[1] Many years later, after his mother's death, Nekrassov found this letter among her papers. It was a letter written to her by her own mother after her flight and subsequent marriage. It announced to her her father's curse, and was filled with sad and bitter reproaches: "To whom have you entrusted your fate? For what country have you abandoned Poland, your Motherland? You, whose hand was sought, a priceless gift, by princes, have chosen a savage, ignorant, uncultured…. Forgive me, but my heart is bleeding…."
[2] Priest.
[3] Landowner.
[4] The peasants assert that the cuckoo chokes himself with young ears of corn.
[5] A kind of home-brewed cider.
[6] Laput is peasants' footgear made of bark of saplings.
[7] Priest
[8] New huts are built only when the village has been destroyed by fire.
[9] The lines of asterisks throughout the poem represent passages that were censored in the original.
[10] There is a superstition among the Russian peasants that it is an ill omen to meet the "pope" when going upon an errand.