In Part One, Chapter 9 Levin meets Kitty while ice skating "...at the Zoological Gardens...ice-hills and skating lake...." I wasn't able to find a skating lake in Moscow's current Zoo online, at least not according to Google. But I did find this postcard from a time period not long after the novel was published in 1877.
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| Ice Skating on Chistye Prudy, 1910 |
Chistye Prudy, by the way, means clean ponds, but refers to a specific pond that was once used as a dump but was cleaned up in the 18th century. I like this photo nevertheless!
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| Red Square |
I wonder about the "ice-hill" part of this, which sounds pretty dangerous to me. (Though, there are a lot of things from the past that seem dangerous in today's world.) I did a short search online for information on skating on hills, but couldn't come up with anything that wasn't a Red Bull-sponsored extreme sport competition. Does anyone have any insights on the ice-hills? Does Tolstoy perhaps mean skiing?
ReplyDeleteAgreed - it does sound terrifying, and not like an activity for mere mortals. Kind of like the quantities of alcohol some of the characters consume...
ReplyDeleteAgreed - it does sound terrifying, and not like an activity for mere mortals. Kind of like the quantities of alcohol some of the characters consume...
ReplyDelete