A Hero of Our Time, page 18
southern Russian tribesmen, Christians, who served as skilled cavalrymen and sort of military police force.
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word used is actually "Giaour," Turkish for non-Muslim, like the Yiddish "goy."
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Nabokov believes it means "Black Eye" in Turkic, but again, the Circassians here didn't speak a Turkic language. The love affair between Russian men and their horses is described in many books.
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famous sword-maker made very sharp blades layered and tempered like Toledo steel. Pistols and muskets of the time had only a short range and were inaccurate from a moving horse. Swords and knives were important emblems for men.
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probably invented by Lermontov, and his lie about its being in prose first is just piling fiction upon preposterous fiction. Lermontov wrote surpassingly good verse still memorized by Russians, but pretty much unknown in English.
Author's note: I apologize to my readers for having put Kazbich's song, which of course was told in prose, into verse; but habit is second nature.
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Nabokov lists a whole page of these stock phrases Lermontov uses to indicate emotion in various Romantic ways.
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mountain mammal like an antelope or goat.
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bride-money, dowry. Many tribes regulate marriages by requiring the husband to pay for the wife before marriage – if she returns to her family he doesn't always get his money back; alternatively, her family gives money which is often retained by her no matter what happens.
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the narrator (can you figure out which one here?) has already forgotten that this courser never needed to be tethered.
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Nabokov states something apparently is wrong with the text here.
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"I once witnessed...," etc.: Nabokov emphasizes the role of eavesdropping in the novel as a literary device to advance the plot, since the exchange of letters as in the Romantic epistolary novel had been worn out by this time. Psychoanalytic critics point out the social isolation involved in this behavior. It also brings in the element of chance vs. fate that runs through the text. Furthermore, it fits right in with the strange texture of the text where fictional characters seem to invent and imitate one another and listen in to what each other says – amazing when you think of it – what is really the truth in this novel?
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i.e., Muslims on the south side of the mountains.
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the Russian word is the same for heaven, sky, or firmament.
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Gamba, French diplomat to Georgia, travel writer (1826), misinterpreted Mount Krestovaya (Mount of the Cross, from Russian "krest" or cross) as "Mount Saint Christopher."
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prosaic central Russian provincial cities.
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the whistling highway robber of Russian folklore who could frighten by imitating wild animals.
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(1672-1725) occupied Derbent in 1702 and Baku in 1723 and traveled through East Caucasus but there is no record he went as far as this part of the mountains.
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polyana, which really means clearing.
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so much for the blood-brother.
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did Kazbich want to carry her off?: The previous motivation seems to have been forgotten – why didn't he take off after his beloved courser instead of the girl?
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we couldn't bring ourselves to use the word "poultice" here.
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or Shapsugi, a tribe of the Circassians in the northwest Caucasus.
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now Krasnodar, North Caucasus, spa town perhaps 60 miles northwest of Vladikavkaz.
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the dry steppes, or rolling upland prairie hills north of the Caucasus, were crossed by (Bactrian) camel caravans.
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comic character from 1785 and later operas.
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Nabokov uses the term "bags" here because the local people were known to collect honey in goatskins.
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or coy woman: from his short novel, La femme de trente ans (1834)
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all-too-revealing Romantic so-called autobiography of 1782. See on-line version.
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nechisto, just unclean, but there are overtones of haunted or evil, perhaps influenced by Undina.
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Black Sea port near Caucasus, south of Taman.
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"On that day shall the mute sing out and the blind shall see:" Isaiah 35:5-6, 29:18.
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Nabokov insists the word used means "boulders" and goes into a long explanation of why it should be translated "billows".
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as the name indicates, this is what is left of an ancient Greek colony on the Black Sea.
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actually, "undine," as in Zhukovsky's poem Undina and an 1811 French romance.
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changed here from "gloaming".
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not to be confused with the political movement a little later, this was a foolish group of dandies in Paris who ineffectually looked down on the solid middle class and posed such ridiculous propositions as this one.
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pseudo-science such as phrenology and diagnosis by facial features was common at the time. It would not be surprising to see Roman features in people living in Black Sea towns.
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heroine from Goethe's Wilhelm Meister.
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spa town on river about 60 miles west of Yekateringrad and north of the Caucasus and its highest peak, Mt. Elbrus. Lermontov was killed in a duel here. A spa is a place with mineral water springs thought to have healing properties and thus frequented by wounded soldiers or other sick or old people. It was a good place to mix and form new social relationships and so a suitable place for a novel. Finally, this type of society gathering was usual in the society novels that Lermontov effectively puts paid to in this segment (the Encyclopædia Brittanica article on Lermontov seems to miss the point of its irony entirely).
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"the last cloud...": from Pushkin's The Storm Cloud, 1835.
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swelling of the glands.
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we couldn't bear to use the term "lorgnette," a sort of magnifying spectacle often with a little handle, used to see at a distance, as at the opera or to make an impression on someone.
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Nabokov notes the tendency as here to veer into the past tense as if someone – maybe Pechorin? – is trying out this character for a role in a play or a book.
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French for love-letters.
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cut very short.
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"My friend, I hate men in order not to despise them – otherwise life would be too disgusting a farce."
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"My friend, I despise women in order not to love them – otherwise life would be too ridiculous a melodrama."
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handsome young man loved by Aphrodite in Greek legend.
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a stock allusion to an old report that the Roman fortune-tellers who worked by examining animals' guts used to laugh in secret reference to their play-acting of predictions whenever two of them met.
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this whole speech is one of the most revealing of Pechorin's character, according to psychoanalytic critics, who point out the obvious determination by Pechorin to hide as much of his true character as possible at the same time he claims that all is known.
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the word is missing in Parker's text but we agree with Nabokov in replacing it here.
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cherkeska, i.e., from the Cherkes.
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balki, Turkic, like the Spanish barranco.
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another reference to Chatsky, see below.
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"My God, a Circassian (bandit)." "Fear not, ma'am, I am no more dangerous than your companion" (cavalier, gallant knight, meaning Grushnitsky). More polite French phrases follow in this story, such as "That's impossible," "Permit me," and so forth. Upper class Russians spoke French in formal society.
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another spa to the west some ten miles.
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since the Jews were not accepted in Russian society they had to work in such jobs as tailors.
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a magazine meant to be taken seriously, edited by Osip Senkovsky, who, by the way, first reviewed this book rather favorably, but, after Lermontov's death, retracted his judgment and called it infantile.
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economically too small a feudal estate with that many serfs or as they were called "souls".
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famous Caucasian mineral water. In the Kabardian language, nart-sane means drink of the Narts, mythical giants or heroes.
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actually, the imported American black locust tree, which has beautiful white flowers this time of year.
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loosely from Chatsky, or Woe from Wit (1824, 1833), a comedy by Griboyedov that was banned by the censors for political reasons. This work seems to have begun the theme of the Russian "superfluous man" that is continued here and later by many others, including Turgenev and Dostoeyevsky.
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from Eugene Onegin, appeared in 1828.
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1581 Italian poem read in French versions in Russia. See online version.
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the Russians had read a French version of The Vampire: A Tale, by John Polidori (1819).
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read in French translation (though Lermontov knew some English).
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whose fate the Roman augurs, or fortune-tellers, had fully predicted, as in "the ides of March".
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the comedy (play) is over.
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card game like bridge.
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gambling card games.
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chirir', Caucasian new wine.
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we've added "big book" here – it's our predestined fate, the mythical story that the author God has already assigned every detail to our mortal lives, and supposedly written it in a book available for consultation in heaven. Note the parallel to a similar expression at the start of this novel.
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Another online edition of this work can be found at the University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center. That English translation, entitled "The Heart of a Russian," by J. H. Wisdom Marr Murray, N.Y.: Knopf, 1916, has a different order to the chapters and has heavy Victorian prose and sketchy footnotes. However, the edition, by Judy Boss, Carolyn Fay, and David Seaman, does have page numbers and a few color illustrations. We did not refer to it when doing this edition. A text-only version of that translation was released in Project Gutenberg in May, 1997.
For further references, please see the books by Cornwell and Nabokov previously cited, as they contain notes, a map, chronologies, excerpts from critical material, and everything you need.
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