17g ''Archivai dandies': young men from well-connected families who held cushy jobs at the Moscow Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Vyzemsky: Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky (1792-1878), friend of Pushkin.
180 Grand Assembly: the Russian Assembly of Nobility, a Moscow club for noblemen.
Chapter 8
185 Lyce: the lyceum established by Alexander I at Tsarskoe Selo for young aristocrats. Pushkin attended the boarding-school there between 1811 and 1817, and to the end of his life remained deeply attached to his friends of those years. It was at the lyceum that he composed his first poems.
Derzhvin: Gavrila Derzhvin (1743-1816): the most outstanding Russian poet of the eighteenth century. In the year before he died, Derzhvin attended a school examination at which the 16-year-old Pushkin recited one of his poems, which the old man praised.
186 Lenore: the heroine of the romantic ballad by Gottfried Burger (I747-94)-
Tauris: an ancient name for the Crimea. Pushkin's visit to the Crimea and his earlier stay in the Caucasus (to which he refers in a line above) were commemorated in two of his so-called 'southern' poems, The Prisoner of the Caucasus and The Fountain of Bakhchisarai.
Nereids': sea-nymphs, daughters of the sea-god Nereus.
187 sing the savage steppe: an allusion to the narrative poem The Gypsies, yet another of Pushkin's southern works.
my garden: Pushkin's country place at Mikhailovskoe, to which he was confined by the government from August 1824 to September 1826 and where he resumed work on Eugene Onegin.
Demon of my pen!: a reference to his poem 'The Demon', in which he speaks of having been haunted in his youth by an 'evil genius', a spirit of negation and doubt who mocked the ideals of love and freedom.
191 Chatsky: the hero of Griboedov's comedy Woe from Wit (1824). Chatsky, after some three years abroad, turns up on the day of a party at the Moscow house of the girl he loves.
Shishkov: Admiral Alexander Shishkov (1754-1841), the leader of the Archaic group of writers, was a statesman and publicist who attacked both Gallicisms and liberal thought in Russian letters.
192 epigram of style: an allusion to some possible epigrammatic play on the word 'vulgar' and the last name of Faddei Bulgarin ( 1789-1859), a literary critic and notorious police informer who was hostile to Pushkin.
Nina Voronskya: an invented name for a stylized society belle. Russian commentators on the poem have suggested various real-life prototypes.
197 badge on those two maids-in-waiting: a court decoration with the royal initials, given to ladies-in-waiting of the empress.
Proldzov: the name (derived from prolaza, roughly 'sycophant' or 'social climber') appears only in posthumous editions. According to Nabokov it was often attached to ridiculous characters in eighteenth-century Russian comedies and in popular pictures.
Saint-Priest. Count Emmanuel Sen-Pri (1806-28), the son of a French migr and a noted caricaturist.
204 Gibbon and Rousseau . . . Fontenelle he scoured: the listing device is a favourite of Pushkin's. Besides Rousseau, this catalogue of Onegin's reading includes: Edward Gibbon (1737-94), the English historian; Sbastien Chamfort (1740-94), French writer famous for his maxims and epigrams; Alessandro Manzoni ( 1785-1873), Italian novelist and poet of the Romantic school; Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), the German philosopher; Mme de Stal (1766-1817), the French writer (whose novel Delphine was listed earlier as one of Tatyana's favourites); Marie F. X. Bichat (1771-1802), French physician and anatomist,
the author of Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort; Simon Tissot (1728- 1797), a famous Swiss doctor, author of the treatise De la sant des gens de lettres; Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), French philosopher, author of the famous Dictionnaire historique et critique; Bernard Fontenelle (1657-1757), French rationalist philosopher and man of letters, author of Dialogues des morts.
205 Benedetta: 'Benedetta sia la madre' (Blessed be the mother), a popular Venetian barcarolle.
Idol mio: 'Idol mio, piu pace non ho' (My idol, I have peace no longer), the refrain from a duet by Vincenzo Gabussi (1800-46).
212 ''Some are no more, and distant. . . others': though probably written in 1824, these lines were taken almost immediately as an allusion to Pushkin's friends among the executed or exiled Decembrists (participants in the ill-fated revolt of December 1825).
Sadi: the thirteenth-century Persian poet.
Appendix
215 Camenae: water-nymphs identified with the Greek Muses.
Katenin: Pavel Katenin (1792-1853). A minor poet and critic, whose Recollections of Pushkin were published in the twentieth century.
217 Makriev Market: a famous market fair held in midsummer in the town of Makariev, to which it moved in 1817 from Nizhni Novgorod.
