Нет, если ты небес
избранник,
Свой дар, божественный посланник,
Во благо нам употребляй:
Сердца собратьев исправляй.
No, if you are chosen by
heavens,
make use of your gift, the
messenger of gods,
for our
benefit:
improve the hearts
of your brethren.
In his turn, the Poet
accuses the Crowd of not seeing any
benefit (pol'za) in Apollo Belvedere:
Ты червь земли, не сын небес;
Тебе бы
пользы всё — на вес
Кумир ты ценишь Бельведерский.
Ты пользы, пользы в нём не зришь.
You
are earth's worm, not heaven's son;
all you need is benefit, by weight
you value the Belvedere idol.
You don't see any practical use in
it.
Malen'kaya pol'za
(Small Benefit) is the nickname of Misail Poloznev, the hero and
narrator in Chekhov's "My Life". Like Cleopatra (in Chekhov's story,
Misail's sister), Misail is a rare name. In Pushkin's Boris
Godunov, Misail and Varlaam are the two monks whom Grishka
Otrepiev meets in a tavern at the Lithuanian border. It is Misail whom the
police officer takes at first for Grishka. Like Grigoriy Otrepiev (who
impersonates tsarevich Dmitry, the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible),
Vadim Vadimovich N. (the hero and narrator of LATH) is an
impostor:
A demon, I felt, was forcing me to impersonate that other man,
that other writer who was and would always be incomparably greater, healthier,
and crueler than your obedient servant.
(2.3)
Misail and Cleopatra Poloznev
are the children of the city architect. Prince Potyomkin's favorite
architect, Ivan Starov (1744-1808) is the author of the Tauride Palace
(Tavricheskiy dvorets) in St. Petersburg. The seat of the first
Russian parliament, the Imperial State Duma, in 1906-17, the Tauride Palace is
mentioned in VN's story Lebeda (Orache, 1932): His father was busy in a place known as Parliament (where a couple
of years earlier the ceiling had
collapsed).
In Chapter Five of The
Gift Fyodor describes how potolok (ceiling) can become "pas
ta loque" ("sea-ling") and blago (Russ., good), "blague" (Fr.,
blunder):
You know, like taking a simple word, say "ceiling" and seeing it as
"sealing" or "sea-ling" until it becomes completely strange and feral, something
like "ice-ling" or "inglice".
His [Fyodor's] mind sank lower and lower into a hell of
alligator alliterations, into infernal co-operatives of words, not
blago but "blague".*
Vadim Vadimovich and his first three wives (Iris Black,
Annette Blagovo and Louise Adamson) can be the children of Count Starov
(Vadim's benefactor, an ardent admirer of Mme de Blagidze, the notorious
beauty).
*restored from Dar's
Russian original