Dead Souls

Russians (and others) have a custom of making the sign of the cross over their mouths when they yawn, to keep evil spirits from flying in.

23

Koshchey the Deathless is a wicked character from Russian folktales. The hero of the tales must cross the sea, come to an island, find an oak tree, dig up a chest under the oak tree, find in the chest a hare, in the hare a duck, in the duck an egg, and in the egg a needle. When the hero breaks off the point of the needle, Koshchey dies.

24

Theodoras Colocotronis (1770-1843), a Greek general, was another hero of the Greek war of independence.

25

The line 'caw itself away at the top of its crow's voice' flew here from the fable The Crow and the Fox, by Ivan Krylov (1769-1844). It is proverbial in Russia.

26

Napoleon, at the head of a 500,000-man army, invaded Russia in 1812. At the end of the same year, he managed to retreat with only a few thousand troops. Later in Dead Souls these events will be referred to simply as 'the year 'twelve.'

27

Rus was the old name for Russia, before Rossiya came into use in the sixteenth century. In the nineteenth century, Rus began to be used again, especially in romantic apostrophes to the fatherland. It is in this sense, or in an ironic parody of it, that Gogol uses the word.

28

A kulich is a rich, sweet yeast bread, generally cylindrical in form, baked especially for Easter.

29

The different denominations of Russian banknotes were given different colors; red was the color of the ten- rouble bill.

30

Johann Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), German romantic idealist poet and playwright, profoundly influenced Russian literature and thought in the early nineteenth century.

31

A zertsalo was a small three-faced glass pyramid bearing an eagle and certain edicts of the emperor Peter the Great (1682-1725), which stood on the desk in every government office.

32

The 'Komarinsky' is a Russian dance song with rather racy words, which Gogol replaces here with the Russian equivalent of 'blankety-blank.'

33

Werther and Charlotte are characters from The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), a novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749—1832). What Chichikov recites, however, is not from that novel (written in prose), but from a poem by the forgotten Russian poet Vassily Tumansky (1800-60) entitled Werther to Charlotte (an Hour Before His Death).

34

The English pedagogue Joseph Lancaster (1778-1838) established a monitorial system of education in which a master taught the best pupils, who then taught others.

35