[19] Fet was a lyric poet of the late nineteenth century, a precursor of the Symbolists.
[20] Dobrolyubov (1836-61) and Chernyshevsky (1828-89) were among the ancestors of the Russian revolutionaries.
[21] Komsomol: the Communist Youth League.
[22]
[23] A barrack in a prison camp inhabited (solely or mainly) by professional criminals.
[24] One of the ultra-reactionary and anti-Semitic organizations responsible for the pogroms at the beginning of the century.
[25] Jug, plywood, puddle, sour milk, duckweed, scarecrow, lazy, kitten.
[26] A collection of poems by the Ukrainian poet T. Chevtchenko.
[27] Ulrich was President of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court. He presided at several of the Great Purge Trials. N.I. Yezhov was People's Commissar for Internal Affairs, 1936- 1938.
[28] Between 1923 and 1934 the Soviet security service was known as the OGPU (United State Political Administration).
[29] The Communist children's organization.
[30] A quotation from a poem by Heine.
[31] From a short lyric of Pushkin's.
[32] An anonymous twelfth-century epic poem.
[33] An allusion to Gogol's play,
[34] The Tsarist Secret Police.
[35] 'This will make your voice beautiful!'
[36] 'Caps off!'
[37] A quotation from a famous song about the Cossack chieftain, Stenka Razin.
[38] Cossack chieftain.
[39] Khrushchev.
[40] I.e. prisoners still capable of a full day's work.
[41] Common criminals who have broken the underworld code.
[42] A revolutionary organization of the nineteenth century.
[43] A light biplane.
[44] The Russian word
[45] A minister under Alexander I. Here he epitomises a narrow-minded and rigid bureaucracy.
[46] The subject of a famous story by Gogol.
[47] Dentist.
