I am going to adjust my pages to keep the notes together; in the meantime,I will continue posting them on the front page of the site.
Nightwood opens in Vienna, Austria
Hedvig A Scandinavian variation of the German “Hedwig” that evokes the bellicose: “hadu” meaning “contention” and “wg” denoting “war.”
Volkbein “people’s foot” or “people’s bone”
Hapsburg (Habsburg) Royal dynasty established in the fifteenth century. Their palace, the Hofburg, is located in Vienna.
By 1880, the Hapsburgs controlled the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Emperor (or Kaiser) Franz Joseph I was married to a noted beauty, Elisabeth of Bavaria, and was father to Crown Prince Rudolf, who would die with his mistress in a double-suicide in 1889 at Mayerling.
Side note upon Rudolf’s death, his uncle, the Archduke Karl Ludwig, became the dynastic heir. He stepped aside so that his son, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, might inherit the title. Ferdinand’s assassination contributed to the onset of WWI.
The go-between for the Crown Prince and his lover, Mary Vetsera, was his cousin, Marie Larisch. T. S. Eliot quoted a conversation he’d held with Larisch in The Waste Land:
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.
JACQUELINE A. POLLARD 