The Petty Demon (56 page)

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These are famous lines taken from the Romantic poem “The Demon” by Mikhail Yurievich Lermontov (1814–1841).

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Reshetnikov, Fyodor Mikhaylovich (1841–1871). A novelist of the 1860’s with strong democratic views and a follower of Belinsky,
Chernyshevksy and Dobrolyubov. His best-known novel was
The People of Podlipno
(1864) which dealt with the depressed and exploited lives of the peasantry and
Lumpenproletariat
.

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Slowacki, Juliusz (1809–1849). A Polish poet and dramatist whose early works depicted the romantic image of the solitary and
disenchanted hero. Much of his work was written and published abroad (Paris). Together with A. Mickiewicz he belonged to the
foremost representatives of Polish revolutionary romanticism. Obviously he could have had no influence on Byron (1788–1824),
whose works preceded those of Slowacki’s.

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Foma Gordeyev
(1899) was the title of Gorky’s first important novel. The hero of the novel, Foma Gordeyev, is the young son of a rich Volga
merchant. He is disenchanted by the lack of spiritual values in both his father and the entire merchant class. When he tries
to resist the traditional autocratic and undemocratic ways of his class, he is eventually destroyed. The novel was praised
for the starkness and brutality of its portrayal of the merchant world.

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A reference to Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818–83), one of the great triumvirate of 19th-century Russian novelists that included
Tolstoi and Dostoevsky.

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These are probably names of brothels in St. Petersburg

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These are probably names of brothels in St. Petersburg

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In Russian the bird is a “sirin,” which is both a small owl-like bird and a mythological bird from ancient Russian folklore
that has the face and breast of a young girl.

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Nadson, Semyon Yakovlevich (1862–1887). Perhaps the most famous and inspirational of the democratically-minded “civic” poets.
He died prematurely of tuberculosis. However, to the romantically-inclined, his death came as much from spiritual causes (disenchantment,
sorrow and painful sensitivity) as from physical.

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Nekrasov, Nikolai Alexeyevich (1821–1878). Perhaps the most famous poet of the mid-nineteenth century in Russia and the leading
representative of the realist-democratic tendency in “civic” poetry. In 1846 he gained control of the journal
The Contemporary
, which, until its suppression in 1866, was the leading journal in Russia, publishing both Turgenev and Tolstoy, as well as
the civic critics like Belinsky, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov. In 1867 he took over another influential journal,
Notes of the Fatherland
, which he published until his death. Minayev, Dmitri Dmitrievich (1835–1889). A translator and minor Russian poet who belonged
to the Nekrasov school. He worked in various democratic journals of his day, including those owned by Nekrasov. Famous for
his parodies, epigrams and puns on topical subjects.

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Salieri, Antonio (1750–1825). An Italian composer who lived in Vienna after 1766. He was reputedly insanely jealous of Mozart
and a legend circulated that he had poisoned the great composer Pushkin utilized that legend in his “little tragedy” entitled
“Mozart and Salieri.”