JM: Lisianski Urey was deputy commander of
Kruzenshtern's expedition...
Dear Jansy,
A person named Lisianski
Urey hardly ever existed. The name of the Russian navigator in
question is Yuri Lisiansky (1873-1837). Lisiansky (or Lisyanski)
is the surname and Yuri is the first name. Among famous men
whose first name was Yuri are the first astronaut Yuri Gagarin
(1934-1968), Prince Yuri Dolgorukiy ("Yuri the long arm," the sobriquet
hinting at the Prince's wide connections), the founder of Moscow (1147), Yuri
Zhivago, the hero of Pasternak's novel.
There is also a famous saying dating from the times
of the tsar Boris Godunov (ruled in 1598-1605): Vot tebe, babushka, i
Yur'yev den'! Literally, it means: "here you have, Grandma, the St.
George's day!" (Boris Godunov has abolished the ancient law that had
allowed a serf to change his master and a master to fire a lazy
serf on the fall's St. George's day; it is not surprising that Pushkin makes a
character of his play "Boris Godunov," 1826, to utter this saying),
but is idiomatically translated as "Here's a fine
how-d'ye-do!"
Re the Jules Verne novel: the fact that Phileas
Fogg travels from West to East allows him to save one day and eventually
win the wager, completing his round-the-world journey in less than 80
days. He nearly loses it, realizing (thanks to Aouda, the young
Parsi woman Fogg saved in India) only at the last moment that, when
crossing the Pacific (where the Lisiansky Island and the Hawaii are
situated), on the trip from Yokohama to San Francisco, he crossed the
International Date Line and therefore returned to London one day earlier
than he thinks he did.
DEN' + IGOR = DEN'GI + OR (den' is
Russian for "day;" Igor is Prince Igor, the hero of "The Song of
Igor's Campaign;" den'gi is Russian for "money;" or is French
for "or")
Alexey Sklyarenko