Translator’s Notes

1. “Nothing so forms a young man as an intimacy with a woman of good breeding.”

2. Tolstoy makes a slip here: he was twenty-seven.

3. Russians generally make a distinction between Europeans and Russians.

4. To keep peace between peasants and owners.

5. A fermented drink prepared from mare’s milk.

6. The desyatina is about 2¾ acres.

7. Tolstoy’s version differs slightly in a few places from our own Authorized or Revised version. I have followed his text, for in a letter to Fet, quoted on p: 11, vol. II, of my Life of Tolstoy, he says that “The Authorized English version [of Ecclesiastes] is bad.”

8. This passage is noteworthy as being one of the few references made by Tolstoy at this period to the revolutionary or “Back-to-the-People” movement, in which many young men and women were risking and sacrificing home, property, and life itself from motives which had much in common with his own perception that the upper layers of Society are parasitic and prey on the vitals of the people who support them.

9. In Russia Sunday was called Resurrection-day.

10. A sect that rejects sacraments and ritual.

11. At the time this was written, capital punishment was considered to be abolished in Russia.