Subject
Perun, Kim Beauharnais, male nurse Dorofey, Baron d'Onsky,
Sun Horse in Ada
Sun Horse in Ada
From
Date
Body
Ada ran to the window. From under the anxious magnolias a white-faced boy flanked by two gaping handmaids stood aiming a camera at the harmless, gay family group. But it was only a nocturnal mirage, not unusual in July. Nobody was taking pictures except Perun, the unmentionable god of thunder. (1.38)
"The Russian Jupiter," Perun is mentioned - along with some other pagan gods of the Slavs - by Saltykov-Shchedrin in Istoriya odnogo goroda ("The History of One City," 1869-70):
Вспомнили, что ещё при Владимире Красном Солнышке некоторые вышедшие из употребления боги были сданы в архив, бросились туда и вытащили двух: Перуна и Волоса. Идолы, несколько веков не знавшие ремонта, находились в страшном запущении, а у Перуна даже были нарисованы углём усы. Тем не менее глуповцам показались они так любы, что немедленно собрали они сходку и порешили так: знатным обоего пола особам кланяться Перуну, а смердам - приносить жертвы Волосу. ("Worship of the Mammon and Repentance")
When Grustilov (the satire on tsar Alexander I) visits Aksin'ya Egorovna (a local blazhennaya, holy fool), the latter says that Perun is staryi perdun (old fart):
- Я и Егоровна, я и тараторовна! Ярило - мерзило! Волос - без волос! Перун - старый... Парамон - он умён! - провизжала блаженная, скорчилась и умолкла. (ibid.)
It is Kim Beauharnais, the snoopy kitchen boy, not Perun, who takes pictures on the sly during the family dinner in "Ardis the Second." The photographs in Kim's album include a snapshot of Ben Wright, the coachman in "Ardis the First:"
'Ah, drunken Ben Wright trying to rape Blanche in the mews - she has quite a big part in this farrago.'
'He's doing nothing of the sort. You see quite well they are dancing. It's like the Beast and the Belle at the ball where Cinderella loses her garter and the Prince his beautiful codpiece of glass. You can also make out Mr Ward and Mrs French in a bruegelish kimbo (peasant prance) at the farther end of the hall. All those rural rapes in our parts have been grossly exaggerated. D'ailleurs, it was Mr Ben Wright's last petard at Ardis.' (2.7)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): petard: Mr. Ben Wright, a poet in his own right, is associated throughout with pets (farts).
Ben Wright's successor in "Ardis the Second" is Trofim Fartukov, the Russian coachman who eventually marries the handmaid Blanche. It was Blanche who placed the anonymous note in Van's dinner jacket:
When Van went up to his room he noticed, with a shock of grim premonition, a slip of paper sticking out of the heart pocket of his dinner jacket. Penciled in a large hand, with the contour of every letter deliberately whiffled and rippled, was the anonymous injunction: 'One must not berne you.' Only a French-speaking person would use that word for 'dupe.' Among the servants, fifteen at least were of French extraction - descendants of immigrants who had settled in America after England had annexed their beautiful and unfortunate country in 1815. (1.40)
In 1815 Napoleon (whose first wife, Josephine Beauharnais, is known on Antiterra as "Queen Josephine," 1.5) was exiled to St. Helena. This fact is mentioned a little earlier in the same chapter of "The History of One City:"
В 1815 году приехал на смену Иванову виконт дю Шарио, французский выходец. Париж был взят; враг человечества навсегда водворён на острове Св. Елены; "Московские ведомости" заявили, что с посрамлением врага задача их кончилась, и обещали прекратить своё существование; но на другой день взяли своё обещание назад и дали другое, которым обязывались прекратить своё существование лишь тогда, когда Париж будет взят вторично.
...Дю Шарио был весел. Во-первых, его эмигрантскому сердцу было радостно, что Париж взят; во-вторых, он столько времени настоящим манером не едал, что глуповские пироги с начинкой показались ему райскою пищей.
Glupov's pirogi s nachinkoy (pies with a filling) seem to hungry vicomte du Chariot (Grustilov's predecessor) a heavenly food. At the family dinner Marina gives Demon, among other food, pirozhki (variously filled pies):
Tonight she contented herself with the automatic ceremony of giving him what she remembered, more or less correctly, when planning the menu, as being his favorite food - zelyoniya shchi, a velvety green sorrel-and-spinach soup, containing slippery hard-boiled eggs and served with finger-burning, irresistibly soft, meat-filled or carrot-filled or cabbage-filled pirozhki - peer-rush-KEY, thus pronounced, thus celebrated here, for ever and ever. After that, she had decided, there would be bread-crumbed sander (sudak) with boiled potatoes, hazel-hen (ryabchiki) and that special asparagus (bezukhanka) which does not produce Proust's After-effect, as cookbooks say. (1.38)
When he has eaten his fill, du Chariot asks to show him a place where one can passer son temps a faire des betises:
Наевшись досыта, он потребовал, чтоб ему немедленно указали место, где было бы можно passer son temps a faire des betises, и был отменно доволен, когда узнал, что в Солдатской слободе есть именно такой дом, какого ему желательно.
Du Chariot's betises (silly things) bring to mind gluposti mentioned by Marina as she speaks to Demon just before the family dinner:
'Pozhalsta bez glupostey (please, no silly things), especially devant les gens,' said deeply flattered Marina (sounding the final 's' as her granddams had done)... (1.38)
Marina's gluposti (silly things) seem to refer to Glupov, the city's name in Saltykov-Shchedrin's side-splitting letopis' (chronicle).
Du Chariot (who loved to wear women's clothes and to treat himself to frogs) turned out to be a girl:
Дю Шарио, виконт, Ангел Дорофеевич, французский выходец. Любил рядиться в женское платье и лакомиться лягушками. По рассмотрении, оказался девицею. Выслан в 1821 году за границу. ("The List of Town Governors")
Du Chariot's name and patronymic, Angel Dorofeevich, brings to mind Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father) and male nurse Dorofey in the Kalugano hospital (where Van recovers from the wound received in a pistol duel with Captain Tapper whose name reflects his "pansy" character):
He [Van] begged her [Tatiana] to massage his legs but she tested him with one glance of her grave, dark eyes - and delegated the task to Dorofey, a beefy-handed male nurse, strong enough to lift him bodily out of bed, with the sick child clasping the massive nape. (1.42)
It is Dorofey who rolls Van in a wheelchair to the ward where Philip Rack (the composer whose family used to rent a cottage way down Dorofey Road, near the forest where Van fought his duel) is dying. The name Philip Rack seems to hint at the Spanish Inquisition. Dyba (rack) and other instruments of torture are mentioned at the beginning of the "Worship of the Mammon and Repentance" chapter of "The History of One City:"
Человеческая жизнь - сновидение, говорят философы-спиритуалисты, и если б они были вполне логичны, то прибавили бы: и история - тоже сновидение. Разумеется, взятые абсолютно, оба эти сравнения одинаково нелепы, однако нельзя не сознаться, что в истории действительно встречаются по местам словно провалы, перед которыми мысль человеческая останавливается не без недоумения. Поток жизни как бы прекращает своё естественное течение и образует водоворот, который кружится на одном месте, брызжет и покрывается мутною накипью, сквозь которую невозможно различить ни ясных типических черт, ни даже сколько-нибудь обособившихся явлений. Сбивчивые и неосмысленные события бессвязно следуют одно за другим, и люди, по-видимому, не преследуют никаких других целей, кроме защиты нынешнего дня. Попеременно, они то трепещут, то торжествуют, и чем сильнее дает себя чувствовать унижение, тем жёстче и мстительнее торжество. Источник, из которого вышла эта тревога, уже замутился; начала, во имя которых возникла борьба, стушевались; остаётся борьба для борьбы, искусство для искусства, изобретающее дыбу, хождение по спицам и т. д.
("Human life is a dream," the spiritualist philosophers tell us, and if they were quite logical, they would add: "and history is also a dream"... ...the reasons that caused the struggle had stopped to exist; but remains struggle for struggle's sake, art for art's sake that invents rack, walking on spokes, etc.)
After a long journey down corridors where pretty little things tripped by, shaking thermometers, and first an ascent and then a descent in two different lifts, the second of which was very capacious with a metal-handled black lid propped against its wall and bits of holly or laurel here and there on the soap-smelling floor, Dorofey, like Onegin's coachman, said priehali ('we have arrived') and gently propelled Van, past two screened beds, toward a third one near the window. There he left Van, while he seated himself at a small table in the door corner and leisurely unfolded the Russian-language newspaper Golos (Logos). (1.42)
In Krokodil: Neobyknovennoe sobytie ili passazh v Passazhe ("The Crocodile: An Extraordinary Event or What Came to Pass in the Passage," 1865), a sitire on Chernyshevski who wrote Chto delat'? ("What to Do?") imprisoned in the Peter-and-Paul Fortress, Dostoevski makes fun of the newspaper Golos ("The Voice") turning it into Volos ("The Hair"). On the other hand, Volos (pronounced to rhyme with koloss, "colossus," and also known as Veles pronounced to rhyme with les, "forest") is the Slav god of cattle (skotiy bog) mentioned by Saltykov-Shchedrin in the above-quoted excerpts. While Perun is, according to Egorovna, staryi perdun , Volos is bez volos (hairless, bald).
golos = Logos
volos/Volos = slovo (word)
kolos = sokol (falcon; kolos - ear of a plant)
In Slovo o polku Igoreve ("The Song of Igor's Campaign," l. 66) vatic Boyan is called Velesov vnuche (grandson of Veles). As Boyan recalled the feuds of initial times, "he set ten falcons [10 sokolov] upon a flock of swans, and the one first overtaken, sang a song first" - to Yaroslav of yore, and to brave Mstislav who slew Rededya before the Kasog troops, and to fair Roman son of Svyatoslav (Slovo, ll. 19-30). Like Igor son of Svyatoslav and grandson of Oleg (the hero of Slovo) and Igor's brother Vsevolod Svyatoslavich ("Wild Bull Vsevolod"), Prince Ivan Temnosiniy (father of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's great-great-grandmother, Princess Sofia Zemski, 1755-1809) is a direct descendant of the Yaroslav rulers of pre-Tartar times (1.1).
On Antiterra the Russians (who were led by Prince Dmitri of Moscow, nicknamed Donskoy after the victory over Khan Mamay) must have lost the battle of Kulikovo (Sept. 8, 1380) to the Tartars and crossed over to America. Baron d'Onsky is Demon Veen's adversary in a sword duel (seconded by charming Monsieur de Pastrouil and Colonel St. Alin, a scoundrel, 1.2). D'Onsky's name and nickname (Skonky) seem to hint at Onegin's Don stallion, but also bring to mind Igor's speech in Slovo: "Brothers and Guards! It is better indeed to be slain than to be enslaved; so let us mount, brothers, upon our swift steeds, and take a look at the blue Don." A longing consumed the prince's mind, and the omen was screened from him by the urge to taste of the Great Don: "For I wish," he said, "to break a lance on the limit of the Kuman field; with you, sons of Rus, I wish either to lay down my head or drink a helmetful of the Don." (ll. 95-110)
In her swimming cap Lucette looks like the Helmeted Angel of the Yukonsk Ikon:
With glowing cheekbones and that glint of copper showing from under her tight rubber cap on nape and forehead, she evoked the Helmeted Angel of the Yukonsk Ikon whose magic effect was said to change anemic blond maidens into konskie deti, freckled red-haired lads, children of the Sun Horse. (3.5)
The Slav god of the rising sun, Hors (or Horus) is mentioned in Slovo: The path of the Great Hors, as a wolf, prowling, he [Vseslav] crossed. (ll. 665-666)
The author of Slovo ignores Perun whose effigy Vladimir the Fair Sun caused to be drowned in the Dnepr. It was Vladimir I of Kiev who "baptised" Rus (888 A. D.). Cordula's first husband, Tobak, resembles Vladimir Christian of Denmark:
'The apartment is mine,' said Van, 'and besides, Cordula is now Mrs Ivan G. Tobak. They are making follies in Florence. Here's her last postcard. Portrait of Vladimir Christian of Denmark, who, she claims, is the dead spit of her Ivan Giovanovich. Have a look.' (2.5)
In Pushkin's Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820) Lyudmila is a daughter of Vladimir the Fair Sun (Boyan is also mentioned by Pushkin). One of Kim Beauharnais's photographs of Ardis shows the big chain around the trunk of the rare oak, Quercus ruslan Chat. (2.7)
The melancholy young German [Philip Rack] was in a philosophical mood shading into the suicidal. He had to return to Kalugano with his Elsie, who Doc Ecksreher thought 'would present him with driplets in dry weeks.' He hated Kalugano, his and her home town, where in a moment of 'mutual aberration' stupid Elsie had given him her all on a park bench after a wonderful office party at Muzakovski's Organs where the oversexed pitiful oaf had a good job. (1.32)
One of Saltykov's Town Governors, Dementiy Varlamovich Brudastyi (Demon Veen's namesake!), has a special device in his head for which he was nicknamed Organchik (Little Organ):
Брудастый, Дементий Варламович. Назначен был впопыхах и имел в голове некоторое особливое устройство, за что и прозван был «Органчиком». Это не мешало ему, впрочем, привести в порядок недоимки, запущенные его предместником. Во время сего правления произошло пагубное безначалие, продолжавшееся семь дней, как о том будет повествуемо ниже. ("The List of Town Governors")
In my previous post ("biryul'ki proshlago...") I forgot to mention uncle Dan who went to Africa to photograph tigers:
Now what about 1881, when the girls, aged eight-nine and five, respectively, had been taken to the Riviera, to Switzerland, to the Italian lakes, with Marina's friend, the theatrical big shot, Gran D. du Mont (the 'D' also stood for Duke, his mother's maiden name, des hobereaux irlandais, quoi), traveling discreetly on the next Mediterranean Express or next Simplon or next Orient, or whatever other train de luxe carried the three Veens, an English governess, a Russian nurse and two maids, while a semi-divorced Dan went to some place in equatorial Africa to photograph tigers (which he was surprised not to see) and other notorious wild animals, trained to cross the motorist's path, as well as some plump black girls in a traveling-agent's gracious home in the wilds of Mozambique. (1.24)
Also, 'Stalinski' (Baratynski's and Sobolevski's joint penname) brings to mind VN's story Tyrants Destroyed (1938) and its last sentence:
While I, a "boneless shadow," un fantome sans os, will be content if the fruit of my forgotten insomnious nights serves for a long time as a kind of secret remedy against future tyrants, tigroid monsters, half-witted torturers of man.
Alexey Sklyarenko
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"The Russian Jupiter," Perun is mentioned - along with some other pagan gods of the Slavs - by Saltykov-Shchedrin in Istoriya odnogo goroda ("The History of One City," 1869-70):
Вспомнили, что ещё при Владимире Красном Солнышке некоторые вышедшие из употребления боги были сданы в архив, бросились туда и вытащили двух: Перуна и Волоса. Идолы, несколько веков не знавшие ремонта, находились в страшном запущении, а у Перуна даже были нарисованы углём усы. Тем не менее глуповцам показались они так любы, что немедленно собрали они сходку и порешили так: знатным обоего пола особам кланяться Перуну, а смердам - приносить жертвы Волосу. ("Worship of the Mammon and Repentance")
When Grustilov (the satire on tsar Alexander I) visits Aksin'ya Egorovna (a local blazhennaya, holy fool), the latter says that Perun is staryi perdun (old fart):
- Я и Егоровна, я и тараторовна! Ярило - мерзило! Волос - без волос! Перун - старый... Парамон - он умён! - провизжала блаженная, скорчилась и умолкла. (ibid.)
It is Kim Beauharnais, the snoopy kitchen boy, not Perun, who takes pictures on the sly during the family dinner in "Ardis the Second." The photographs in Kim's album include a snapshot of Ben Wright, the coachman in "Ardis the First:"
'Ah, drunken Ben Wright trying to rape Blanche in the mews - she has quite a big part in this farrago.'
'He's doing nothing of the sort. You see quite well they are dancing. It's like the Beast and the Belle at the ball where Cinderella loses her garter and the Prince his beautiful codpiece of glass. You can also make out Mr Ward and Mrs French in a bruegelish kimbo (peasant prance) at the farther end of the hall. All those rural rapes in our parts have been grossly exaggerated. D'ailleurs, it was Mr Ben Wright's last petard at Ardis.' (2.7)
Darkbloom ('Notes to Ada'): petard: Mr. Ben Wright, a poet in his own right, is associated throughout with pets (farts).
Ben Wright's successor in "Ardis the Second" is Trofim Fartukov, the Russian coachman who eventually marries the handmaid Blanche. It was Blanche who placed the anonymous note in Van's dinner jacket:
When Van went up to his room he noticed, with a shock of grim premonition, a slip of paper sticking out of the heart pocket of his dinner jacket. Penciled in a large hand, with the contour of every letter deliberately whiffled and rippled, was the anonymous injunction: 'One must not berne you.' Only a French-speaking person would use that word for 'dupe.' Among the servants, fifteen at least were of French extraction - descendants of immigrants who had settled in America after England had annexed their beautiful and unfortunate country in 1815. (1.40)
In 1815 Napoleon (whose first wife, Josephine Beauharnais, is known on Antiterra as "Queen Josephine," 1.5) was exiled to St. Helena. This fact is mentioned a little earlier in the same chapter of "The History of One City:"
В 1815 году приехал на смену Иванову виконт дю Шарио, французский выходец. Париж был взят; враг человечества навсегда водворён на острове Св. Елены; "Московские ведомости" заявили, что с посрамлением врага задача их кончилась, и обещали прекратить своё существование; но на другой день взяли своё обещание назад и дали другое, которым обязывались прекратить своё существование лишь тогда, когда Париж будет взят вторично.
...Дю Шарио был весел. Во-первых, его эмигрантскому сердцу было радостно, что Париж взят; во-вторых, он столько времени настоящим манером не едал, что глуповские пироги с начинкой показались ему райскою пищей.
Glupov's pirogi s nachinkoy (pies with a filling) seem to hungry vicomte du Chariot (Grustilov's predecessor) a heavenly food. At the family dinner Marina gives Demon, among other food, pirozhki (variously filled pies):
Tonight she contented herself with the automatic ceremony of giving him what she remembered, more or less correctly, when planning the menu, as being his favorite food - zelyoniya shchi, a velvety green sorrel-and-spinach soup, containing slippery hard-boiled eggs and served with finger-burning, irresistibly soft, meat-filled or carrot-filled or cabbage-filled pirozhki - peer-rush-KEY, thus pronounced, thus celebrated here, for ever and ever. After that, she had decided, there would be bread-crumbed sander (sudak) with boiled potatoes, hazel-hen (ryabchiki) and that special asparagus (bezukhanka) which does not produce Proust's After-effect, as cookbooks say. (1.38)
When he has eaten his fill, du Chariot asks to show him a place where one can passer son temps a faire des betises:
Наевшись досыта, он потребовал, чтоб ему немедленно указали место, где было бы можно passer son temps a faire des betises, и был отменно доволен, когда узнал, что в Солдатской слободе есть именно такой дом, какого ему желательно.
Du Chariot's betises (silly things) bring to mind gluposti mentioned by Marina as she speaks to Demon just before the family dinner:
'Pozhalsta bez glupostey (please, no silly things), especially devant les gens,' said deeply flattered Marina (sounding the final 's' as her granddams had done)... (1.38)
Marina's gluposti (silly things) seem to refer to Glupov, the city's name in Saltykov-Shchedrin's side-splitting letopis' (chronicle).
Du Chariot (who loved to wear women's clothes and to treat himself to frogs) turned out to be a girl:
Дю Шарио, виконт, Ангел Дорофеевич, французский выходец. Любил рядиться в женское платье и лакомиться лягушками. По рассмотрении, оказался девицею. Выслан в 1821 году за границу. ("The List of Town Governors")
Du Chariot's name and patronymic, Angel Dorofeevich, brings to mind Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father) and male nurse Dorofey in the Kalugano hospital (where Van recovers from the wound received in a pistol duel with Captain Tapper whose name reflects his "pansy" character):
He [Van] begged her [Tatiana] to massage his legs but she tested him with one glance of her grave, dark eyes - and delegated the task to Dorofey, a beefy-handed male nurse, strong enough to lift him bodily out of bed, with the sick child clasping the massive nape. (1.42)
It is Dorofey who rolls Van in a wheelchair to the ward where Philip Rack (the composer whose family used to rent a cottage way down Dorofey Road, near the forest where Van fought his duel) is dying. The name Philip Rack seems to hint at the Spanish Inquisition. Dyba (rack) and other instruments of torture are mentioned at the beginning of the "Worship of the Mammon and Repentance" chapter of "The History of One City:"
Человеческая жизнь - сновидение, говорят философы-спиритуалисты, и если б они были вполне логичны, то прибавили бы: и история - тоже сновидение. Разумеется, взятые абсолютно, оба эти сравнения одинаково нелепы, однако нельзя не сознаться, что в истории действительно встречаются по местам словно провалы, перед которыми мысль человеческая останавливается не без недоумения. Поток жизни как бы прекращает своё естественное течение и образует водоворот, который кружится на одном месте, брызжет и покрывается мутною накипью, сквозь которую невозможно различить ни ясных типических черт, ни даже сколько-нибудь обособившихся явлений. Сбивчивые и неосмысленные события бессвязно следуют одно за другим, и люди, по-видимому, не преследуют никаких других целей, кроме защиты нынешнего дня. Попеременно, они то трепещут, то торжествуют, и чем сильнее дает себя чувствовать унижение, тем жёстче и мстительнее торжество. Источник, из которого вышла эта тревога, уже замутился; начала, во имя которых возникла борьба, стушевались; остаётся борьба для борьбы, искусство для искусства, изобретающее дыбу, хождение по спицам и т. д.
("Human life is a dream," the spiritualist philosophers tell us, and if they were quite logical, they would add: "and history is also a dream"... ...the reasons that caused the struggle had stopped to exist; but remains struggle for struggle's sake, art for art's sake that invents rack, walking on spokes, etc.)
After a long journey down corridors where pretty little things tripped by, shaking thermometers, and first an ascent and then a descent in two different lifts, the second of which was very capacious with a metal-handled black lid propped against its wall and bits of holly or laurel here and there on the soap-smelling floor, Dorofey, like Onegin's coachman, said priehali ('we have arrived') and gently propelled Van, past two screened beds, toward a third one near the window. There he left Van, while he seated himself at a small table in the door corner and leisurely unfolded the Russian-language newspaper Golos (Logos). (1.42)
In Krokodil: Neobyknovennoe sobytie ili passazh v Passazhe ("The Crocodile: An Extraordinary Event or What Came to Pass in the Passage," 1865), a sitire on Chernyshevski who wrote Chto delat'? ("What to Do?") imprisoned in the Peter-and-Paul Fortress, Dostoevski makes fun of the newspaper Golos ("The Voice") turning it into Volos ("The Hair"). On the other hand, Volos (pronounced to rhyme with koloss, "colossus," and also known as Veles pronounced to rhyme with les, "forest") is the Slav god of cattle (skotiy bog) mentioned by Saltykov-Shchedrin in the above-quoted excerpts. While Perun is, according to Egorovna, staryi perdun , Volos is bez volos (hairless, bald).
golos = Logos
volos/Volos = slovo (word)
kolos = sokol (falcon; kolos - ear of a plant)
In Slovo o polku Igoreve ("The Song of Igor's Campaign," l. 66) vatic Boyan is called Velesov vnuche (grandson of Veles). As Boyan recalled the feuds of initial times, "he set ten falcons [10 sokolov] upon a flock of swans, and the one first overtaken, sang a song first" - to Yaroslav of yore, and to brave Mstislav who slew Rededya before the Kasog troops, and to fair Roman son of Svyatoslav (Slovo, ll. 19-30). Like Igor son of Svyatoslav and grandson of Oleg (the hero of Slovo) and Igor's brother Vsevolod Svyatoslavich ("Wild Bull Vsevolod"), Prince Ivan Temnosiniy (father of Van's, Ada's and Lucette's great-great-grandmother, Princess Sofia Zemski, 1755-1809) is a direct descendant of the Yaroslav rulers of pre-Tartar times (1.1).
On Antiterra the Russians (who were led by Prince Dmitri of Moscow, nicknamed Donskoy after the victory over Khan Mamay) must have lost the battle of Kulikovo (Sept. 8, 1380) to the Tartars and crossed over to America. Baron d'Onsky is Demon Veen's adversary in a sword duel (seconded by charming Monsieur de Pastrouil and Colonel St. Alin, a scoundrel, 1.2). D'Onsky's name and nickname (Skonky) seem to hint at Onegin's Don stallion, but also bring to mind Igor's speech in Slovo: "Brothers and Guards! It is better indeed to be slain than to be enslaved; so let us mount, brothers, upon our swift steeds, and take a look at the blue Don." A longing consumed the prince's mind, and the omen was screened from him by the urge to taste of the Great Don: "For I wish," he said, "to break a lance on the limit of the Kuman field; with you, sons of Rus, I wish either to lay down my head or drink a helmetful of the Don." (ll. 95-110)
In her swimming cap Lucette looks like the Helmeted Angel of the Yukonsk Ikon:
With glowing cheekbones and that glint of copper showing from under her tight rubber cap on nape and forehead, she evoked the Helmeted Angel of the Yukonsk Ikon whose magic effect was said to change anemic blond maidens into konskie deti, freckled red-haired lads, children of the Sun Horse. (3.5)
The Slav god of the rising sun, Hors (or Horus) is mentioned in Slovo: The path of the Great Hors, as a wolf, prowling, he [Vseslav] crossed. (ll. 665-666)
The author of Slovo ignores Perun whose effigy Vladimir the Fair Sun caused to be drowned in the Dnepr. It was Vladimir I of Kiev who "baptised" Rus (888 A. D.). Cordula's first husband, Tobak, resembles Vladimir Christian of Denmark:
'The apartment is mine,' said Van, 'and besides, Cordula is now Mrs Ivan G. Tobak. They are making follies in Florence. Here's her last postcard. Portrait of Vladimir Christian of Denmark, who, she claims, is the dead spit of her Ivan Giovanovich. Have a look.' (2.5)
In Pushkin's Ruslan and Lyudmila (1820) Lyudmila is a daughter of Vladimir the Fair Sun (Boyan is also mentioned by Pushkin). One of Kim Beauharnais's photographs of Ardis shows the big chain around the trunk of the rare oak, Quercus ruslan Chat. (2.7)
The melancholy young German [Philip Rack] was in a philosophical mood shading into the suicidal. He had to return to Kalugano with his Elsie, who Doc Ecksreher thought 'would present him with driplets in dry weeks.' He hated Kalugano, his and her home town, where in a moment of 'mutual aberration' stupid Elsie had given him her all on a park bench after a wonderful office party at Muzakovski's Organs where the oversexed pitiful oaf had a good job. (1.32)
One of Saltykov's Town Governors, Dementiy Varlamovich Brudastyi (Demon Veen's namesake!), has a special device in his head for which he was nicknamed Organchik (Little Organ):
Брудастый, Дементий Варламович. Назначен был впопыхах и имел в голове некоторое особливое устройство, за что и прозван был «Органчиком». Это не мешало ему, впрочем, привести в порядок недоимки, запущенные его предместником. Во время сего правления произошло пагубное безначалие, продолжавшееся семь дней, как о том будет повествуемо ниже. ("The List of Town Governors")
In my previous post ("biryul'ki proshlago...") I forgot to mention uncle Dan who went to Africa to photograph tigers:
Now what about 1881, when the girls, aged eight-nine and five, respectively, had been taken to the Riviera, to Switzerland, to the Italian lakes, with Marina's friend, the theatrical big shot, Gran D. du Mont (the 'D' also stood for Duke, his mother's maiden name, des hobereaux irlandais, quoi), traveling discreetly on the next Mediterranean Express or next Simplon or next Orient, or whatever other train de luxe carried the three Veens, an English governess, a Russian nurse and two maids, while a semi-divorced Dan went to some place in equatorial Africa to photograph tigers (which he was surprised not to see) and other notorious wild animals, trained to cross the motorist's path, as well as some plump black girls in a traveling-agent's gracious home in the wilds of Mozambique. (1.24)
Also, 'Stalinski' (Baratynski's and Sobolevski's joint penname) brings to mind VN's story Tyrants Destroyed (1938) and its last sentence:
While I, a "boneless shadow," un fantome sans os, will be content if the fruit of my forgotten insomnious nights serves for a long time as a kind of secret remedy against future tyrants, tigroid monsters, half-witted torturers of man.
Alexey Sklyarenko
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