan

(1880)

1. “big fire” in Orel: There were several major fires in Orel during the first half of the nineteenth century. The “big fire” referred to here is probably the one in 1848, which destroyed much of the town.

2. “a big part … memory”: A paraphrase of lines from the poem “Monument,” by Gavrila Derzhavin (1743–1816), which is in turn a paraphrase of the Exegi monumentum (“I have built a monument”) of Horace (65–8 BC), the closing poem of his third book of odes.

3. Orel Assembly of the Nobility: See note 34 to “The Enchanted Wanderer.”

4. A Nest of Gentlefolk: A novel by Ivan Turgenev (1818–83), published in 1859. Turgenev, like Leskov, was born in Orel, but unlike Leskov he belonged to the wealthy landed gentry.

5. the hundred and four sacred stories … book: One Hundred and Four Sacred Stories from the Old and New Testaments, a popular eighteenth-century collection of biblical stories, translated from the German.

6. Alexei Petrovich Ermolov: General Ermolov (1777–1861) distinguished himself in the Napoleonic Wars (1805–1814) and was then sent to the Caucasus, where he was made commander in chief of Russian forces. He retired in 1831 and spent the last thirty years of his life on his estate near Orel.

7. molokan: The word comes from moloko (“milk”). It was applied derisively to a Christian sect that emerged in seventeenth-century Russia, because its members drank milk on fast days, contrary to Orthodox teaching. They called themselves “Spirit Christians” and rejected all churches, not only the Orthodox.

8. St. Agafya the Dairymaid: An eighteenth-century martyr, patron saint and protector of cattle, who died on February 5, 1738.

9. The Cool Vineyard: A handwritten book of medical advice translated from the Polish at the end of the seventeenth century. It became very popular and spread among the Russian people until the early nineteenth century. Leskov quotes from a printed edition of 1879.

10. Naum Prokofiev: Despite the author’s claim here, Russian scholars have been unable to identify the man.

11. athelaea … Manus-Christi sugar: A list of partly fanciful, partly authentic medicaments. “Sealed earth” is terra sigillata, a medieval medicinal earth; “Malvasian wine” is made from the Malvasian varieties of grapes, originally grown in the Mediterranean basin; “mithridate” is an ancient remedy made up of as many as sixty-five different ingredients, used in treatment of the plague; “Manus-Christi sugar” is a cordial made by boiling sugar with violet or rose water, thought to give enfeebled people “a hand” (manus).

12. bezoar-stone: A gray or black stone from the stomach of a goat or other herbivorous animal, much used in popular medicine and believed to cure many diseases.

13. rebaptizers: Leskov may be referring to the Anabaptists (literally “rebaptizers”), who had come to southern Russia from Germany in the later eighteenth century, but more likely he means Old Believers who practiced rebaptism (see note 6 to “Lady Macbeth”).

14. young St. George: The feast of St. George is celebrated on April 23.

15. Bishop Nikodim: Nikodim (d. 1839) was bishop of Orel from 1828 to 1839.

16. Apollos: Apollos Baibakov (1745–1801) was bishop of Orel from 1788 to 1798.

17. the saint … revealing himself: See note 16 to “The Enchanted Wanderer.” The saint in this case uses more radical methods to “reveal himself.” Reference will be made to the “revealing of relics” at the end of chapter 7.

18. the prophet Jeremiah … its own day: The prophet Jeremiah is commemorated on May 1, St. Boris on May 2, St. Mavra on May 3, St. Zosima (of Volokolamsk) on May 8, St. John the Theologian (the Evangelist) likewise on May 8, St. Nicholas on May 9, and Simon the Zealot on May 10, which is also the pagan Slavic feast day of Mother Earth.

19. St. John’s … the joints of the earth: The birth of St. John the Baptist is celebrated on June 24, the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul on June 29. The feast day of St. Theodore of the Wells is June 8.

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.”

7. “White Eagle”: The Order of the White Eagle, founded in 1705, was the highest Polish decoration for military or civil service. In 1798, following the partition of Poland by Russia, Prussia, and Austria, it was taken over by the Russian royal family. Abandoned after the Russian revolution, it was revived in Poland in 1921 and is still awarded. For the order of St. Vladimir, see note 25 to “Singlemind.”

8. Taglioni … Bosio … Krestovsky Island: Maria Taglioni (1804–84), an Italian-Swedish ballet dancer, first came to Russia in 1827 on a three-year contract with the imperial ballet theater in Petersburg and last danced there in 1842. Angelina Bosio (1830–59) was an Italian soprano and prima donna who enjoyed great success in Europe, America, and Russia, where she first sang in 1853 and where she died of a cold while traveling from Moscow to Petersburg. Krestovsky Island, in the Neva delta in Petersburg, was home to various amusements in the nineteenth century, including open-air restaurants with Gypsy singers.

9. Polycrates: Polycrates, tyrant of Samos in the sixth century BC, was extremely lucky in all his endeavors, which made people predict a bad end for him. The prediction came true when he was murdered by his ally, Oroetes, satrap of Sardis.

10. “Saul and the Witch of Endor”: See I Samuel 28:3–35. Saul, the first king of Israel, goes secretly to ask the witch of Endor to consult the shade of the late prophet Samuel. She does so, and Samuel predicts his fall and the kingship of David.

11. What philosophy never dreamt of: See note 2 above.

12. laid out on a table: It was customary in Russia to lay a dead person out on a table until the body could be put in a coffin.

Lefty

(1881)

1. Alexander Pavlovich … the Congress of Vienna: Alexander Pavlovich is the emperor Alexander I. The Congress of Vienna was a conference of representatives of Austria, Great Britain, Russia, Prussia, and France, held in Vienna from September 1814 to June 1815, to decide the future organization of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars and the breakup of the Holy Roman Empire.

2. the Don Cossack Platov: Count Matvei Ivanovich Platov (1757–1818) was a distinguished Russian general and ataman (commander) of the Don Cossacks under Field Marshal Suvorov (see note 36 to “The Enchanted Wanderer”) and later during the Napoleonic Wars. At the conclusion of the peace, he indeed accompanied the emperor to England. However, Leskov’s narrator grants him a mythical longevity well into the reign of Nicholas I.

3. two and ten nations: Napoleon’s army was referred to in Russia as “the army of twelve nations.”

4. a Mortimer musket: Harvey Walklate Mortimer (1753–1819) and his brothers and descendants were well-known English gunsmiths for several generations.

5. Tsarskoe Selo: The imperial country estate, fifteen miles south of Petersburg. The name means “Tsar’s Village.”

6. molvo sugar … Bobrinsky factory: Y. N. Molvo ran a sugar refinery in Petersburg during the early nineteenth century. Count Alexei Alexeevich Bobrinsky (1800–68) was also one of the first sugar refiners in Russia. William B. Edgerton, in Satirical Stories of Nikolai Leskov (New York, 1969) suggests that “Molvo” was a Russified form of the French name Mollevaut and comments, “If this supposition is true, then the irony of Platov’s Russian defense of ‘Mollevaut’ sugar becomes all the sweeter.”

7. Zhukov tobacco …: Vasily Zhukov produced pipe tobacco in his Petersburg factory from the 1820s to the 1850s.

8. The emperor Nikolai Pavlovich … at his ascension: Nikolai Pavlovich is the emperor Nicholas I (1796–1855). The “disturbances at his ascension” were the events of the Decembrist uprising of December 14, 1825, when young officers in Petersburg mutinied during the confusion following the death of Alexander I and demanded democratic reforms in Russia.

9. holy Athos: The mountain and peninsula of Athos is home to twenty Orthodox monasteries, among them the Russian Orthodox monastery of St. Panteleimon.

10. “Evening Bells”: “Evening Bells” is a song by the Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779–1852), published in 1818, with the subtitle “The Bells of St. Petersburg.” Moore claimed it was based on a Russian original, but the source is unknown. In 1828, the Russian poet Ivan Kozlov (1779–1840) translated Moore’s poem into Russian. His version became immensely popular and is still widely sung. The musical setting by Alexander Alyabyev (1787–1851) is indeed “painted out.”

11. Count Nestlebroad: That is, Count Karl Vasilievich Nesselrode (1780–1862), of Baltic German birth, who entered the Russian navy and then the diplomatic service under Alexander I, becoming foreign minister in 1816 and remaining in that capacity for more than forty years.

12. our lace: The city of Tula had four specialties: firearms, samovars, gingerbread, and lace.

13. Count Kleinmichel: Count Pyotr Andreevich Kleinmichel (1793–1869) served from 1842 to 1855 as chief administrator of highways and public buildings under Nicholas I.

14. Commandant Skobelev: In 1839, General Ivan Nikitich Skobelev (1778–1849) was commandant of the Peter-and-Paul Fortress in Petersburg, which served as a prison.

15. Martyn-Solsky: The narrator’s variant on the name of Martyn Dmitrievich Solsky (1793–1869), doctor in a guards regiment and member of the medical council of the ministry of internal affairs.

16. Count Chernyshev: Count Alexander Ivanovich Chernyshev (1786–1857), cavalry general and statesman, served as minister of war under Nicholas I from 1826 to 1852.

17. “deeds … of old”: A reference to lines from Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820), a narrative poem by Alexander Pushkin (1799–1837).

The Spirit of Madame de Genlis

(1881)

1. A. B. Calmet: Leskov is mistaken about the middle initial. Antoine Augustin Calmet (1672–1757) was a Benedictine monk. His most well-known work, Dissertations on Apparitions, Angels, Demons, and Spirits, and on Ghosts and Vampires in Hungary, Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia (Paris, 1746; re-edited in 1951), was published in Russia in 1867.

2. Mmes de Sévigné … de Genlis: Leskov gives a list of six famous letter writers or memoirists of the reign of Louis XIV, all ladies, before he comes to Mme de Genlis. He misspells most of the names, but we give them in their correct form. Mme de Genlis (Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de St. Aubin Brûlart, marquise de Sillery, comtesse de Genlis, 1746–1830) first entered the royal palace as lady-in-waiting to the duchesse de Chartres and became the governess of her children, one of whom, Louis Philippe d’Orléans (1773–1850), later became king. She wrote verse, novels, plays, treatises, and some important memoirs.

3. Voltaire … criticism: Mme de Genlis met Voltaire at his estate in Ferney, near Geneva, and noted in her memoirs that he was a tasteless, ill-bred man with a love of crude flattery.

4. Kardec’s theory of “mischievous spirits”: Allan Kardec was the pen name of Hippolyte Léon Denizard Rivail (1808–69), a French schoolteacher and a prime mover of the spiritualist vogue in the mid-nineteenth century (see note 3 to “The White Eagle”). Among other things, he coined the word “spiritism” and produced a five-volume theoretical synthesis, The Spiritual Codification.

5. Prince Gagarin: Prince Ivan Sergeevich Gagarin (1814–82) was serving as secretary of the Russian legation in Paris when, in 1842, he converted to Catholicism and became a Jesuit. He lived the rest of his life in Paris, where Leskov met him in 1875.

6. Heine’s “Bernardiner und Rabiner”: The reference is to the poem “Disputation,” from Romanzero (1851), by Heinrich Heine (1797–1856). The poem, which is set in medieval Toledo, presents a dispute between a Capuchin friar and a rabbi about whose God is the true God. It is resolved by the young Doña Blanka, who says “I don’t know which of them is right, but they both stink.”

7. Mme du Deffand … Gibbon: Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du Deffand (1697–1780), was a prolific letter writer who corresponded with many notable people of her time, including Voltaire and Horace Walpole, with whom she formed an enduring attachment. The English historian Edward Gibbon (1737–94) is most famous for his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88).

8. Lauzun: Armand Louis de Gontaut, duc de Lauzun (1747–1793), took part in the American War of Independence on the side of the colonists and in the French revolutionary wars. He was arrested and guillotined during the Reign of Terror.

9. Gibbon was … “vile joke”!: Leskov quotes this passage, with cuts and alterations, from the Russian edition of the memoirs of Mme de Genlis, Memoirs of Felicia L***, published in Moscow in 1809.

The Toupee Artist

(1883)

1. February 19, 1861: The date of the imperial manifesto proclaiming the emancipation of the serfs.

2. Sazikov and Ovchinnikov … Heine … Worth …: Pavel Ignatyevich Sazikov (d. 1868) and Pavel Akimovich Ovchinnikov (1830–88) were well-known gold- and silversmiths with shops in Moscow and Petersburg. In his late prose work Lutezia (1854), Heine speaks not of a tailor but of a Parisian shoemaker named Sakosky, describing him as “an artist in leather footwear.” The Englishman Charles Frederick Worth (1825–95) became a famous Parisian couturier, inventor of the défilé de mode (“fashion show”).

3. Bret Harte …: The reference is to the story “A Sleeping-Car Experience,” by Francis Brett Harte (1836–1902), published in the collection Drift from Two Shores (1878), but Leskov’s recounting of it has little to do with the original.

4. Count Kamensky in Orel: Field Marshal Count Mikhail Fedotovich Kamensky (1738–1809) retired from the army to his estate in Orel in 1806. He was notorious for mistreating his serfs and was murdered by one of them three years later. He had two sons, both generals, Sergei (1771–1836) and Nikolai (1776–1811). Sergei retired from the army in 1822, returned to the Kamensky estate, and threw himself into running the serf theater started by his father. The troupe, including actors, dancers, and musicians, numbered about four hundred souls. Kamensky treated them quite tyrannically. Serf theaters arose in Russia in the late seventeenth century; by the nineteenth century there were more than 170 of them.

5. Alexander Pavlovich or Nikolai Pavlovich …: See notes 1 and 8 to “Lefty.”

6. camarine: That is, aquamarine, or blue beryl. Some of the best aquamarines come from Russia. Ironically, aquamarine is said to symbolize love, harmony, and marital happiness.

7. Snakes … your face: A somewhat inaccurate quotation from the Serbian song “Prince Marco in Prison.”

8. Turkish Rushchuk: The town of Ruse, on the Danube in Bulgaria, was called “Rushchuk” (“Little Ruse”) by the Ottomans, who made it a major fortress and city. It was liberated from Ottoman control in 1878.

9. “bolyarin”: The Church Slavonic equivalent of the Russian boyarin, equivalent to the medieval “baron.”

The Voice of Nature

(1883)

1. Faddeev … Baryatinsky: Field Marshal Prince Alexander Ivanovich Baryatinsky (1814–1879) was made commander of Russian forces in the Caucasus and then governor of the region, a post he held until his retirement in 1862. Rostislav Andreevich Faddeev (1824–83), a general and a writer on military subjects, was attached to the governor of the Caucasus from 1859 to 1864.

2. Temir-Khan-Shura: A settlement in what is now Dagestan, founded as a fortress in 1834 and granted the status of a town in 1866.

3. Paul de Kock: (1793–1871). A prolific French novelist, author of crude but spicy and often amusing novels about Parisian life.

A Little Mistake

(1883)

1. Ivan Yakovlevich: Ivan Yakovlevich Koreisha (1780–1861) was an inmate of a Moscow psychiatric clinic for over forty years. His bizarre verbosity earned him the reputation of a seer, and people of all classes came to have him “prophesy” for them. Koreisha was Dostoevsky’s model for the holy fool Semyon Yakovlevich in Demons (1872).

2. Pismovnik: Nikolai Gavrilovich Kurganov (1726–96), mathematician, teacher, and member of the St. Petersburg Academy, published his Pismovnik, a collection of writings for self-education in Russian language and literature, in 1793.

3. a clown from Presnya: In the late eighteenth to nineteenth century, the Presnya district of Moscow was a park and picnic area with ponds and entertainments.

4. promise … head cut off: See note 14 to “The Sealed Angel.” The tetrarch Herod Antipas was so taken with his stepdaughter Salomé’s dancing that he promised to give her whatever she asked for. At the prompting of her mother, Herodias, she asked for John the Baptist’s head.

The Pearl Necklace

(1885)

1. the late Pisemsky: Alexei Feofilaktovich Pisemsky (1826–81), distinguished novelist and playwright, was a realist of a dark turn of mind, skeptical of the liberal reforms of the 1860s.

2. in which … man: A slightly altered quotation from Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin, chapter 7, stanza 22.

3. the late poet Tolstoy: See note 2 to “The Enchanted Wanderer.” The line is from stanza 35 of Tolstoy’s satirical poem “The Dream of Councilor Popov” (1873), which spread widely through Russia in handwritten copies.

4. the altar of Themis: Themis was an ancient Greek titaness, an oracle at Delphi, the goddess of divine order and justice.

5. “The joy of Rus’ is to drink”: The Primary Chronicle, compiled in Kiev around 1113, attributes these words to Prince Vladimir, who supposedly rejected Islam because it prohibits alcohol.

6. Princess Yusupov … Gorgibus: Princess Tatyana Vasilievna Yusupov (1769–1848) indeed had a famous collection of precious gems, but the “pearl of Gorgibus,” a 126-carat pear-shaped pearl, was brought from the Indies by Gorgibus of Calais and sold to King Philip IV of Spain (1605–65).

7. a prosphora: A small, round bread especially blessed for holy communion.

8. ‘Bourguignon’: The firm of Bourguignon, on the boulevard des Capucines in Paris, specialized in making imitation jewelry.

9. Rurik and Gediminas: That is, the ancient ruling dynasties of Russia and Lithuania, respectively.

The Spook

(1885)

1. the kikimora: A female house spirit in Slavic folklore, sometimes married to the house demon (domovoi).

2. “of Catherine’s planting”: That is, planted in the time of Catherine the Great (see note 1 to “Singlemind”).

3. Baba Yaga: A wicked witch in Russian folklore, who lives in the forest in a hut on chicken’s legs and rides around in an enormous mortar, steering it with a broom.

4. the class of rhetoric in the seminary: Seminaries were the only educational institutions open to children of the peasant and merchant classes in Russia. Their students were not necessarily preparing for the priesthood.

5. white Nezhin roots …: That is, crude local tobacco. Nezhin, in Chernigov province to the west of Orel, was a center of the tobacco industry.

6. the Python, Cerberus, and their ilk: In Greek mythology, the Python was the gigantic serpent that guarded the oracle at Delphi and Cerberus was the three-headed hound that guarded the entrance to the underworld.

7. Varus … Teutoburg: Publius Quintilius Varus (46 BC–9 AD), a Roman patrician and general under Augustus Caesar (63 BC–19 AD), was defeated by a confederation of Germanic troops under the general Arminius at the battle of Teutoburg in Germany, where his three legions were annihilated.

8. the schismatic village of Kolchevo: That is, a village inhabited by Old Believers (see note 6 to “Lady Macbeth”).

9. the Orel priest Ostromyslenny: Father Efim Ostromyslenny (or Ostromyslensky) was a priest in Orel and taught religion in the Orel high school. Leskov was one of his grateful students and mentions him a number of times in his work.

10. because your eye was dark: See Matthew 6:22–23: “The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light; but if your eye is not sound, your whole body will be full of darkness” (Revised Standard Version). Also Luke 11:34.

The Man on Watch

(1887)

1. Nikolai Ivanovich Miller …: Lieutenant General Nikolai Ivanovich Miller (d. 1889), after retiring from the army, was first an inspector then the director of the Alexandrovsky Lycée, founded by Alexander I for the education of the elite of the nobility.

2. Nikolai Pavlovich: See note 8 to “Lefty.” The emperor Nicholas I was known for the military strictness of his rule.

3. the Jordan entrance: The entrance to the imperial palace from the Neva embankment, where the “Jordan” ice hole was located, cut in the ice for the blessing of the waters on the feast of Theophany (see note 19 to “Singlemind”).

4. Kokoshkin … Svinyin: Sergei Alexandrovich Kokoshkin (1795–1861), formerly an infantry general, served as superintendent of police in Petersburg from 1830 to 1847. He was a favorite of Nicholas I. By 1839 Nikita Petrovich Svinyin had already been a lieutenant colonel in the Izmailovsky Regiment for six years.

5. the grand duke Mikhail Pavlovich: Mikhail Pavlovich Romanov (1798–1849), the fourth son of the emperor Paul I (see note 23 to “Singlemind”), was at that time a colonel of the guards.

6. in Gogol’s comedy: See note 9 to “Singlemind.” The reference is to act 3, scene 6, where the number of messengers is actually thirty-five thousand.

7. Peter’s Little House: The oldest building in Petersburg, a small wooden house on the Petrovskaya Embankment, built for Peter the Great in 1703 and now a museum. During the reign of Nicholas I, the dining room was turned into a chapel and the icon of the Savior that Peter the Great used to take with him on campaign was placed in it.

8. the Peter-and-Paul Fortress: See note 14 to “Lefty.”

9. a certain bishop …: The bishop in question is thought to be Metropolitan Filaret Drozdov (see note 3 to “The Enchanted Wanderer”).

10. of the earth, earthy: See 1 Corinthians 15:47 (“The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven”).

A Robbery

(1887)

1. “With the pure … froward”: Psalm 18:26.

2. the famous fires … Trubetskoy: Pyotr Ivanovich Trubetskoy (1798–1871), governor of Orel province, is mentioned frequently in Leskov’s work. For the “famous fires,” see note 1 to “Deathless Golovan.”

3. churchly faith … Father Efim … Old Believers: For “churchly faith” and Old Believers, see note 6 to “Lady Macbeth.” For Father Efim, see note 9 to “The Spook.”

4. Kamensky … Turchaninov … Molotkovsky: For Kamensky, see note 4 to “The Toupee Artist.” After Kamensky’s death, the theater was taken over by the entrepreneurs Turchaninov and Molotkovsky.

5. rebaptized girls: See note 13 to “Deathless Golovan.”

6. the great martyr Barbara …: Little is known about the third-century St. Barbara, known as “the Great Martyr Barbara” in the Orthodox Church. An akathist is a special prayer service.

7. our deliverance from the Gauls: That is, from the Grande Armée of Napoleon, which was driven out of Russia in 1812.

8. Tula … samovarniks …: See note 12 to “Lefty.”

9. ‘Many Years’ … ‘Memory Eternal’: Well-known Orthodox hymns wishing long life for the living and peace and God’s memory for the dead.

10. ‘Except the Lord … but in vain’: A conflated variant of Psalm 127:1 (“Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it; except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain”).

11. Alfred … in people’s houses: The reference is probably to the eighteenth-century folk drama Of King Maximilian and His Disobedient Son Adolph. Either Misha or Leskov has mistaken the name.

12. “It is meet and right” … “Rest Eternal”: Various phrases from the preparation of communion, the reading of the Gospel, and the commemoration of the dead.

13. wailing woefully: An imprecise quotation from the seventeenth-century “Tale of Woe and Grief and How Woeful-Grief Drove a Young Man to Monkhood.”

14. “Lord, save us … Arid”: See Psalm 59:2 (“Deliver me from the workers of iniquity, and save me from bloody men”). It is not clear whom the aunt means by Arid. It has been suggested that she means Jared, a fifth-generation descendant of Adam, but he is distinguished only by his longevity. She may mean Herod.

15. the marshal of the nobility: See note 34 to “The Enchanted Wanderer.”

16. zertsalo: See note 16 to “Singlemind.”