Thanks to Beth Sweeney for forwarding the revision of my
post on Lunin, Dmitri de Midoff, et al. in LATH and to Mary Efremov for her
much too kind words!
It belatedly occurs to me that, ship being Russian
for "thorn" (Dorn in German) and grad an archaic word for
"city," the name Shipogradov (of the eminent novelist and recent Nobel
Prize winner) actually hints at Dornach,* a village near Basel where during the
World War I the Goetheanum (anthroposophic temple) was built by an
international team. Among the Russians who participated in the construction
were Maximilian Voloshin and Andrey Bely (whose Petersburg was
published by "Sirin"** in 1913-14). It is also worth noting that korabl'
(Russian for "ship") is a cell of the khlysty sect. The
sect's name means "whips" and is a corruption of khristy
("Christs"). The most famous khlyst was Grigoriy Rasputin (a
namesake of Grigoriy Reich who published poetry under penname
Lunin).
After he had read Bunin's story The Gentleman from
San-Francisco (1915), Balmont (a great friend of Voloshin who lived at
the Balmonts' during his stay in Paris) said to the author:
"Bunin, u vas est' chuvstvo korablya (you have
the feeling of a ship)."*** I. A. Shipogradov is LATH's version of I. A.
Bunin.
Vadim's benefactor, Count Starov is a grave
old-fashioned Mason (1.2). According to Bunin, in a conversation
with him Voloshin (who had been accepted in a Lodge in Paris) gave to
understand that he was a Mason. Btw., the name Starov may hint at
starovery (Old Believers whose churches were also called
korabli, ships)
Vadim confesses that he was bothered by the dream feeling
that his "life was the nonidentical twin, a parody, an inferior variant of
another man's life, somewhere on this or another earth." (2.3) According to
Rudolf Steiner (the founder of anthroposophy), there were two Jesus children.
Initially, Dr. Steiner was the leader of the Theosophical Esoteric
Society for Germany and Austria. The Theosophical Society was established
in 1875 by Elena Petrovna Blavatski (the author of The Secret Doctrine,
1888). Her name brings to mind Vadim's wives Iris Black and Annette Blagovo, and
Wladimir Blagidze, alias Starov, who murders Iris Black in Paris
(1.13). If Vadim's princely surname is, as I suspect, Yablonski, there is also
the -bl- sound in it. Yablonski comes from yablonya (apple
tree), the tree of knowledge in the Christian tradition. The name of
Vadim's third wife, Louise Adamson, may hint at Adam (the first man, the father
of Abel and Cain).
Vadim is the author of Polnolunie
(Plenilune, 1929), a novella in verse, and of the garland of
sonnets. He uses rare words (like vzvoden', a welter) in his
prose.
The moon affects the tides. In the third sonnet of
his Lunaria, a garland of sonnets, Voloshin says addressing the
moon:
И глубиной таинственных извивов
Качания
приливов и отливов,
Внутри меня тобой повторены.
And by the depth of your mysterious bends
the rocking of tide and ebb
is repeated inside of me.
Correcting an earlier mistake: the title of Voloshin's poem
from his book Putyami Kaina (Following The Paths of
Cain) quoted in my post "elements, electricity & L disaster in
Ada" is Mashina ("Machine"), not "The Machines."
*In his devastating review of Bely's autobiographical
Zapiski chudaka (Notes of an Eccentric, 1923) Mandelshtam
criticizes the "tasteless and absurd" idea to build "the temple of
universal wisdom" in such an inappropriate place. According to
Mandelshtam, Bely's book is an attempt рассказать о
себе, вывернуть себя наизнанку, показать себя в четвёртом, пятом, шестом
измерении (to tell about himself, turn himself inside out, show himself
in a fourth, fifth, sixth dimension). Like Bely's book, LATH is a self-parody;
but it is in a much better taste (see also my earlier posts on the
subject).
**a publishing firm
***see Bunin's Autobiographical Notes
(1950)
Alexey Sklyarenko