Doctor levitin, p.33
Doctor Levitin, page 33
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Ryazan Province: Ryazan is an old Russian city and provincial capital situated about 120 miles to the southwest of Moscow.
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Orenburg shawl: Famed Russian shawls knitted from a particularly fine blend of goat down and silk; the craft originated from the city of Orenburg, located on the Ural River close to the border with Kazakhstan.
Shota Rustaveli . . . : The great Georgian poet and statesman Shota Rustaveli (ca. 1160–ca. 1220), commonly considered to be the author of the epic The Knight in the Panther’s Skin, widely read in Russian translation; legend has it that Rustaveli made a pilgrimage to and died in Jerusalem.
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Tvardovsky’s words—that the major character trait of the Russian peasant . . . : Aleksandr Tvardovsky (1910–1971), Russian Soviet poet of peasant stock, most famous for his long narrative poem Vasily Tyorkin, composed and published serially during World War II. The last name of the protagonist, a charismatic Russian peasant turned soldier, comes from the Russian root teret’ (“to grate”; “to grind”) and suggests the special capacity of Russians for bearing it all, for surviving against all odds though life-grinding circumstances, including foreign invasions.
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a pay-for-service health center (in Russian, platnaya poliklinika): Clinics and health centers that charged for services, and offered shorter or no lines and better quality of care, existed in large Soviet cities and stood somewhat apart from the regular, free network of Soviet healthcare.
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Ostrov Station: The town of Ostrov, from which Tatyana Levitina takes a bus to her native village of Maryino, is a district center in the Pskov Province, 27 miles south of Pskov (see note to p. 14).
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red corner (in Russian, krasnyi ugol): The red corner (also known in English as the icon corner) is a place of worship in a traditional Russian Orthodox household, usually a corner oriented east and adorned with icons and an oil lamp.
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Pushkin’s Dubrovsky: Short novel by Aleksandr Pushkin, composed in 1832–1833. Vladimir Dubrovsky, a young Russian officer and nobleman robbed of his father’s estate by a rich and powerful neighbor, retired general Troekurov, becomes a Robin Hood-like leader of a band of peasant robbers. Passing himself off as a Frenchman, young Dubrovsky gains employment as a tutor of Troekurov’s daughter Masha, who falls in love not with the real Dubrovsky but with the persona of her French tutor.
Izba: Traditional Russian peasant house, often made of logs.
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Three Station Square (in Russian, Ploshchad’ tryokh vokzalov): The unofficial popular name of Komsomolskaya Square (prior to 1933, Kalanchyovskaya Square) in Moscow. This square, located northeast of the historic center, is the location of three major railway stations—Leningradsky, Kazansky, and Yaroslavsky (and as such the city’s biggest railway hub)—and also of the Komsomolskaya metro station.
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Helsinki Accords: See note to p. 9.
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Palekh, Khokhloma: Palekh, a town in the Ivanovo Province northeast of Moscow, is the historic center of the famous miniature painting school, especially renowned for its lacquered boxes. Khokhloma, or Khokhloma wood painting, is a traditional Russian style of decorating kitchen and household wooden objects, originating in the Nizhny Novgorod Province. Khokhloma wood objects and artifacts are painted with bright red flowers and berries against a black background and gold trim.
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Ethnic Germans: Two principal groups of ethnic Germans resided in the Russian Empire. The so-called Baltic Germans had been living in Estonia and Latvia since the twelfth–thirteenth centuries, their elite becoming the area’s nobility. After the Baltic lands were ceded to the Russian Empire following Sweden’s defeat in the Great Norther War (1700–1721), members of the Baltic German nobility actively entered the Russian Imperial service, many of them becoming Russianized and acculturated after the Russian fashion. In 1914, about 160,000 Germans resided in Russia’s Baltic lands. Under the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 and the ensuing population transfers, the vast majority of the Baltic Germans from Latvia and Estonia were resettled to the Reich territories.
The history of the so-called Volga Germans (nemtsy Povolzh’ya or povolzhskiye nemtsy, sometimes called “Russian Germans”) stands in stark contrast to that of the Baltic Germans. Under Catherine the Great, non-Jewish settlers from Europe were invited to move to the Russian Empire and farm its vast lands. In the 1760s the ancestors of the Volga Germans, thousands of them, many of them Mennonites seeking religious protection, moved to the Russian Empire and founded agricultural colonies, mainly along the lower Volga basin, in and south of the Saratov Province. They became part of Russia and regarded Russia as their true home, although they retained their language and traditions much the way the Amish have in the United States. In 1924 the Volga German Autonomous Republic with the capital city Pokrovsk (renamed Engels in 1931) was formed in the lower basin of the Volga; according to the 1939 Soviet census, about 367,000 Volga Germans resided in the autonomous republic. Soon after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, the ethnic Germans in the USSR were deemed potential collaborators. Over 400,000 Volga Germans were disenfranchised, rounded up, and exiled to Central Asia and Siberia, mainly to Kazakhstan. Perhaps as many as 200,000 of them died en route and during the resettlement in what amounted to a genocidal collective punishment by default. The Soviet textbooks said nothing about the mass deportation, its closest American parallel being the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. In the 1970s, the Volga Germans began to apply for exit visas to emigrate to West Germany (which allowed the return of ethnic Germans); Jewish refuseniks encountered Volga Germans in lines outside Visa Section offices.
Saratov: Major Russian city and regional center located in the lower basin of the Volga, about 530 miles southeast of Moscow; capital of the Saratov Province.
Chelyabinsk: Major Russian industrial city located on the southeastern slopes of the Ural Mountains, at the geographical boundary of the Urals and Siberia; capital of the Chelyabinsk Province.
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Volskdeutche: In Nazi Germany, this term referred to all ethic Germans regardless of their citizenship and country of residence—as opposed to Reichsdeutsche, Germans living within the Reich. Thus ethnic Germans living on Soviet territories generally fell under the definition of Volksdeutche.
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Mayakovskaya: Metro station in the center of Moscow at the intersection of Tverskaya Street (formerly Gorky Street) and the Garden Ring on Mayakovskaya (now Triumfal’naya) Square. The station opened in 1938 as part of the Zamoskvoretskaya Line, the second oldest line of the Moscow Metro; named so after the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), whose status was posthumously elevated to that of a national Soviet classic.
Sokol: Metro station that opened in 1953 in the Sokol district, which was quickly developed in the 1930s–1950, northwest of the city’s historic center.
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Pale of Settlement (in Russian, cherta osedlosti): A swath of Russia’s northwestern, western, and southwestern territories, including parts of the present-day Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, and western and southern Russia, where Russia’s Jews were generally allowed to reside permanently from the late eighteenth century to the February 1917 revolution, after which restrictions based on nationality and confession were abolished.
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Vostryakovo: A working-class settlement west of Moscow founded in the 1950s; presently a neighborhood within the western outskirts of Moscow. Also the name of a nearby large cemetery with a Jewish section.
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SALT II Treaty: SALT is an acronym for Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. The bilateral SALT I and SALT II negotiations, conferences, and resulting treaties between the US and the USSR took place in 1969–79 and addressed the issue of nuclear arms control.
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The Vyborg side (in Russian, Vyborgskaya storona): Named so after the city of Vyborg on the Karelian Isthmus; the Vyborg side constitutes one of the principal geographical parts (“sides”) of the city of St. Petersburg (Petrograd; Leningrad). The Neva divides St. Petersburg into three main areas: northern, southern, and eastern. The Vyborg side, traditionally a working-class and industrial area and a Bolshevik stronghold during both 1917 revolutions, makes up the eastern portion of the northern main area of the city, along with Vasilievsky Island and the Petrograd Side, from which the Vyborg Side is separated by the Bolshaya (“Big”) Nevka. As opposed to the Vyborg Side, a geographical term, the Vyborg District (Vyborgsky rayon), as an administrative section of the city of St. Petersburg, dates to 1718, and exists in its present borders since 1978; one of the largest districts in the city, and presently the third most populous.
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The Forestry Academy Park: Forestry Technology Academy (Russ. Lesotekhnicheskaya Akademiya), formerly Forestry Institute, founded in 1803 and renamed S. M. Kirov Leningrad Forest Technology Academy in 1929, is located in the Vyborg District of St. Petersburg (Leningrad) and surrounded by a large park; its oldest part dates to the 1830s. Shrayer-Petrov grew up in the Lesnoye section of the Vyborg Side in the vicinity of the Forestry Academy and its arboretum.
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Luga: Town and district center located about 88 miles south of St. Petersburg (Leningrad).
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Vinnitsa (in Ukrainian, Vinnitsya): Located about 160 miles southwest of Kiev, Vinnitsa is presently the largest city of the historic Podolia region in the southwest of Ukraine; capital of the Vinnitsa Province and formerly a major regional center of Jewish life.
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Triple Cologne (in Russian, troynoy odekolon): Men’s cologne developed in Russia in the first third of the nineteenth century. Mass-produced during the Soviet period, it became not only the most commonly used aftershave but also an antiseptic; owing to its high alcohol content (sixty-four percent), it was not infrequently consumed as an alcoholic beverage. The scent of Triple Cologne was part of the stereotype of a Soviet everyman.
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Zaporozhian Cossack: Cossacks who lived beyond the rapids of the Dnieper in Central Ukraine. In the sixteenth–seventeenth centuries, the semi-autonomous Zaporozhian Cossack Host (in Ukrainian, Zaporiz’ka Sich) constituted a formidable military and political force in the region. It gained special notoriety during the Khmelnytsky Rebellion of 1648–1657. A Zaporozhian Cossack sported a special long lock of hair hanging from a clean-shaven head, known as chub or oseledets, and a long mustache extending from both sides of the mouth down to the jaw.
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that frightening place where one formally became a refusenik: Refusenik is a calque of the Russian (Soviet) otkaznik (plural otkazniki; from the Russian noun otkaz “refusal”). The terms refers to the individuals, predominantly of Jewish origin, who applied for an exit visa to emigrate from the USSR but were denied, or refused, permission to leave. In English translation, the term “refusenik” has acquired a bit more ambiguity and unintentional irony: the Soviet authorities, not the Jews, were refusing. The refuseniks had only refused the ticket to Soviet paradise.
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Padre Montanelli . . . Voinich’s The Gadfly: A novel by the Irish-born Ethel Lilian Voinich (1864–1960), originally published in 1897 in the United States. The novel’s protagonist, Arthur Burton, an activist of the Italian Risorgimento movement in the 1840s, eventually comes in conflict with his mentor (and secret biological father), Father Montanelli, a Catholic priest, subsequently a Cardinal. In translation, The Gadfly was phenomenally popular in the USSR, enjoyed the status of required reading, and by some accounts sold 2,500,000 copies.
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Girls from the Spanish Steps (in Russian, Devushki s ploshchadi Ispanii): Le ragazze di Piazza Spagna, a 1952 Italian comedy directed by Luciano Emmer; released in the US under the title Three Girls from Rome.
Kolpachny Lane (in Russian, Kolpachny Pereulok): Street in the northeast of Moscow’s historic center, running south from Pokrovka Street to Khokhlovsky Lane. At the time described in the novel, the Moscow city branch of the Visa Section (OVIR) was located in an old mansion at 10 Kolpachny Lane.
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Never Love a Stranger: The first in a slew of bestselling novels by Harold Robbins (1916–1997), also a movie of the same title. Smuggled into the USSR, Robbins’ novels, including Never Love and Stranger, The Dream Merchants (1949), and The Carpetbaggers (1961), enjoyed popularity in the circles of Soviet intelligentsia, and were read as sources of knowledge and information about the United States. See also the note about Jacqueline Susann (p. 196).
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Trubnaya Square . . . Tsvetnoy Boulevard: See note to p. 11; Tsvetnoy (“Flower”) Boulevard runs north from Trubnaya Square (on the Boulevard Ring) to Sadovaya-Sukharevskaya Street (a section of the Garden Ring). Herbert and Tatyana Levitin pass the former Central Farmers Market and the former Old Circus (now the Nikulin Circus) as they walk on the west side of Tsvetnoy Boulevard toward the Garden Ring. They see the editorial offices of Literary Gazette (Literaturnaya gazeta) on the other side of Tsvetnoy Boulevard. A shashlychnaya is a café or restaurant that serves shashlyk (skewered meat grilled over hot coals; closely related to Shish kebab).
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Papirosa: Russian cigarette with a shorter tube filled with tobacco and a longer filterless section that goes into the mouth.
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May holidays: After May 1, International Workers Day, and May 9, Victory Day (which celebrates the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany), both of which were official Soviet holidays.
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House of Cinema (in Russian, Dom Kino): The Central House of Cinema in Moscow opened in 1934 as a club, screening, and conference space under the aegis of the Union of Soviet Cinematographers. The current building on Vasilievskaya Street opened in 1968 and featured the main screening hall for 1100 people.
Malaya Bronnaya Street . . . Patriarch’s Ponds: Malaya Bronnaya is a very picturesque street (and coveted residential area) in the northwest of Moscow’s historic center, which runs from Tverskoy Boulevard on the Boulevard Ring to where Bol’shaya Sadovaya Street connects with Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya Street on the Garden Ring. Toward the end of Malaya Bronnaya Street, closer to the Garden Ring, is an enchanted area encompassing what remains of the Patriarch’s Ponds (named after the residence of a seventeenth-century Russian Orthodox Patriarch), presently one pond surrounded by a park and playground. This area is mythologized in Russian literature, including in the works of Lev Tolstoy and Mikhail Bulgakov.
Kolkhoznaya Square: In 1934 Moscow, Bol’shaya (“Large”) Sukharevskaya Square, a major landmark in the north of the city’s historic center, located east of the intersection of Sretenka Street and the Garden Ring, was expanded and renamed Kolkhoznaya (“Collective Farm”) Square; at the time Moscow’s Malaya (“Small”) Sukharevskaya Square, located on the Garden Ring west of the intersection with Sretenka Street, was made part of the expanded square. In 1939 Kolkoznaya Square was divided into Malaya (“Small”) and Bol’shaya (“Large”), but Muscovites continued to refer to it simply as “Kolkhoznaya Square.” In 1994, the old names of the adjacent squares were restored.
Mayakovskaya Square: See note to p. 75.
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Bazarov: Evgeny Bazarov, protagonist of Ivan Turgenev’s famous novel Fathers and Sons (1862), set in the summer of 1859, on the eve of the emancipation of Russian peasant serfs (1861). At the end of the novel, Bazarov, a charismatic nihilist training to become a medical doctor, dies of typhus.
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Bluebell: Anatoly Levitin’s affectionate name for Natasha Leyn. The Russian original has Nezabudka (Forget-Me-Not, a feminine noun referring to a flower with associations of fidelity and love everlasting). After numerous discussions and in consultation with the author, the translators settled for “Bluebell.”
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District Court of Jerusalem: In referencing the Adolf Eichmann Trial, the novel in original Russian quotes from the authorized Russian translation of Israel’s Attorney General Dr. Gideon Hausner’s speech at the Eichmann trial, as published in Israel by Aliyah-Library (see Dr. Gideon Hausner, 6 000 000 obvinyayut, tr. from the Hebrew, Jerusalem: Biblioteka-Aliya, 1974). Karl Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) was appointed by Hitler as head of the Reich Central Office of Jewish Emigration, and in 1942, following the Wannsee Conference, took charge of the Final Solution. Agents of the Mossad (Israeli secret service) located Eichmann in Argentina, where he had fled after World War II, and abducted him to Israel in 1960. At his trial in Jerusalem (2 April–14 August 1961), Eichmann argued that he was “following orders.” Found guilty of crimes against humanity and the Jewish people, and of war crimes, Eichmann was executed on 31 May 1962.
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Wolf Messing (1899–1974): A Polish-born Jew who escaped to the USSR in 1939, displayed psychic and telepathic powers, and became a famous performer.
Lidia Timashuk (whose praises had been sung by . . . Olga Chechyotkina): On the so-called Doctor’s Plot, see note to p. 25. In 1948 Lidia Timashuk, a cardiologist, wrote a letter to the authorities, denouncing the Kremlin physicians, who treated the party’s Central Committee Secretary Andrey Zhdanov (1896–1948), and accusing them of overlooking Zhdanov’s heart condition and incorrectly treating the Soviet leader. Zhdanov died a month later. As the so-called Doctors’ Plot was already in the process of being fabricated in August 1952, Timoshchuk was summoned to the Ministry of State Security and asked to testify. After the Doctors’ Plot was officially announced and the anti-Jewish campaign quickly gained speed, Timashuk’s testimony was treated as an act of high Soviet patriotism; she was awarded the Order of Lenin for “helping the Government denounce the doctor-murderers” and was publically praised. In an article published in Pravda, the journalist Olga Chechyotkina wrote of Timashuk as a “symbol of Soviet patriotism, high vigilance, ruthless, courageous struggle against the enemies of our Motherland.”
