In one of my earlier posts I mentioned
Chernomor, the villain in Pushkin's long poem "Руслан и Людмила" (Ruslan
and Lyudmila). Chernomor (Черномор)
is also the name of a character in Pushkin's "Fairy Tale about Tsar
Saltan" (1831), the marine tutor (морской дядька) of thirty three
knights who live in the sea. The fairy tale's heroine
is tsarevna Лебедь, the swan saved by the hero from the kite (коршун*),
the evil sorcerer in a bird's disguise. The swan can speak Russian
and eventually turns out to be a beautiful maiden with a moon under her
plait and a star in her forehead. Her gait is compared to that of a pava
(peahen), and her flowing speech, to the murmur of a rivulet:
Месяц под косой блестит,
А во лбу звезда горит.
А сама-то величава,
Выступает будто пава;
Сладку речь-то говорит,
Будто реченька журчит.
Cf. avian theme resurfacing in Ada's
most heart-rending chapter (3.5): "Van managed to sleep soundly,
the only reaction on the part of his dormant mind being the dream image
of an aquatic peacock, slowly sinking before somersaulting like a
diving grebe, near the shore of the lake bearing his name in the
ancient kingdom of Arrowroot."
"Lucette wanted to know: kto siya
pava (who's that stately dame)?" [a little later Lucette dubs pava
"Miss Condor"]
"Tenderly she [Lucette] shook her
jeweled head."
"Then she [Lucette] walked before him
as conscious of his gaze as if she were winning a prize for 'poise.' He
could describe her dress only as a struthious (if there existed
copper-curled ostriches), accentuating as it did the swing of her
stance... Lucette made him think of some acrobatic creature immune to
the rough seas."
Saltan + i = Stalin + a
Tsar Saltan = altar + sinitsa + L
- ili = sharlatan + tsar + S - shar (sinitsa means "titmouse"
in Russian, ili "or," sharlatan "charlatan," shar
"ball, sphere, globe; sea strait")
*"Коршун" (The Kite) is a
poem (1916) by Blok, the final one in Blok's cycle "Родина" (Native
Land, 1907-16).