GPU: State Political Directorate (Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravlenie), Soviet Union secret police from 1922–1934.
Dantonesque: reference to Georges Danton, statesman and leader of the French Revolution whose booming voice was legendary.
Thackeray: Though Shklovsky names Thackeray, this refers to Sir Walter Scott’s The Tale of Old Mortality (1816) where the narrator, having decided against writing a conclusion to his novel, is questioned by a friend during tea: “‘Really, madam,’ said I, ‘you must be aware that every volume of a narrative turns less and less interesting as the author draws to a conclusion,—just like your tea, which, though excellent hyson, is necessarily weaker and more insipid in the last cup. Now, as I think the one is by no means improved by the luscious lump of half-dissolved sugar usually found at the bottom of it, so I am of opinion that a history, growing already vapid, is but dully crutched up by a detail of circumstances which every reader must have anticipated, even though the author exhaust on them every flowery epithet in the language.’”
Shklovsky makes occasional errors of this sort throughout the text.
veiki: In Finnish, veikko means friend, brother, or fellow; in Petersburg, the term veiki was used to refer to both the drivers as well as the carriage.
funt: Russian pound (409.5 grams), now obsolete.
Moscow does nothing, Petersburg creates nothing: Paraphrase of a passage in Belinsky’s “Petersburg and Moscow” in Fiziologiya Peterburga (The Physiology of Petersburg). “The inhabitant of Petersburg is eternally sick with the fever of reality; frequently he in reality does nothing [delaet nichego], in contradistinction to the inhabitant of Moscow, who doesn’t do anything [nichego ne delaet], but the ‘nothing’ of the inhabitant of Petersburg for himself is always ‘something.’” (Translation courtesy of Tom Dolack.)
distinguished places of presence and absence: The now-obsolete term prisutstvennoe mesto, literally “place of presence,” indicated the public offices where important meetings and assemblies were held, and by extension the places where power was exercised. Hence the play on words.
Vladimir: A high military decoration in pre-revolutionary Russia.
Hylaea: the name of the original Cubo-Futurist group.
“stone women”: known as kurgan stelae, an ancient form of grave monument in the form of anthropomorphic stone slabs (which in Russia usually depicted women).
Khlebnikov’s grave at the Aleksandr Nevsky cemetery: his grave is actually in Moscow’s Novodevichy Cemetery.
like Mendeleev’s: Mendeleev created the periodic table of elements.
Karamzinists: followers of Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826), writer and historian. At the turn of the nineteenth century, they clashed with the followers of Admiral Shishkov (1753–1841) (Shiskovites) who supported strict linguistic conservatism.
Hermann and Raskolnikov: Protagonists of Pushkin’s “The Queen of Spades” and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, respectively.
“I have forgotten [. . .]”: lines from Osip Mandelstam, Tristia No. 113.
Akaky: Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, protagonist of Gogol’s “The Overcoat.”
In the very name Akaky: the literal meaning of the name, derived from the Greek, meaning “harmless” or “lacking evil,” suggests the extent of humiliation it must have taken to drive the ghost to violence.
Golyadkin: protagonist of Dostoyevsky’s The Double.
shed tears over a work of imagination: from Pushkin’s “Elegy” (1930).
Yudenich was approaching Petrograd: Nikolai Nikolaevich Yudenich (1862–1933), tsarist general and commander of the White Army. His attack on Petrograd, in 1919 during the Russian Civil War, failed.
Sverdlov: Yakov Sverdlov (1885–1919), a political official and Bolshevik leader, was elected chairman of the Central Executive Committee in 1917.
Mont de Piété: name of an institutional pawnbroker organization in Europe from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries.
Kornilov: Lavr Kornilov (1870–1918), tsarist army general, became Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the army in July 1917. A month later, he spear-headed an attempted coup d’état. Shortly thereafter, he helped to establish the Volunteer Army, which fought against the Bolsheviks in the Civil War. He died in battle.
SRs: Acronym that stands for Socialist-Revolutionary Party.
byliny: Russian folk epics.
Sviatoslav: A Kievan prince who was decapitated by his enemies. He appears as a character in Khlebnikov’s “Otter’s Children.”
valenki: traditional Russian boots made of wool felt.
Potemkin villages: the famous “façades” of prosperous villages that Potemkin had ordered constructed in the country to impress the empress when she came to visit.
Krug: “circle” in Russian.
Malyar: “painter” in Russian.
poka chto: for now, for the time being, while, as long as.
nichego: the literal meaning of nichego is “nothing”; colloquially, it is often used as an adverb to mean: “not bad,” “pretty good,” or “so-so.”
Chapayev: famous film by the Vasilyev brothers adapted from Dmitri Furmanov’s eponymous novel.
Third Bourgeois: distributed as Bed and Sofa in Anglophone countries.
Minin and Pozharsky: Kozma Minin (a meat trader) and the prince Dmitry Pozharksy banded together to lead the Volunteer Army that, in September 1612, drove out the Polish forces occupying Moscow, thus putting an end to foreign occupation and the “Time of Troubles.”
skomorokhs: street performers, traveling players in Medieval Russia.
slovesnost: both slovesnost and, later on, pismenost, have the same general meaning as “literature.” But whereas the former derives from slovo, word, the latter derives from pismo, graphic sign or writing.
The translator would like to thank Tom Dolack and Katya Hokanson, as well as Serena Vitale, for their invaluable assistance with all matters Russian.