Part 39 (2/2)
19. St Khariton: A Muscovite identified his address by its proximity to this or that church. The saint in question was a martyr in the Orient, under Diocletian, in about AD 303. Pushkin had spent several years in this residential quarter as a child. The parish was in east Moscow, which explains why the Larins, who entered Moscow by the western gate, had to traverse the entire city.
20. grey-haired Kalmyk: The Kalmyks were originally a Mongolian people who moved westwards in the seventeenth century and were absorbed into the province of Astrakhan in south-west Russia in the eighteenth century, later to become a republic under the Soviets. It was an aristocratic fas.h.i.+on in the eighteenth century to keep a Kalmyk boy in the household, a practice that had fallen into disuse when the Larins arrived, so that the original boy is here an old man. Only a few very rich houses employed a special doorman; in most cases one of the household staff would take over this function like the Kalmyk here, who is still engaged in a household task as he does so.
21. Pachette: A Frenchified (and comic) version of the purely Russian Pasha.
22. St Simeon's: St Simeon's was in the same parish as St Khariton. St Simeon Stylites the Elder (390?-459) was a Syrian hermit who spent thirty-seven years on a pillar.
23. And since I pulled you by the ears: A slightly altered quotation from Griboyedov's Woe from Wit, a recurrent source for this chapter, starting with the epigraph.
24. Lyubov Petrovna, Ivan Petrovich... Semyon Petrovich: These three are siblings.
25. Monsieur Finemouche: Probably a French tutor.
26. Pomeranian dog: The custom of keeping house dogs went back to the second half of the eighteenth century.
27. clubber: The reference is to the prestigious English club, a private establishment founded in 1770, famed for its good food and gambling.
28. graces of young Moscow: An ironic reference to three maids of honour, known in Moscow as the three graces'.
29. The 'archive boys': A designation coined by Pushkin's friend S. Sobolevsky for a circle of writers inspired by the German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Sch.e.l.ling (1775a1854) known as the lyubomudry ('lovers of wisdom' a a Russified version of philosophy' or philosopher'). The majority of them served in the archive of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Despite the satire here, Pushkin was by no means hostile to the group, who included the outstanding men of letters Prince Vladimir Odoyevsky, Stefan Shevyryov and Dmitri Venevitinov.
30. Vyazemsky: Pushkin has already referred twice to his friend Vyazemsky a in the epigraph to Chapter I and in lines 6a7 of Chapter III. Here he makes him a member of the cast just as he had done with his friend Kaverin in Chapter I, stanza 16. But, apart from the joke, Vyazemsky appears here as the only surviving figure of any substance in the 'desert' of Russian social life after the collapse of the Decembrist revolt.
31. an old man: Vyazemsky suggested that this is the poet Ivan Dmitriyev (see epigraph).
32. Melpomene: The Greek Muse of tragedy. Pushkin took a negative view of Russian tragedy at the time, arguing for a Shakespearean theatre in place of bad imitations of Racine.
33. Thalia: The Greek Muse of comedy. Given the banning of Griboyedov's Woe from Wit and the general stagnation of comic drama in the mid-1820s, Pushkin took a sceptical view of Russian comedy, too.
34. the a.s.sembly: The Russian a.s.sembly of n.o.bility, founded in 1783.
CHAPTER VIII.
1. Fare thee well... well: The opening of Byron's poem Fare Thee Well' from the cycle Poems of Separation, 1816.
2. The lycee Established by Alexander I in 1810 in the grounds of the Summer Palace outside St Petersburg to educate young gentlemen destined for a professional career. Pushkin boarded there from 1811 to 1817, regarding the school as his real home, and celebrated the date of its opening, 19 October 1811, with anniversary poems from 1817 until the year of his death. The model of the lycee was taken from France.
3. Apuleius: Lucius Apuleius, Roman author (c. AD125a180), whose fantastic and erotic tale The Golden a.s.s was popular in the eighteenth century in Russia. Pushkin read it in French.
4. Cicero: Marcus Tullius Cicero (106a43 BC), renowned Roman writer, politician and thinker.
5. Derzhavin: Gavrila Derzhavin (1743a1816), Russia's first outstanding poet. As a schoolboy, Pushkin enthralled the ancient man with his recitation of his poem Recollections at Tsarskoe Selo' at a public examination at the lycee in 1815.
6. joined the dust: Pushkin excluded the remaining ten lines of this stanza together with several others that were to follow stanza I. They offered a more extended and detailed poetic autobiography.
7. The noise and feasts... excursions: This probably refers to the Green Lamp, a libertarian organization of young n.o.blemen that Pushkin joined after leaving the lycee and that, already conspiratorial, foreshadowed the Decembrist movement.
8. But I seceded... fled a far: Pushkin refers here to his exile through the prism of his Romantic narrative poems, Prisoner of the Caucasus (1820a21) and The Gipsies (1824), where the hero voluntarily flees from civilization.
9. Leonora: Heroine of the much-translated Lenore by Burger.
10. Tauris: The Crimea, where Pushkin spent three weeks during his first year of exile.
11. The Nereids: In Greek mythology, sea nymphs, the fifty daughters of Nereus and Doris.
12. Moldavia: Part of the province of Bessarabia, where Pushkin was exiled 1820a24. The Gipsies (1824), written later in Odessa and Mikhailovskoye, his family estate, drew its material from the environs of Kis.h.i.+nev, capital of Bessarabia.
13. Then suddenly... French book: This refers to the third stage of Pushkin's exile at his family estate at Mikhailovskoye, when the Muse is transformed into Tatiana.
14. A Harold, Quaker, Pharisee: 'Harold: i.e. Byron's Childe Harold. Quaker: a member of the religious society of friends, founded by George Fox in 1648a50, adopting peaceful principles and plain living. Pharisee: originally a member of an ancient Jewish sect distinguished by its strict obsevance of tradition and written law; latterly, a self-righteous person or hypocrite.
15. Demon: A reference to Pushkin's poem 'The Demon' (1824).
16. leaving boat for ball: An allusion to Griboyedov's Woe from Wit, referring to the hero Chatsky's return to Moscow in 1819 after three years abroad.
17. s.h.i.+shkov: Admiral Alexander s.h.i.+shkov (1754a1841), leader of the Archaist group of writers who contested the inclusion or adaptation of French vocabulary into Russian.
18. The Cleopatra of Neva: Probably Countess Yelena Zavadovsky, whose cold, queenly beauty was the talk of society.
19. Spain's amba.s.sador: An anachronism. There was no Spanish amba.s.sador in St Petersburg in 1824, when Chapter VIII takes place. A new amba.s.sador appeared in 1825, when Russia resumed diplomatic relations with Spain, broken off during the Spanish revolution. This and similar anachronisms in the last two chapters suggest that Pushkin wanted to set a post-Decembrist background to his story.
20. ten strikes: Ten o'clock. Onegin visits at the earliest opportunity. Normally, guests would arrive at a soiree much later.
21. The badge of which two sisters prated: The badge is a court decoration inscribed with the royal monogram granted by the Tsar to women who became ladies-in-waiting to the Empress. In an unpublished version of this stanza the sisters are referred to as orphans. When their father, General Borozdin, died, leaving them penniless, the Tsar took them under his wing.
22. the war: The reference is presumably to the war with Poland of 1830, another anachronism.
23. he found a bore: Omitted lines: there are a number of variants behind stanzas 23a6 that either reinforce the civility surrounding Tatiana in stanza 23 or sharpen the satire of stanzas 24a6.
24. Prolasov: Prolasov or Prolazov is derived from prolaz' or pro-laza', meaning climber' or sycophant'. He is also a ridiculous figure in eighteenth-century Russian comedies and popular prints.
25. Saint-Priest: Count Emmanuil Saint-Priest (1806a28) was a hussar and fas.h.i.+onable cartoonist, son of a French emigre.
26. Palm Week cherub: Paper figures of cherubs (glued to gingerbread, etc.) sold at the annual fair during Palm Week, the week preceding Easter.
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