In Milton's Paradise Lost, Book
Twelve, the Angel Michael relates to Adam what will happen after the Flood
and mentions Abraham and his son: "This patriarch blessed, / Whom
faithful Abraham due time shall call / A son, and of his son a
grandchild, leaves" (151-153). He doesn't mention the name
of Abraham's son, just as earlier he doesn't mention the name of the
city, in which men, the future progeny of Adam and Eve, will try to
build a huge tower: "Of brick, and of that stuff, they cast to build / A city
and tower, whose top may reach to Heaven" (43-44). That city is, of course,
Babel, and its name is homonymous with the penname of the Soviet
writer Isaak Babel (1894-1940). Babel (whose real name was Bobel'; who came,
like Ilf and Petrov, from Odessa; who was arrested in May, 1939, and
executed in January, 1940) had the same first name as Abraham's son by
Sarah, the father of Jacob ("a grandchild" in the quoted lines). Note
that
BABEL = L'ABBÉ (Monsieur
l'Abbé, Onegin's
governor, a poor wretch of a Frenchman, who taught his pupil everything in
play);
BABEL + I = BIBLE + A;
BABEL + ZOROASTER = ZOROBABEL + AREST (Zoroaster is
Persian religious teacher, founder of the religion called Zoroatrianism,
who lived in the 6th century B.C.; Zorobabel is a leader of the Jews on their
return to Jerusalem after the Babylonian captivity; arest is Russian
for "arrest").
Alexey Sklyarenko