In Eugene Onegin (Ten: IX: 3-4) Pushkin mentions
the one-armed Prince (Alexander Ypsilanti, 1792-1828, a Phanariot
who served in the Russian army and lost his right arm in the
Battle of Dresden, 1813) who "winked" to the friends of Morea (i. e.
Peloponnesus) from Kishinev:
Безрукий князь друзьям Мореи
Из Кишинёва уж мигал
the one-armed prince to the friends of Morea
from Kishinev already winked.
The hero of Kuprin's story, General Ivan Skobelev (the grandfather of
Mikhail Skobelev, "the White General," hero of the Russo-Turkish War
of 1877-78), lost his left arm in the Patriotic War of 1812, in the battle of
Smolensk:
Под Смоленском он командовал полком, и там ему
ядро оторвало левую руку.*
Ivan Skobelev was an adjutant of the field-marshal Kutuzov, the
Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army. After Napoleon's exodus from
Russia, Kutuzov received the Princely title and became Prince Kutuzov of
Smolensk. Kutuzov's daughter Eliza Khitrovo was in love with Pushkin and was
nicknamed Erminia (after a character in Tasso's "Jerusalem
Delivered"). Lady Erminin (under whose blue eye, as imagined by Marina, Van
walks on his hands) is the late wife of Colonel Erminin, mother of the
twins Greg and Grace (with whom Ada plays anagrams at the same picnic in "Ardis
the First"). She must have committed suicide when she learnt of her husband's
affair with her sister Ruth (who is pregnant when she comes to the picnic
in Ardis the First and who presumably dies in childbirth).
The tsar Nicholas I made Ivan Skobelev (1778-1849) the Commander
of the Peter-and-Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg:
И правда упрятал: на другое же утро получил Иван
Никитич личное назначение от государя: быть ему комендантом Петропавловской
крепости.
The brother of VN's great-grandfather, General Ivan Nabokov was Skobelev's
successor as the Commander of the Peter-and-Paul Fortress:
I know nothing about his [Nikolay
Nabokov's] military career; whatever it was he could not have
competed with his brother, Ivan Aleksandrovich Nabokov (1787-1852), one of the
heroes of the anti-Napoleon wars and, in his old age, commander of the
Peter-and-Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg where (in 1849) one of his prisoners
was the writer Dostoevski, author of The Double, etc., to whom the kind
general lent books. Considerably more interesting, however, is the fact that he
was married to Ekaterina Pushchin, sister of Ivan Pushchin, Pushkin's schoolmate
and close friend. (Speak, Memory, Chapter Three, 1)
The father of the twins Aqua and Marina, General Ivan Durmanov was the
Commander of Yukon Fortress:
Van's maternal grandmother Daria ('Dolly') Durmanov was
the daughter of Prince Peter Zemski, Governor of Bras d'Or, an American province
in the Northeast of our great and variegated country, who had married, in 1824,
Mary O'Reilly, an Irish woman of fashion. Dolly, an only child, born in Bras,
married in 1840, at the tender and wayward age of fifteen, General Ivan
Durmanov, Commander of Yukon Fortress and peaceful country gentleman, with lands
in the Severn Tories (Severnïya Territorii), that tesselated protectorate still
lovingly called 'Russian' Estoty, which commingles, granoblastically and
organically, with 'Russian' Canady, otherwise 'French' Estoty, where not only
French, but Macedonian and Bavarian settlers enjoy a halcyon climate under our
Stars and Stripes. (1.1)
.
Van loses the ability to walk on his hands after his pistol duel with
Captain Tapper whose bullet injures Van in his left forearm (1.42).
Van's duel with Tapper brings to mind Demon's sword duel with Baron d'Onsky, who
dies of a gangrenous afterthought on the part of the least of his wounds,
"possibly self-inflicted, a sting in the groin, which caused circulatory
trouble, notwithstanding quite a few surgical interventions during two or three
years of protracted stays at the Aardvark Hospital in Boston - a city where,
incidentally, he married in 1869 our friend the Bohemian lady, now keeper of
Glass Biota at the local museum." (1.2). At Marina's funeral d'Onsky's son, a person with only one arm, threw his remaining one
around Demon and both wept comme des fontaines. (3.8) The author
of Tsygany ("The Gypsies," 1824), Pushkin
wrote Bakhchisarayskiy fontan ("The Fountain of
Bakhchisaray," 1821-23) in Kishinev where he met Alexander
Ypsilanti (the one-armed Prince).
The narrator in Kuprin's story is the former steward in the estates of
Mikhail Skobelev and his father Dmitri (also a General, son of Ivan
Skobelev) and of Messrs. Beauharnais (apparently, the descendants of
Maximilian Beauharnais, 3d Duke of Leuchtenberg, a grandson of Napoleon's
first wife, Josephine Beauharnais, who married Maria Nikolaevna
Romanov, the daughter of Nicholas I):
Я всю семью Скобелевых хорошо знал. Управлял
имениями Михаила Дмитриевича и Дмитрия Ивановича и господ Богарне.
Kim Beauharnais is a kitchen boy and photographer at
Ardis who spies on Van and Ada. It is Kim Beauharnais who in the night of the
Burning Barn sets the barn on fire (cf. the great Moscow fire of 1812). Napoleon
accused Rostopchin, the Moscow governor, of setting the city on fire.
Rostopchin's daughter, Mme de Ségur, is
the "author of Les Malheurs de Sophie (nomenclatorially occupied on
Antiterra by Les Malheurs de Swann)" (Darkbloom).
A sort of hoary riddle (Les Sophismes de
Sophie by Mlle Stopchin in the Bibliothèque Vieux Rose series): did the
Burning Barn come before the Cockloft or the Cockloft come first. Oh, first! We
had long been kissing cousins when the fire started. In fact, I was getting some
Château Baignet cold cream from Ladore for my poor chapped lips. And we both
were roused in our separate rooms by her crying au feu! July 28? August
4?
Who cried? Stopchin cried? Larivière cried?
Larivière? Answer! Crying that the barn flambait? (1.19)
Ivan Skobelev's name was initially Kobelev. S (or
slovo, as the letter S was called in the old alphabet and as the
narrator in Kuprin's story calls it) was added to his mean name (kobel'
means "male dog") when he married his second wife, a St. Petersburg
Countess:
Тогда, по распоряжению высших властей, повелено
было его первый брак с непутёвой женой расторгнуть, а ему было разрешено
вступить в новый брак с графиней. И к фамилии его, с высочайшего соизволения,
была приписана вначале литера "слово", то есть стали - он и его будущие потомки
- именоваться для благозвучия не Кобелевыми, а Скобелевыми.
One is reminded of Baron Klim Avidov who gave Marina's
children a set of Flavita (Russian Scrabble) and who, according to Walter C.
Keyway, Esq. ("an unfortunate English tourist"), dropped the first letter of his
name in order to use it as a nobility particle:
It was, incidentally, the same kindly but
touchy Avidov (mentioned in many racy memoirs of the time) who once catapulted
with an uppercut an unfortunate English tourist into the porter's lodge for his
jokingly remarking how clever it was to drop the first letter of one's name in
order to use it as a particule, at the Gritz, in Venezia Rossa.
(1.36)
The letter allegedly dropped by Avidov is D. In the old
Russian alphabet D was called dobro ("good," a noun opposed to
zlo, "evil"). According to Kunyaev (a Kaluga-born Soviet poet),
dobro dolzhno byt' s kulakami (good should have fists). In
Kunyaev's poem kulakami (Instr. pl. of kulak, "fist") rhymes
with klokami (Instr. pl. of klok, "flock"). In her last note
poor mad Aqua mentions klok of a chelovek:
The hands of a clock, even when out of
order, must know and let the dumbest little watch know where they stand,
otherwise neither is a dial but only a white face with a trick mustache.
Similarly, chelovek (human being) must know where he stands and let
others know, otherwise he is not even a klok (piece) of a
chelovek, neither a he, nor she, but 'a tit of it' as poor Ruby, my
little Van, used to say of her scanty right breast. (1.3)
In Shakespeare's Hamlet (1.1) Horatio answers to
Barnardo's question if Horatio is there: "A piece of him." Admiral Horatio
Nelson who opposed Napoleon in the sea was one-armed. Moreover, he was, like
Kutuzov, one-eyed. With the help of Jones (a footman in "Ardis the Second" who
becomes a policeman in Ladore) Van blinds Kim Beauharnais - burning his
files and most of Kalugano's pine forest - for spying on him and Ada and
blackmailing Ada (2.11). Another Jones was Van's teacher of history in
Riverlane:
Price, the mournful old footman who brought the
cream for the strawberries, resembled Van's teacher of history, 'Jeejee'
Jones.
'He resembles my teacher of history,' said Van
when the man had gone.
'I used to love history,' said Marina, 'I loved
to identify myself with famous women. There's a ladybird on your plate, Ivan.
Especially with famous beauties - Lincoln's second wife or Queen Josephine.'
(1.5)
Josephine Beauharnais was, of course, the Empress of
France (before Napoleon divorced her).
Blanche, a French handmaid at Ardis, is the cook's niece:
...the cook's niece Blanche jumped out of a pumpkin-hued
police van in her stockinged feet (long, long after midnight, alas)...
(1.19). In Eugene Onegin (Ten: II: 2-4) Pushkin mentions "not our
cooks who plucked the two-headed eagle near Bonaparte's tent."
Vekchelo (a Yukon professional) is an anagram of
chelovek, Baron Klim Avidov is an anagram of Vladimir
Nabokov.
*Actually, Skobelev (whose life was thoroughly
fictionalized by Kuprin) lost his left arm in
1831, in the battle of Minsk (during the Polish revolt).
Alexey Sklyarenko