As I pointed out earlier, Ada's Tobak
reminds one of Fima Sobak, a character in Ilf and Petrov's "The Twelve
Chairs". Sobak = skoba (cramp-iron; in one of his poems
Mandelshtam compares letters of Armenian alphabet to cramp-irons). There
is Koba (Stalin's nickname, after the hero of Kazbeghi's novel "The
Patricide") in skoba.
I was misled by the mention of the
Mediterranian resorts in one of the fragments and therefore failed to
recognize Pasternak. Like all Soviet literature, "Doctor Zhivago" has something
provincial about it. Anyway, Bunin deserved the Nobel prize much more than
Pasternak or Sholokhov did, not to speak of Nabokov (who never received
it).
Alexey Sklyarenko