Mike Marcus: Has anyone pointed out that the word itself appears in Pale Fire: "Some of the pranksters were much younger than the King, but this did not matter since his pictures in the huts of mountain folks and in the myopic shops of hamlets, where you could buy worms, ginger bread and zhiletka blades, had not aged since his coronation."?
 
Despite a Russian diminutive suffix, "zhiletka blades" (invented by VN) exist only in Zemblan. Therefore, my apologies to Carolyn (I thought that zhiletka, as meaning "safety razor," was her invention).
 
As to Gamaliel, Tolstoy quotes him in his letters several times. In a letter of March 31, 1891, to L. P. Nikiforov he wrote: Скажу, как Гамалиил: "Если от бога это дело, то как бы не быть врагом дела божья, а если не от бога, то оно само погибнет". In a letter of April 20, 1896, to Goremykin (the Minister of Internal Affairs) Tolstoy repeats Gamaliel's words about the spread of Christianity: Сказанные Гамалиилом слова о распространении христианского учения, что если дело это от человеков, то оно разрушится, а если оно от бога, то не можете разрушить его; берегитесь поэтому, чтобы нам не оказаться богопротивниками, — остаются всегда уроком истинной правительственной мудрости в её отношениях к проявлению деятельности людей. (apologies, no translation)
 
Btw., good Gamaliel (not reelected after his fourth term and dining in Demon's club in Manhattan in his informal gagality) is also mentioned in Part Three, chapter 4. 
 
The first four letters of Gamaliel's name are Mascodagama's last four letters (I spare you the anagram).
 
Russian for "canard" is gazetnaya utka. It is a calque of German Zeitungsente (non testatum - NT - Ente, "duck"). Btw., Van learns of the airplane disaster in which his father ("a bank president lost in the closing garble") died from an American daily paper published in Nice. (3.7)
 
Alexey Sklyarenko
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