FA: The smaller person in the drawing
couldn't possibly be Albert Einstein. No resemblance
whatever.
Nevertheless, the inscription says that he
is [Professor] Einstein. "Do not believe your eyes", as Koz'ma
Prutkov would have said.
Btw., in my previous post I wrongly rendered Tyutchev's
line "Schastliv v nash vek, komu pobeda" as "In our days happy's he who
[gained] victory..." It should be "in our age" of
course. Note that in one of his discarded variants Shade
writes:
All artists have been born in what they call
A sorry age; mine is the worst of all:
An age that thinks spacebombs and spaceships
take
A genius with a foreign name to make,
When any jackass can ring up the stuff
Einstein is a foreign name - for a Russian ear, at least. It
is true, though, that Einstein was a theorist who didn't make spacebombs and
spaceships.
JM:
There are many Einsteins, Zweisteins, Eysteins and
Eisensteins
I believe, in one of his interviews VN turns the name Eisenstein, of the
famous Soviet film director, into Eisenstadt. Stadt being German for
"city", it reminds me of Ehrenburg, another "urban" name.
Alexey Sklyarenko