"Patting his thighs and his chair, he [Daniel Veen] sought and retrieved - from under the footstool - the vestpocket wordbook and went back to his paper, but a second later had to look up 'groote,' which he had been groping for when disturbed." (1.11)

Groote is Dutch for "great". The tsar Peter I, who traveled to Holland incognito in order to study shipbuilding and navigation, is often called "Peter the Great".

The "vestpocket wordbook" helps Dan to read an article apparently devoted to oystering in a Dutch-language illustrated paper. Oysters are mentioned elsewhere in Ada:

"Van remembered that his tutor's great friend, the learned but prudish Semyon Afanasievich Vengerov, then a young associate professor but already a celebrated Pushkinist (1855-1954), used to say that the only vulgar passage in his author's work was the cannibal joy of young gourmets tearing 'plump and live' oysters out of their 'cloisters' in an unfinished canto of Eugene Onegin. But then 'everyone has his own taste,' as the British writer Richard Leonard Churchill mistranslates a trite French phrase (chacun à son gout) twice in the course of his novel about a certain Crimean Khan once popular with reporters and politicians, 'A Great Good Man'..." (1.38)

On the other hand, "a great good man" (великий добрый человек) is the formula used by Pushkin in his unfinished Russian version of S. T. Coleridge's poem The Good, Great Man: Как редко плату получает великий добрый человек. Here is the original poem (of which Pushkin translated only the first two lines) by the author of Kubla Khan*:

"How seldom, friend! a good great man inherits
Honour or wealth with all his worth and pains!
It sounds like stories from the land of spirits
If any man obtain that which he merits
Or any merit that which he obtains."

REPLY TO THE ABOVE

For shame, dear friend, renounce this canting strain!
What would'st thou have a good great man obtain?
Place? titles? salary? a gilded chain?
Or throne of corses which his sword had slain?
Greatness and goodness are not _means_, but _ends_!
Hath he not always treasures, always friends,
The good great man? _three_ treasures, LOVE, and LIGHT,
And CALM THOUGHTS, regular as infant's breath:
And three firm friends, more sure than day and night,
HIMSELF, his MAKER, and the ANGEL DEATH!

The death angel's name in Jewish and Islamic angelology is Azrael. Pushkin mentions Azrael in his poem "Из Гафиза" ("From Hafiz", 1829) written when the poet was in the Russian army in East Turkey: "Азраил, среди мечей, / Красоту твою заметит / И пощада будет ей" (Azrael will notice your beauty amidst the swords and will have mercy upon it).

Азра - Mohamet Asra, the young slave who fell in love with a sultan's daughter and is dying because of it in Heine's poem Der Asra

Heine, author of Der Asra (1846), is also the author of Koenig Richard (1851), a poem about Richard the Lion-Hearted (cf. Richard Leonard Churchill, author of the novel about the Crimean Khan). Both poems are mentioned by Annensky in his essay Geyne prikovannyi ("Bedridden Heine").

Strictly speaking, there are no 'cloisters' or even 'cloisterers' (as VN renders затворницы, "female recluses") in Eugene Onegin's unfinished canto, but there are many nuns and at least one cloister (in Himmelsbraeute, a poem also mentioned by Annensky) in Heine. On the other hand, in Germany: a Winter Tale (chapter XXIII) Heine describes his feasting on oysters (asperged with lemon, as are the oysters consumed by Pushkin and his friends in EO) in Hamburg.

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.

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