Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse (Oxford World's Classics) Page 21
Albani’s glory: Francesco Albani (1578–1660): Italian painter much admired in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Chapter 6
La sotto … dole: ‘There, where the days are cloudy and short | Is born a race that has no fear of death.’
Regulus: the Roman general Marcus Atilius Regulus, who, upon his capture by the Carthaginians, was sent to Rome to deliver harsh terms for peace; whereupon he returned to his captors as he had promised and was executed.
Véry’s: Café Véry, a Parisian restaurant.
Delvig: Baron Anton Delvig (1798–1831), minor poet and one of Pushkin’s closest friends, his classmate at the Lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo.
Lepage’s deadly pieces: Jean Lepage (1779–1822), famous Parisian gunsmith.
Chapter 7
Lyóvshin’s crew: students of works by Vasily Lyovshin (1746–1826), author of numerous tracts on gardening and agriculture.
iron bust: A statuette of Napoleon.
The bard of Juan and the Giaour: Byron.
Autómedons: Autómedon was the charioteer of Achilles in the Iliad.
Petróvsky Castle: the chateau not far from Moscow where Napoleon took refuge from the fires in the city.
‘Archival dandies’: young men from well-connected families who held cushy jobs at the Moscow Archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Vyázemsky: Prince Pyotr Vyazemsky (1792–1878), friend of Pushkin.
Grand Assembly: the Russian Assembly of Nobility, a Moscow club for noblemen.
Chapter 8
Lycée: 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.
Derzhávin: Gavrila Derzhávin (1743–1816): the most outstanding Russian poet of the eighteenth century. In the year before he died, Derzhávin attended a school examination at which the 16-year-old Pushkin recited one of his poems, which the old man praised.
Lenore: the heroine of the romantic ballad by Gottfried Bürger (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.
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.
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.
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 Voronskáya: an invented name for a stylized society belle. Russian commentators on the poem have suggested various real-life prototypes.
badge on those two maids-in-waiting: a court decoration with the royal initials, given to ladies-in-waiting of the empress.
Prolázov: 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 émigré and a noted caricaturist.
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; Sébastien 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 Staël (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 santé 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.
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).
‘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
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.
Makáriev Market: a famous market fair held in midsummer in the town of Makariev, to which it moved in 1817 from Nizhni Novgorod.
Terek: a river in the Caucasus.
Kúra‘s and Arágva ‘s banks: refers to two mountain rivers in the Caucasus.
Beshtú: (or Besh Tau): a five-peaked mountain eminence in the northern Caucasus.
Mashúk: one of the peaks in the northern Caucasus.
Orestes with his friend here vied: a reference to the tale of Orestes and his friend Pylades, who argued over which of them would be sacrificed to the goddess Artemis, each wishing to die in the other’s place. In the end both escaped, along with the temple priestess, who turned out to be Iphigenia, Orestes’ sister.
Mithridates: King of Pontus, who in 63 BC, after being defeated by Rome, ordered one of his soldiers to kill him. Pushkin visited his alleged tomb while travelling in the Crimea in 1820.
Adam Mickiérwicz: Polish national poet (1798–1855), who spent almost five years in Russia, where he made the acquaintance of Pushkin. His visit to the Crimea in 1825 provided material for his Crimean Sonnets.
Cypris: Venus or Aphrodite.
Bakhchisarai: the reference is to a fountain in the garden of the Crimean Khan’s palace. See Pushkin’s narrative poem ‘The Fountain of Bakhchisarai’.
Zaréma: the jealous wife of the Khan, one of the heroines in Pushkin’s poem ‘The Fountain of Bakhchisarai’.
Morali: (or Moor Ali): apparently a Moorish seaman or pirate, whom Pushkin met during his stay in Odessa.
Tumánsky: a minor poet who served along with Pushkin as a clerk to the governor of Odessa.
Automne: César Automne, a well-known restaurateur in Odessa.
Ausonia: Italy.
SELECTION OF OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
SERGEI AKSAKOV
A Russian Gentleman
ANTON CHEKHOV
Early Stories
Five Plays
The Princess and Other Stories
The Russian Master and Other Stories
The Steppe and Other Stories
Twelve Pla
ys
Ward Number Six and Other Stories
A Woman’s Kingdom and Other Stories
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
An Accidental Family
Crime and Punishment
Devils
A Gentle Creature and Other Stories
The Idiot
The Karamazov Brothers
Memoirs from the House of the Dead
Notes from the Underground and The Gambler
NIKOLAI GOGOL
Village Evenings Near Dikanka and Mirgorod
Plays and Petersburg
ALEXANDER HERZEN
Childhood, Youth, and Exile
MIKHAIL LERMONTOV
A Hero of our Time
ALEXANDER PUSHKIN
Eugene Onegin
The Queen of Spades and Other Stories
LEO TOLSTOY
Anna Karenina
The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories
The Raid and Other Stories
Resurrection
War and Peace
IVAN TURGENEV
Fathers and Sons
First Love and Other Stories
A Month in the Country
APOLLINAIRE,
Three Pre-Surrealist Plays
ALFRED JARRY, and MAURICE MAETERLINCK
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
Cousin Bette
Eugénie Grandet
Père Goriot
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
The Flowers of Evil
The Prose Poems and Fanfarlo
DENIS DIDEROT
This is Not a Story and Other Stories
ALEXANDRE DUMAS (PÈRE)
The Black Tulip
The Count of Monte Cristo
Louise de la Vallière
The Man in the Iron Mask
La Reine Margot
The Three Musketeers
Twenty Years After
ALEXANDRE DUMAS (FILS)
La Dame aux Camélias
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Madame Bovary
A Sentimental Education
Three Tales
VICTOR HUGO
The Last Day of a Condemned Man and Other Prison Writings
J.-K. HUYSMANS
Against Nature
JEAN DE LA FONTAINE
Selected Fables
PIERRE CHODERLOS DE LACLOS
Les Liaisons dangereuses
MME DE LAFAYETTE
The Princesse de Clèves
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
A Day in the Country and Other Stories Mademoiselle Fifi
PROSPER MÉRIMÉE
Carmen and Other Stories
BLAISE PASCAL
Pensées and Other Writings
JEAN RACINE
Britannicus, Phaedra, and Athaliah
EDMOND ROSTAND
Cyrano de Bergerac
MARQUIS DE SADE
The Misfortunes of Virtue and Other Early Tales
GEORGE SAND
Indiana
The Master Pipers
Mauprat
The Miller of Angibault
STENDHAL
The Red and the Black
The Charterhouse of Parma
JULES VERNE
Around the World in Eighty Days
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Seas
VOLTAIRE
Candide and Other Stories
Letters concerning the English Nation
ÉMILE ZOLA
L’Assommoir
The Attack on the Mill
La Bête humaine
Germinal
The Ladies’ Paradise
The Masterpiece
Nana
Thérèse Raquin
Till Eulenspiegel: His Adventures
Eight German Novellas
GEORG BÜCHNER
Danton’s Death, Leonce and Lena, and Woyzeck
J. W. VON GOETHE
Elective Affinities
Erotic Poems
Faust: Part One and Part Two
E. T. A. HOFFMANN
The Golden Pot and Other Tales
J. C. F. SCHILLER
Don Carlos and Mary Stuart
LUDOVICO ARIOSTO
Orlando Furioso
GIOVANNI BOCCACCIO
The Decameron
MATTEO MARIA BOIARDO
Orlando Innamorato
LUIS VAZ DE CAMÕES
The Lusíads
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote de la Mancha
Exemplary Stories
DANTE ALIGHIERI
The Divine Comedy
Vita Nuova
BENITO PÉREZ GALDÓS
Nazarín
LEONARDO DA VINCI
Selections from the Notebooks
NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI
Discourses on Livy
The Prince
MICHELANGELO
Life, Letters, and Poetry
PETRARCH
Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works
GIORGIO VASARI
The Lives of the Artists
JANE AUSTEN
Catharine and Other Writings
Emma
Mansfield Park
Northanger Abbey, Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sanditon
Persuasion
Pride and Prejudice
Sense and Sensibility
ANNE BRONTË
Agnes Grey
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
CHARLOTTE BRONTË
Jane Eyre
The Professor
Shirley
Villette
EMILY BRONTË
Wuthering Heights
WILKIE COLLINS
The Moonstone
No Name
The Woman in White
CHARLES DARWIN
The Origin of Species
CHARLES DICKENS
The Adventures of Oliver Twist
Bleak House
David Copperfield
Great Expectations
Hard Times
Little Dorrit
Martin Chuzzlewit
Nicholas Nickleby
The Old Curiosity Shop