According to Roman Bogdanovich, Smurov (the narrator and main
character in The Eye) is seksual'nyi levsha (a
sexual lefty):
"I have the impression, dear friend, that
I have already written to you of the fact that Smurov belongs to that curious
class of people I once called 'sexual lefties.'" (Chapter
Five)
Levsha (The Tale of a Lefty from
Tula, 1881) is Leskov's best-known story. Like Weinstock (a
bookseller in The Eye), Leskov was a mystic. Leskov is the author
of Ovtsebyk (Musk-Ox, 1862) and Lady Macbeth of the
Mtsensk District (1865). The characters of LATH include Oks (Osip Lvovich
Oksman, an elderly man with a Shakespearean pate), the owner of a Russian
bookshop in Paris.
Leskov's tale Ocharovannyi strannik (The
Enchanted Wanderer, 1873) brings to mind Strannik (The Wanderer, 1835), Pushkin's
adaptation in Alexandrines of the opening chapter of John Bunyan's The
Pilgrim's Progress from This World to That Which Is to Come (1678). Among
the authors mentioned in LATH is Ian Bunyan:
Take tenses: how different their elaborate
and strict minuet in English from the free and fluid interplay between the
present and the past in their Russian counterpart (which Ian Bunyan has so
amusingly compared in last Sunday's NYT to "a dance of the veil performed by a
plump graceful lady in a circle of cheering drunks"). (2.10)
"Ian" was Vera Muromtseva's name for her husband Ivan
Bunin (1870-1953). The writer was a descendant of Afanasiy
Bunin, a Tula landowner, father of the poet V. A. Zhukovski
(1783-1852). Zhukovski (another mystic) is the author
of To the Emperor Alexander (1814), an epistle in 484 Alexandrines. The
father of Lyuba Savich (Vadim's typist) is the author of The Monarch
and the Mystic, a biography of Alexander the First (2.2).
Alexander the First died in Taganrog. Taganrog is
Chekhov's home city. Grad being an archaic form of gorod
(city), one wonders if Shipogradov (a recognizable
portrait of Bunin in LATH) also hints at Taganrog, a port on the Azov
Sea. Like St. Petersburg, Taganrog was founded (in 1698) by Peter I (the
tsar and the ship-builder).
Btw., Leskov is mentioned by VN in his Post Scriptum to the
Russian edition of Lolita.
Alexey Sklyarenko