Aqua's twin sister, Marina is a namesake of Marina Tsvetaev (1892-1941), a
"poet of genius" as VN calls her in Speak, Memory (Chapter Fourteen,
2):
I met wise, prim, charming Aldanov; decrepit Kuprin,
carefully carrying a bottle of vin ordinaire through rainy streets;
Ayhenvald - a Russian version of Walter Pater - later killed by a trolleycar;
Marina Tsvetaev, wife of a double agent, and poet of genius, who, in the late
thirties, returned to Russia and perished there.*
The name Tsvetaev comes from tsvet, or tsvetok (pl.
tsvety), "flower." The author of a series of memoir
essays Otets i ego muzey ("Father and his Museum," 1933-36),
Marina Ivanovna Tvetaev is a daughter of the founder of
the magnificent Alexander III Museum (now the State Pushkin Museum of Fine
Arts) in Moscow. The Museum's main sponsor was Nechaev-Maltsev (1834-1913),
the owner of the famous glass factories in Gus'-Khrustal'nyi (a city in the
Province of Vladimir whose name means "chrystal goose"):
Слово "музей" мы, дети, неизменно слышали в окружении
имён: великий князь Сергей Александрович, Нечаев-Мальцев, Роман Иванович
Клейн и ещё Гусев-Хрустальный. Первое понятно, ибо великий князь
был покровителем искусств, архитектор Клейн понятно тоже (он же строил
Драгомиловский мост через Москва-реку), но
Нечаева-Мальцева и Гусева-Хрустального нужно объяснить. Нечаев-Мальцев был
крупнейший хрусталезаводчик в городе Гусеве, потому и ставшем Хрустальным. Не
знаю почему, по непосредственной ли любви к искусству или просто "для души"
и даже для её спасения (сознание неправды
денег в русской душе
невытравимо), -- во всяком случае, под неустанным и
страстным воздействием моего отца (можно сказать, что
отец Мальцева обрабатывал, как те итальянцы -- мрамор) Нечаев-Мальцев стал
главным, широко говоря -- единственным жертвователем
музея, таким же его физическим
создателем, как отец --
духовным. (Даже такая шутка по Москве ходила: "Цветаев-Мальцев".)
("The Alexander III Museum," 1933)
According to a Russian saying, gus' svin'e ne tovarishch ("no
goose is a friend of a sow"). In the song "You don't butt in, the samurai"
(quoted in full in my recent post) there are lines:
Сунул враг свиное рыло
В наш советский
огород.
The enemy poked its swine snout
into our Soviet kitchen-garden.
According to Marina, d'Onsky is a spiritual Samurai. One of the seconds in
Demon's duel with d'Onsky is Colonel St. Alin, a scoundrel (1.2). Stalin is
mentioned in the song about the samurai:
Слава Сталину гремела –
Песня пламенных
сердец.
A glory to Stalin resounded -
the song of ardent hearts.
Demon's adversary in a sword duel, Baron d'Onsky (nicknamed Skonky)
seems to be a horse, Onegin's Don stallion (Two: V: 4). Lenski's
second in his duel with Onegin, a reformed rake Zaretski is compared by
Pushkin to zyuzya (obs., swine) and to a modern Regulus:
И то сказать, что и в сраженьи
Раз в настоящем
упоеньи
Он отличился, смело в грязь
С коня калмыцкого свалясь,
Как зюзя
пьяный, и французам
Достался в плен: драгой залог!
Новейший Регул, чести
бог,
Готовый вновь предаться узам,
Чтоб каждый вечер у Вери
В долг
осушать бутылки три.
and, furthermore, in battle too
once, in genuine intoxication,
he distinguished himself, boldly in the mud
toppling from his Kalmuk steed,
swine drunk, and to the French
fell prisoner (prized hostage!) -
a modern Regulus, the god of honor,
ready to yield anew to bonds
in order every morning at Véry's
to drain on credit some three bottles. (Six: V: 5-14)
Regulus: "The allusion is to the Roman general Marcus Atilius Regulus (d.
c. 250 b. c.), hero of the third Punic War. After his defeat by the
Carthagenians he was dispatched by his captors to Rome with harsh terms of
peace. There he insisted instead that the war be continued. Although he knew
that he would pay for this with his life, he returned into captivity as he had
promised to do." (EO Commentary, III, p. 8)
Goose is the bird in the rebus composed by old Sinitski, a character
of Ilf and Petrov's Zolotoy telyonok ("The Little Golden Calf,"
1931). The goose in Sinitski's rebus holds in its beak the big
Cyriilic letter Г (that corresponds to Roman G and looks like Roman L
turned upside down), big and heavy as a gallows:
И старик, усевшись за свой стол, начал разрабатывать
большой, идеологически выдержанный ребус. Первым долгом он набросал карандашом
гуся, держащего в клюве букву «Г», большую и тяжелую, как виселица. Работа
ладилась. (chapter IX "Crisis of the Genre
Again")
It takes Koreiko a moment to solve Sinitski's difficult riddle:
In the next sentence VN evokes Kuprin whom he met in Paris in the 1930s and
who, as a greeting, raises from afar a bottle of red wine - in
the autumnal rain under falling yellow leaves. The memoirist then mentions
Remizov, the author of Krestovye Syostry** (1911) who looked to VN
like a rook after untimely castling.
**"The Kresty Sisters" (Kresty is a prison in St. Petersburg where
VN's father spent three months in 1908, SM, p. 25).