1 Quoted by Joseph Barnes in his translation of Andrei Platonov, The Fierce and Beautiful World (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1970), p.19.
2 Antaeus, No. 4 (Winter, 1971), p. 122.
3 [This translation by Marian Fell has been slightly revised by the editor.]
4 Fractured Latin and German: “Twigs children-healing flogger.”
5 Lower Russian Orthodox clergy are permitted to marry.
6 Antan Chekhov’s Life and Thought: Selected Letters and Commentary, edited by Michael Henry Heim and Simon Karlinsky (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 447.
7 Leopold Antonovich Sulerzhitsky (1872-1916) was trained as an artist and stage designer, though he was expelled from school for making revolutionary speeches. A devoted disciple of Tolstoy, he was entrusted by the master with organizing the emigration of the Dukhobors to Canada in 1898 and 1899. The proceeds from Tolstoy’s last novel, Resurrection, enabled the religious sect to make the journey and escape persecution at home. At the time of his death, Suterzhicsky was a director of the Moscow Art Theater.
8 Prince Pyotr Alekseevich Kropotkin (1842-1921) was a leading theorist of anarchism.
9 A. B. Goldenweiser (1875-1961) was a composer and pianist.
10 In the margin of the printed text Gorky wrote: “In order to avoid misunderstanding, I should add that I regard religious writing the same way I do artistic writing—the lives of Buddha, Christ, and Mo-hammed ] see as novels in the mode of fantasy.”
11 Sections VIII and XVII have been omitted.
12 The estate of the Yusupovs bordered on Gaspra, the estate of Countess Panina, near Yalta on the southern coast of the Crimea, where Tolstoy was staying in 1901-2.
13 “We shall wait” and “in the rain.” Except for near homophony, there is no connection. The following paragraph, containing some complex speculations about Russian words, has been omitted.
14 S. Y. Yelpatevsky (1854-1933), a Populist writer, revolutionary, and medical doctor, left literary portraits of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, and others.
15 Rozanov (1856-1919), a leading philosopher and critic, theorized about the central role of the sexual instinct in the nature of man. He is the author of a notable study of Dostoevsky, to whose former mistress he was married.
16 The principal character in Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata.”
18 Tikhomirov was a member of the People’s Will Party, which was responsible for the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. He was later pardoned by Alexander III and became a reactionary and monarchist.
19 D. V. Nikitin (1874-1960) was the Tolstoys’ house physician from 1902 to 1904.
20 V. K. Plehve (1846-1904) was one of the most notorious reactionaries in the government of Nicholas II.
21 V. G. Korolenko (1853-1921) was a novelist, journalist, and editor.
22 L. N. Andreev (1871-1919), short story writer and novelist, was the author of The Seven That Were Hanged (1908).
23 Masha is a familiar form of Maria. Russians were usually named for saints, and the name day was celebrated, rather than the birthday.
25 Grigory Zinoviev, a leading Bolshevik, who was head of the Petrograd Soviet. In 1936 he was executed for “confessedly” plotting against Stalin and the Soviet regime.
26 Poking fun at the Bolsheviks’ weakness for abbreviations, which were a novelty at the time.
27 Modern Russian Poetry, translated by Vladimir Markov and Merrill Sparks (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967).
28 This translation, first published in 1965, has been slightly revised.
29 Central Union of Consumers’ Cooperatives.
30 Mixail Vasil‘evic Mabo { 1879-1961 ) left the Soviet Union in 1921. I had the pleasure of an interview with him in Freehold, New Jersey, where he was living in retirement, a few weeks before his death. Mabo (or Mabo-Azovskij, to use his nom de plume) recorded some of his recollections of Mandelstam in an article in the Novoe Russkoe Slovo (New York) for 14 January 1949. Perhaps it should be noted that Mabo remembers Aleksandr Sarandinaki to have been Harbor Master in Kerc, not Theodosia, where the post was filled by a certain A. Novinskij. And, to fulfill a pledge made to Mabo, I should like to record that he did not write poems, as Mandelstam says, but plays, and he was still writing them at the time of his death.
31 Mandelstam’s error for “tommies.”
32 The information and propaganda section of the White Army.
33 A Cossack military rank (equivalent to lieutenant in the Russian army); originally, a commander of a unit of one hundred men.
34 The first (censored) version of the novel appeared in two issues of the journal Moskva. The full text was published in Moscow in 1973.
35 Literally “high field.”
36 The annual celebration of the 1917 Revolution.
37 Seg: a Finnish corruption of St. Serge; Pogost: churchyard.
38 Good-bye in English in the text.
39 Translated by Richard Lourie from the Russian (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1981).