An idiomatic use of arshin can be
found in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin:
Кого ж любить? Кому же верить?
Кто не изменит нам один?
Кто все дела, все речи мерит
услужливо на наш аршин?
Whom, then, to love? Whom to believe?
Who is the only one that won't betray
us?
Who measures all deeds, all speeches
obligingly by our own foot rule? (Four: XXII:
1-4)
Interestingly, in the preceding stanza women
are compared to fluff:
А милый пол как пух легок.
While the amiable sex is light as fluff (Four: XXI:
8).
The diminutive (as it were, singular) form of
пух (down; fluff) is пушинка. This word was used by
Mandelshtam in his poem "Жизнь упала как зарница..." ("Life fell down like a
sheet-lightnig..." 1925) addresed to the poet's wife:
Хочешь, валенки сниму?
Как пушинку подниму?
Do you want me to help you take off your felt
boots?
To lift you in my arms like a bit of
fluff?
ПУШИНКА = ПУШКИНА = КНИПУША (Пушкина is Natalia
Nikolaevna Pushkina, the poet's wife, 1812-63; Книпуша was Chekhov's
affectionate name for his wife, O. L. Knipper, 1869-1958, an actress in the
company of Stanislavsky's Moscow Theatre). Never in my life I was surprised
as much as when I saw this anagram.
As Pushkin's and Chekhov's widows had done before,
Nadezhda Mandelshtam (1899-1980) survived her husband, who had perished in a
Stalin camp, for decades.
The line in Eugene
Onegin immediately preceding the one in which fluff is
mentioned* reads:
Но мненья светского поток...
But the stream of monde's opinion (Four:
XXI: 7).
MONDE = DEMON
SHAR + BEN SIRINE = ARSHIN + SIR + BENE (Ben Sirine
is an obscene ancient Arab, expounder of anagrammatic dreams, mentioned in
Ada: 2.2; sir is the word that occurs in Van's
anagrammatic dream: "Two formless fat transparent creatures were engaged in some
discussion, one repeating 'I can't!' (meaning 'can't die' - a difficult
procedure to carry out voluntarily, without the help of the dagger, the ball, or
the bowl), and the other affirming 'You can, sir!':" 3.1; bene is Latin
for "good;" cf. de mortuis nil nisi bene)
Can not pass over in
silence that, in the Commentary to his translation of EO (Vol. 2,
pp. 434-5, of the Bollingen edition), Nabokov calls the two above
quoted stanzas of Pushkin's novel "uncommonly poor."
*There is another "fluffy" line in Eugene
Onegin. In Chapter One of the novel Pushkin famously compares the
ballerina Dunyasha Istomina to the fluff flying from Eol's lips (One: XX:
12).
Alexey Sklyarenko