Lectures on Russian literature

attire of the lower classes, or a stylized version of it—high

boots, short belted coat, sheepskin cap (p.36).

No. 44 We are at home on Thursdays. . . . 'Which means to-

day?' said Lyovin

This is a slip on Tolstoy's part; but then, as previously

mentioned, Lyovin's time throughout the book is prone to

lag behind the time of the other characters. The Oblonskis,

and we, know it is Friday (chapter 4), and later references

to Sunday confirm this (p.40).

No. 45 The Hotel d'Angleterre or the Ermitage

Nabokov's drawing of a costume such as Kitty wore when she

The Ermitage is mentioned but not chosen, since it would

skated with Lyovin.

have been hardly seemly for a novelist to advertise one of

the best Moscow restaurants (where, according to Karl Baedeker, writing in the nineties, i.e., twenty years later, a good dinner minus wine cost two rubles twenty-five, or a couple of old-time dollars). Tolstoy mentions it, along with his invented Angleterre, merely to point out the latter's gastronomic rank. It will be noted that dinner is at the old-fashioned time between five and six (p.40).

No. 46 Sleigh

Cabs for hire as well as private vehicles other than the kareta (a closed carriage on wheels, such as Oblonski used) were more or less snug sleighs for two people. Snow permitting the use of sleighs covered the streets of Moscow and Petersburg approximately from November to April (p.40).

No. 47 Tatars

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Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

Or, less, correctly, Tartars—a name given to nearly three million inhabitants of the former Russian Empire, chiefly Moslems and mostly of Turkic origin, remnants of the Mongol (Tatar) invasions of the thirteenth century. From the Province of Kazan, East Russia, a few thousand migrated in the nineteenth century to Petersburg and Moscow where some of them pursued the calling of waiters (p.41).

No. 48 The French girl at the buffet board

Her job would be to supervise the buffet, and sell flowers (p.41).

No. 49 Prince Golitsyn

A generalized gentleman here. The moralist in Tolstoy had such a distaste for 'inventing' (although actually the artist in him invented a greater number of plausible people than any man before him except Shakespeare) that often in his drafts we find him using 'real names' instead of the slightly camouflaged ones he superimposed later. Golitsyn is a well-known name, and in this case Tolstoy apparently did not bother to twist it into Goltsov or Litsyn in his final text (p.42).

No. 50 Oysters

Flensburg oysters: these came from German beds (on the North Sea coast of Schleswig Holstein, just south of Denmark), which from 1859 to 1879 were rented to a company in Flensburg on the Denmark border.

Ostend oysters: ever since 1765 seed oysters had been brought from England to Ostend in Belgium.

Both 'Flensburg' and 'Ostend' were small products in the seventies, and these imported oysters were highly esteemed by Russian epicures (p.42).

No. 51 Cabbage soup and groats

Shchi—z soup consisting mainly of boiled cabbage—and grechnevaya kasha— boiled buckwheat meal—were, and presumably still are, the staple food of Russian peasants, whose rustic fare Lyovin would partake of in his capacity of gentleman farmer, man of the soil, and advocate of his simple life. In my time, forty years later, to slurp shchi was as chic as to toy with any French fare (p.42).

No. 52 Chablis, Nuits

Burgundy wines, white and red respectively. The white wines known to us as Chablis are made in the Department of Yonne (eastern France) situated in the oldest viticultural district of Europe, namely the ancient province of Burgundy. Nuits (place name) St. Georges, which presumably was the waiter's suggestion, comes from vineyards north of Beaune, in the center of the Burgundy district (p.43).

No. 53 Parmesan

Cheese was eaten with bread as an hors-d'oeuvre and in between courses (p.43).

No. 54 Gallant steeds

Russia's greatest poet Aleksandr Pushkin (1799-1837) translated into Russian (from a French version) Ode LIII of the so-called Anacreontea, a collection of poems attributed to Anacreon (born in the sixth century b.c. in Asia Minor, died at the age of 85), but lacking the peculiar forms of Ionic Greek in which he wrote according to authentic fragments quoted by ancient writers. Oblonski misquotes Pushkin horribly. Pushkin's version reads: Gallant steeds one recognizes By the 139

Vladimir Nabokov: Lectures on Russian literature

markings branded on them; Uppish Parthians one can tell By their elevated mitres; As to me I recognize Happy lovers by their eyes . . . (p.45).

No. 55 And with disgust the scroll of my past life I read, and shudder, and denounce it And bitterly complain. . . .

Lyovin quotes a passage from Pushkin's poignant 'Recollection' (1828) (p.48).

No. 56 Recruits

In the summary of the week's news of the Pall Mall Budget for December 29, 1871, I find the following: 'An Imperial decree has been issued at St. Petersburg fixing the levy of recruits of the year 1872 at the rate of six per 1000 for the whole empire including the Kingdom of Poland. This is the usual levy in order to raise the army and navy to their proper standard' etc.

This note has little direct bearing on our text but is of some interest in itself (p.48).

No. 57 Himmlisch ist's . . .

'To conquer my earthly lust would have been divine but if I have not succeeded, I experience all the same lots of pleasure.'

According to a brief note in Maude's translation of the novel (1937), Oblonski quotes these lines from the libretto of the Fledermaus which, however, was first produced two years after that dinner.

The exact reference would be: Die Fledermaus, komische Operette in drei Akten nach Meilhac und Halevy (authors of Le Reveillon, a French vaudeville, which itself was taken from a German comedy Das Gefangnis by Benedix), bearbeitet von Haffner und Genee, Musik von Johann Strauss. First produced in Vienna on April 5, 1874 (according to Loewenberg's Annals of Opera, 1943). I have not discovered this anachronistic quotation in the score but it may be in the complete book (p.50).

No. 58 That gentleman in Dickens . . .

The reference is to the pompous and smug Mr. John Podsnap in Dickens' Our Mutual Friend, which had first appeared in London in twenty monthly parts from May 1864 to November 1865. Podsnap, who was 'happily acquainted with his own merit and importance, [had] settled that whatever he put behind him he put out of existence. . . . [He] had even acquired a peculiar flourish of the right arm in often clearing the world of its most difficult problems by sweeping them behind him . .

.' (p.50).

No. 59 Plato's 'Symposium'

In this dialogue Plato, a notorious Athenian philosopher (died in 347 b.c. at the age of eighty), has several banqueters discuss love. One of them rhetorically distinguishes earthly from heavenly love; another sings of Love