Would I despise her [Lyuba Savich] for having an album with reviews of my books
pasted in--Morozov's and Yablokov's lovely essays as well as the trash of such
hacks as Boris Nyet, and Boyarski? (2.2)
As I pointed out before, the names Morozov and Boyarski hint
at Boyarynya Morozov (1632-75, one of the best-known partisans of the Old
Believer movement). Her confessor was Archpriest Avvakum (Avvakum Petrov,
1621-82, the author of Zhitie Protopopa Avvakuma, "The Life of
Archpriest Avvakum," 1672). In his long poem Protopop Avvakum (1918)
Maximilian Voloshin mentions Boyarynya Morozov and her sister, Princess Urusov,
who were incarcerated in an underground cellar at
Borovsk (where Feodosia Morozov succumbed to
starvation):
Боярыню Морозову с сестрой -
Княгиней
Урусовой - детей моих духовных
Разорили и в Боровске в темницу
закопали.
Ту с мужем развели, у этой сына уморили.
Voloshin had completed The Archpriest
Avvakum on May 19, 1918, a couple of months before VN met him
Yalta, so he could have read one of his last poems to VN. In the
Introduction to Drugie berega ("Other Shores," 1954), the Russian
version of his autobiography, VN mentions Avvakum (one of the first Russian
memoirists):
Переходя на другой язык, я отказывался таким
образом не от языка Аввакума, Пушкина, Толстого--или Иванова, няни, русской
публицистики-- словом, не от общего языка, а от индивидуального, кровного
наречия. (Switching to another language, I thus rejected not
the language of Avvakum, Pushkin, Tolstoy - or that of Ivanov, nurse, Russian
journalism - in a word, not the common language, but the individual, intimate
idiom.)
The name Boris Nyet (in Russian spelling Nyet is
ten', "shadow, shade," backwards) seems to hint at Grigory's
words to Marina in Pushkin's Boris Godunov (1825):
Ten' Groznogo menya
usynovila,
Dimitriem iz groba
narekla...
The shade of Ivan the
Terrible adopted me,
from the grave named me
Dimitry...
The
name Yablokov comes from yabloko (apple). "The apple does not fall far
from the apple-tree (yablonya)." It seems to me that Vadim's real name
is Yablonski. Vadim changes only its initial, when he wants us to suppose
that his real name is Oblonski:
Let us suppose
my real name to have been "Oblonsky" (a Tolstoyan invention); then the false one
would be, for example, the mimetic "O. B. Long," an oblong blursky, so to
speak. (5.1)
In Tolstoy's novel Oblonski
is Anna Karenin's maiden name.
Alexey Sklyarenko