THINGS RESOLVED, IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER

Chernyshevsky quotation on p. 3 of RT

This is indeed at Chernyshevsky, PSS, v, p. 217. To be pedantic, Chernyshevsky’s sentence ends ‘and concern to liberalism’. One might say ‘to the liberals’, as IB does, but there is no ‘only’ in the Russian sentence. I’ll take out ‘only’.

Chaadaev reference on p. 15 of RT

This is apropos of a letter that Chaadaev wrote to Count ‘Prince’, RT 10: wrongly? This is tricky. In the two editions of the Soviet encyclopaedia that I have consulted, and in Seton-Watson’s The Russian Empire 1801-1917, Orlov is indeed described as ‘Prince’. But you’ll see that in the letter in question Chaadaev addresses him as ‘Count’, and it is hardly likely that Ch. would have offended the person with whom he wanted to ingratiate himself by accidentally demoting him! Moreover Zhikharev, in his account of the episode, repeatedly refers to Orlov as ‘Count’. I can’t adjudicate without doing more research on Orlov. Perhaps he was a Count at the time that Chaadaev wrote to him but was elevated to Prince in the last ten years of his life (he died in 1861), but that doesn’t sound a very plausible explanation to me. If you want to follow closely the text that IB has used as his source here, then I suppose ‘Count’ would be better. But you may think that there are insufficient grounds to quibble with IB’s description of him as ‘Prince’, so you could just leave it. I think I’d better, unless I’m surer of my ground. A. F. Orlov, Head of the Third Section, in 1851 (the precise date of the letter is not known). The letter (which was written in Russian) can be found in P. Ia. Chaadaev, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i izbrannye pis′ma (Moscow: Izdatel′stvo Nauka, 1991), vol. ii, pp. 255 (and see the notes on pp. 391-2), among other places. wonderful: added to The original source is Vestnik Evropy, September 1871, pp. 50-51, which I have not been able to consult. I can check this, but I think the PSS ref. should suffice: after all, in lots of other notes a reference is given to a collected edition, not to the original publication. Or do you think I should track all quotations back to their first publication? No I wouldn’t attempt this. A relief! But in this case it was obviously necessary to check back. I’ll deal with the VE passages in a separate reply to your later message about this, if I don’t clear up everything here. That would be quite a nightmare! Chaadaev’s letter was introduced there by his first biographer, M. I. Zhikharev, who is the ‘nephew’ to whom IB refers.

I have three minute quibbles with IB: (i) Zhikharev was not strictly speaking Chaadaev’s nephew but the grandson of the older sister of Chaadaev’s mother i.e. first cousin once removed: so ‘cousin’ would do? Yes, I suppose so: I find family relationships hard to follow!(see the source PSSIP cited above, p. 578); (ii) Chaadaev says Nicholas was sent to restore order in Europewill substitute (rather than IB’s ‘the world’); and (iii) Chaadaev’s response to Zhikharev, as reported by the latter, was also in French (‘Mon cher, on tient à sa peau’), so one might as well leave that in French, given that the preceding question has been left in French. or translate the other bit? ‘Why this unnecessary act of meanness?’? Your translation seems fine. And yes, Zhikharev’s question should be in English, because it is in Russian in the original. But I wonder whether it would be better to couch the question in indirect speechgood idea, which is what Zhikharev is doing, in spite of the fact that he puts quotation marks round this material. As for Chaadaev’s response, I’d be inclined to leave that in French, both because Ch. is going over to a different language here and because French is what Ch. wrote in as a rule (e.g. his famous first ‘Philosophical Letter’).OK, but I’d better translate in the footnote.

Baron Korf on p. 10 of RT

I think it must be p. 626 of Shilder that IB has used, as you assume, but what Shilder says is slightly different, if we are to be pedantic as I always try to be!, from IB’s account.

The account in Shilder has Orlov coming out of the tsar’s study, wiping away a tear, and saying that the tsar had read to him the draft of the manifesto in which Nicholas outlined ideas that he wanted Korf to write up. Orlov had said to the tsar that what he had heard was already so good that nobody could improve on it. Korf was then called into Nicholas, who read his draft to Korf, pausing from time to time to gloss it. Korf too was in enraptured and went to kiss Nicholas’ hand when he had finished reading, but Nicholas would not let him and embraced Korf instead. The tsar did not ask about Korf’s draft or mention it again.

So, reading IB’s account from ll. 8-6 up, I would say that there is no evidence here that Nicholas had tears in his eyes when he read his manifesto to Korf, or that Korf was almost reduced to tears (although the reading did move him deeply), or that Korf destroyed his draft as unworthy (although conceivably Shilder goes on to report this on p. 627, which I have not seen). this is the sort of thing I probably wouldn’t change, as it would disrupt IB’s account too much; understood I feel torn about this, though giving the right reference helps, since readers are then able to check for themselves; I’ll scan you a copy of p. 627 later in case this affects your judgement I haven’t yet looked at p. 627.

Incidentally, strictly speaking Shilder ought to be transliterated with a prime or apostrophe to indicate the soft sign after the ‘l’: Shil′der. good point; will add that; btw, what do you use for the soft sign? it doesn’t seem to be a prime (´) or a straight apostrophe (') or a smart apostrophe (’) … Any of these signs would do. Personally I like the primeso do I, for the same reason: but what I was trying to discover was what key you used to get what appears in your ‘Shil′der’, which looks good because it’s less sloping than Word’s prime; an italic straight apostrophe–'– gives the same result, but your symbol isn’t in italic, oddly …, because it is distinctive (i.e. not an apostrophe), but you’ll see all three. The important thing, perhaps, is just to indicate the soft sign somehow.

Incidentally, I’ll answer here a further question about transliteration that you raise in another message. Yes, I do suggest you modernise -ago to -ogo, which is how this adjectival flexing will be spelt after the Bolsheviks’ orthographic reform of 1918. You are quite right to suppose that if you were to try to render the pre-revolutionary orthography then it wouldn’t stop at this flexion. You would have to transliterate all the hard signs at the end of words and maybe some other archaic features of the language. OK, thanks; -ogo it is

The Menshikov or Buturlin or Annenkov committee on pp. 12-13 of RT

I should think that you are right that p. 637 of Shilder is the source here, but what Shilder says is as follows.

Buturlin was so zealous and despotic that he wanted to have some verses excised from an acathistus on the Virgin Mary written by the seventeenth-century saint Dmitrii of Rostov on the grounds that they were revolutionary. The tsar (I assume it is the tsar: the term used is batiushka, ‘our little father’, which was often applied to the tsar, especially by the peasants) told Buturlin that he was thus censuring his own saint (Buturlin’s first name was Dmitrii), and who had never been thought of as a revolutionary! According to the line to which you refer (l. 15) Buturlin says, albeit in a jocular tone: ‘if the Gospel had not been a well-known book the censorship would of course have had to correct it’. Later on there is a reference to a satirical poem published in the Northern Bee (a reactionary paper), but there is no reference to the tsar’s views on it.

It may be that I ought to look at the surrounding pages in Shilder, to see if there is anything that is nearer to the anecdote that IB relates, but if there is not then IB’s claim that the committee (in whichever of its various incarnations) ‘actually denounced a satirical poem approved by the Tsar himself’ is some way wide of the mark. oh God; I’ll scan you some more pages, but this sounds like another unrescuable muddle I haven’t looked at the other scanned pages yet.

THINGS I’VE HAVEN’T YET RESOLVED

Belinsky quotation on p. 2 of RT

I’ve had a quick skim through all Belinsky’s letters of 1846 and 1847 in the definitive Soviet edition of his works, hoping that the sentence as it appears in the Russian, starting with the capital B, would leap out at me, but it does not. Of course, the quotation might have been slightly doctored. I’ll go through the letters to likely addressees again, more carefully. As you say, needle in a haystack stuff. Dan says that Belinsky wrote the quoted words to his friends ‘after his trip round Russia in 1846’ so it is more likely to be a letter of early 1847, before Belinsky went off on a foreign trip, but of course Dan may not have phrased things with great accuracy. It sounds like something Belinsky might have said, but I don’t think I’ve come across it elsewhere. oh dear: thanks for looking, anyway After some further, as yet fruitless, sleuthing I have a suggestion to make. I think that Dan’s source for his material on Belinsky is probably G. V. Plekhanov, the first Russian Marxist who wrote voluminously and with great lucidity and elegance about Russian thought from the age of Peter the Great on. I say this because I see a reference to Plekhanov’s work on Belinsky in a note in Dan (we do have the Russian original in our library I looked at this as well as at the English translation, but the scholarly apparatus was woefully inadequate, indeed largely absent, in both, and there was no indication of the source of this quotation from Belinsky, but it is in store, so I looked at the translation of Dan’s work, edited by Leonard Schapiro if I remember rightly, which is on open access). My suggestion is that you see if Oxford has the title by Plekhanov to which I think Dan refers OK, will check (I am speaking from memory). If it does not, or if Dan’s reference is actually to the complete works of Plekhanov (Sochineniia, 24 vols, Moscow-Leningrad 1923-7), then I suggest you look at this edition. Volume 23 has a lot on Belinsky, and also an earlier volume which I do not have in front of me at home but the number of which I could easily look up next week if you want itthanks; will let you know. I do have this (I think rare) edition myself, and could comb through it more carefully than I have yet done, but I would rather not, as this is going to be pretty time-consuming. On the other hand you do have a quite substantial sentence in the Russian to help you track it down. I suspect that if we do find this quotation in Plekhanov there may still be doubt as to its authenticity since, as you pointed out earlier, there don’t seem to be any letters of Belinsky’s to more than one addressee in 1846-7 indeed.

Just one other thought about this. It may be worth also looking in a pre-revolutionary edition of Belinsky’s letters that Dan could have used, i.e. V.G.Belinsky, Pis’ma, ed. E. A. Liatsky, 3 vols, St P. 1914. If there were any letters there addressed to more than one person in late 1846/early 1847, then that might be it. This is a very useful edition, which I recall using long ago when working on Botkin. But it would be a bit odd if it had things by Belinsky that did not subsequently get incorporated in Belinsky, PSS.quite so; but I’ll check it– it’s in Taylor

Another place to look for this source – I ramble on – would be the fourth volume of Nechaeva’s standard Soviet life and works study of Belinsky.OK

Norov, Pyatkovsky and Navalikhin on p. 26 of RT

Of these three only the first appears in the index of the definitive ninety-volume edition of Tolstoi’s work, and I’m not yet sure that Norov is mentioned in connection with War and Peace. This suggests to me that they could be difficult to track down. I think we had perhaps better let sleeping dogs lie here; perhaps IB drew these remarks from a secondary source, but which? When was The Hedgehog and the Fox first published? 1953 as a book, 1951 as a (shorter) article If it postdates Reg Christian’s work on Tolstoy, or Henri Troyat’s, then perhaps those works could have been IB’s source?what are the dates of those?

YOUR QUERY ABOUT TITLES IN FOOTNOTES

It does seem wrong to give the titles in the notes to the essay on Herzen and Bakunin in English when it is the Russian edition of Herzen’s works to which IB is referring. My instinct would therefore be to transliterate, bringing the notes in this chapter into line with the notes elsewhere in the volume. Of course, you could give an additional reference to an English version of the work where one exists, and if you wanted me to check that the references to the English version were indeed to the passages cited in the references to the Russian works then I’d be happy to do that. that’d be very kind, Derek; I’ve already checked some of them, but sometimes the fragment quoted is so small that my rudimentary Russian makes it difficult for me to pin down the quotation; I’m glad of your overall verdict about titles, which coincides with the provisional decision I’d arrived at myself: to put titles in Russian transliteration, with English translations in brackets after the first occurrence in cases where an English translation exists (only From the Other Shore and My Past and Thoughts?). You’ll find this policy implemented in the online notes file.

The quotation from Dostoevsky in RT, p. 172

This is to be found in Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer (Dnevnik pisatelia, 1873), in F. M. Dostoevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh (Leningrad: Izdatel′stvo Nauka, 1972-90), xxi, p. 10. bravo! inserted in

In Belinsky ??I mean Dostoevsky of coursegood, thanks. I am fixated on the thoughts attributed to Belinsky about potatoes and constitutions. the ‘he’ at the beginning of the quotation is not actually the first word of the sentence, but comes after a semi-colon, so perhaps ought not to have a capital letter. I’d certainly follow that rule if quoting in the original language, though in the case of translations I am prepared to be a little bit more flexible if the result is more natural; however, in this case I see no reason not to get it right.