In Ada (3.5) the Robinsons are the old couple onboard
Tobakoff who give Lucette a tubeful of Quietus pills. Robinson and
Friday are mentioned in Vyazemski's poem "Николаю Аркадьевичу Кочубею" (To N. A. Kochubey,
1863) from the cycle The Photographs of Venice:
Под этим уныньем с зевотой
сердечной,
Другим Робинсоном в лагунной темнице,
Сидишь с глазу на глаз ты
с Пятницей вечной,
И тошных семь пятниц сочтёшь на седмице.
(Under
this depression with yawning in one's heart,
like another Robinson in the lagoon dungeon,
one is sitting tête-à-tête with
eternal Friday
and can count seven nauseating Fridays
a week.)
Vyazemski is the author of Sem'
pyatnits na nedele (Seven Fridays a Week,* 1826). In a letter of May
24, 1826, to Vyazemski Pushkin says that "Seven Fridays" is your best
vaudeville.
Were it for the middle t
(btw., the Robinsons are teetotalists), pyatnitsa (Friday)
would be a near-homophone of p'yanitsa (drunkard). According to
Denis Davydov (the poet who sang simply vodka**), when Rastopchin introduced
Karamzin (the historian) to Platov (the Cossack chieftain), the latter
said adding rum to his cup: "Glad to meet you, I always loved writers because
all of them are drunkards" (Vyazemski, The Old Notebook):
Денис Давыдов уверял, что когда Растопчин представлял Карамзина
Платову, атаман, подливая в чашку свою значительную долю рома, сказал: «Очень
рад познакомиться; я всегда любил сочинителей, потому что они все —
пьяницы».
Before jumping to her death into the Atlantic, Lucette took four green pills of Quietus and drank a
'Cossack pony' of Klass vodka - hateful, vulgar, but potent stuff; had another;
and was hardly able to down a third because her head had started to swim like
hell. Swim like hell from sharks, Tobakovich! (3.5)
re Klass*** vodka: Vyazemski
wrote prefaces to Pushkin's The Caucasian Captive and The
Fountain of Bakhchisaray. The foreword to the latter poem is entitled
Conversation between the Editor and the Classicist. In his memoir essay
"Допотопная, или допожарная Москва" ("Moscow before the Deluge or, rather,
before the Fire," 1866) Vyazemski reveals the falsity of the phrase
эксплоатація человѣка человѣкомъ (l'exploitation de l'homme par
l'homme) so common in the Marxist rhetoric.
Btw., like VN, Vyazemski was an
insomniac. In his old age he wrote in a poem:
Пью по
ночам хлорал запоем,
Привыкший к
яду Митридат,
Чтоб усладить себя покоем
И сном, хоть взятым
напрокат.
(The Mithridates immune to
poison,
I heavily drink chloral at night
in order to delight in
repose
and sleep, if only in
a hired sleep.)
*"(s)he has seven Fridays a
week" - as we say of a person who keeps changing his/her
mind
**see Chekhov's letter of Nov.
25, 1892, to Suvorin (staryi p'yanitsa, old drunkard, as Chekhov calls
him)
***Klass sprutov i rabochiy
klass (the class of octopi and the working class) are mentioned
in Pasternak's Vysokaya bolezn' (The Sublime Disease, 1928). Lenin's
speech is compared in it to the rustle of a ball lightning. sprut = Prust = strup (sprut - octopus; Prust - Proust
in Russian spelling; strup -
scab)
Alexey
Sklyarenko