Envy 110-120
pg. 112 - Buddha
Gautama Buddha (563/480 BCE - 483/400 BCE) was the ninth incarnation of Hindu God Lord Vishnu and the founder of Buddhism. Statues of Lord Buddha are known for being very large.
pg. 113 — Taras Bulba
A romanticized historical novella published in 1835 by Nikolai Gogol. It describes the life of an old Zaporozhian Cossack, Taras Bulba, and his two sons Andriy and Ostap.
pg. 113 — Russia's eternal, traditional bast sandal
The traditional, but now obsolete, footwear of Russian peasants. Easy to manufacture, but not durable. Usage of bast sandals, or bast shoes, dates back to at least 4900 years ago during the Neolithic period. The sandal being in the gutter is described as “too academic an image of desolation”: the image represents the end of traditional Russian peasantry and the arrival of the Soviet era, in which the peasants were to be uplifted.
pg. 115 — new era
The Soviet era, as compared to the previous era under the Imperial Russian government. The envious Ivan Babichev and Nikolai Kavalerov are remnants of the old, failed Tsarist era whereas the successful "New Man" Andrei Babichev is an exemplar of the new Soviet era.
pg. 115 — Ophelia
A character in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, she is the daughter of Polonius, the sister of Laertes, and a potential wife of Prince Hamlet of Denmark. Hamlet’s actions eventually drive her to madness and lead to her drowning. Ivan named his machine after Ophelia: in his envy induced madness, Ivan imagines himself as the sole reason for Ophelia not being able to do anything it is capable of, which parallels the effect that Hamlet had on Ophelia in Hamlet.
pg. 118 — The siege of Troy
The siege of Troy (1250 BCE) was the deciding event of the Trojan War, which is a legendary war fought between the Greeks and the Trojans that is most famously narrated in Homer’s Iliad.
