[158] P. I. Pánin.
[159] Allusion to S. K. Narýshkin, who had introduced wind instruments, where each player played but one note.
[160] A game which consists of throwing a large nail into a ring.
[161] Famous popular novels much in vogue in all Europe; the latter is the English Bevys of Hamptoun; the allusion is here to the rude manners of Prince Vyázemski.
[162] Lentyág and Bryúzga of Catherine’s Prince Khlor, by whom she meant Potémkin and Vyázemski.
[163] In 1767 the Senate and deputies, who had been invited to present a project for a new code of laws, proposed a title for the Empress “Great, Most Wise, and Mother of the Country,” but she declined it.
[164] This and the following lines refer to the reign of Empress Anna, when the least inattention to the minutest details of Imperial prerogatives brought about the severest persecution: it was sufficient not to empty a beaker which was drunk to her health, or to scratch out or correct her name in a document, or to drop a coin with her picture upon it, in order to be immediately denounced to the secret police. Then follows the reference to the ice palace in which the marriage of the Court fool, Prince Golítsyn, was celebrated; the other Court fools of the day were the Princes Volkónski and Apráksin.
Yúri Aleksándrovich Neledínski-Melétski. (1752-1829.)
After finishing his education in the University of Strassburg, Neledínski occupied various posts in the army and with legations. In 1800 he was made a Senator. He distinguished himself in literature by his simple, deep-felt songs, two of which, given below, have become enormously popular. His other poems and translations from French authors are now forgotten.
Sir John Bowring has translated his “Under the oak-tree, near the rill,” “To the streamlet I’ll repair,” and “He whom misery, dark and dreary”; the latter is the same as Lewis’s “He whose soul from sorrow dreary.”