In memory of Sam Sсhuman

Hugh Person strangles Armande in his sleep on a March night in 1966.

Tsar Paul I (Pavel Petrovich) was strangled by a group of exasperated courtiers on a March night in 1801. "The event will be especially remembered as having inspired, in 1817, a magnificent passage (ll. 57-88) in Pushkin's first great work, his Ode to Liberty." (EO Commentary, vol. III, p. 336) "According to Vigel's Memoirs (1864) and a letter from Nikolay Turgenev to Pyotr Bartenev (in 1867), Pushkin wrote (no doubt from memory - poets do not compose in public) the ode, or part of it, in the rooms of Nikolay Turgenev, who at the time lived in St. Petersburg on the Fontanka Quay, opposite the Mihaylovskiy Palace (also known as the Inzhenernyi Castle), whither, flushed after a champagne supper and wearing their resplendent decorations, the assassins made their way to Tsar Paul's bedroom on the night of Mar. 11, 1801." (ibid., p. 344)

Nikolay Turgenev (1789-1871) was a cousin of the father of Ivan Turgenev (1818-83), the novelist. In Turgenev's story Chasy ("The Watch," 1875) the action begins in March, 1801, when Nastasey Nastaseich gives the hero the watch as a nameday present:

Дело происходило в самом начале нынешнего столетия, в 1801 году. Мне только что пошёл шестнадцатый год. Жил я в Рязани, в деревянном домике, недалеко от берега Оки - вместе с отцом, тёткой и двоюродным братом...

Крёстным отцом моим был некто Анастасий Анастасьевич Пучков, или, собственно: Настасей Настасеич; иначе никто его не величал...

Зовут меня - вы знаете - Алексеем. Я родился 7, а именинник я 17 марта.
It happened at the very beginning of this century, in 1801. I had just reached my sixteenth year. I was living in Ryazan in a little wooden house not far from the bank of the river Oka with my father, my aunt and my cousin...

My godfather was a certain Anastasey Anastasievich Puchkov, or more exactly Nastasey Nastaseich, for that was what everyone called him...

My name — you know — is Alexey. I was born on the seventh of March and my name-day is the seventeenth.

Armande's mother, Anastasia Petrovna Potapov (the owner of Villa Nastia), was born in Ryazan (chapter 12).

In his poem Telega zhizni ("The Cart of Life," 1823) Pushkin compares Time to a coachman:

Хоть тяжело подчас в ней бремя,

Телега на ходу легка;

Ямщик лихой, седое время,

Везёт, не слезет с облучка.

Although the burden in it is sometimes hard,
The Cart is easy in its move,
The reckless coachman, gray time,
Will not get of his bench above.

According to a memoirist (S. N. Krivenko), Ivan Turgenev once met a peasant (former serf) who described to the writer the visit of tsar Alexander II to his former master's estate. The peasant compared the tsar's coachman to chudo-yudo borodatoe (a bearded monster):

Тут Тургенев внезапно переменил тон и с неподражаемой интонацией в неподражаемо народной форме повёл рассказ от лица мужика-очевидца, который описал Тургеневу всё царское посещение.

— Ждём мы пождём, а царя всё нет да нет. Уж солнышко закатываться за лес стало. Отошшали мы, инда тоска на нас напала... Только глядь, по дороге, прямо на нас валит кто-то страшенный, с усами, на коне: как подлетел, как пужанёт во всё горло: «Такие из-этакие, на колени! Государь едет!..» Так мы и пали ничком, и лежим словно на страшной неделе — Господи, владыко живота моего — и головы поднять не смеем. Много ли, мало ли мы так лежали, только как загогочет кто-то опять: «Государь едет!» Поднял я бочком голову: вижу, не то казаки, не то егеря летят во всю мочь и гигикают, а по дороге, брат ты мой, этак в шагах в тридцати, жарит тройка лошадей, каких и отроду не видывал: копыта — во какие, дуга — во какая, — и Тургенев широко разводит своими мощными руками, — кучер как чудо-юдо бородатое, а в брычке, значит, сидит сам ён, и того больше, шинель серая, фуражка с красным околышем, а голова, ну вот умри я, что пивной котёл, ровно у Лукопёра богатыря.

At a public reading in St. Petersburg in 1880 Turgenev repeated the peasant's story. Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by terrorists on March 1, 1881.

We shall now discuss love...

That night at Stresa she [Armande] insisted they rehearse (he in his sleeping shorts, she in a Chudo-Yudo pajama) an acrobatic escape in the stormy murk by climbing down the overdecorated face of their hotel, from their fourth story to the second one, and thence to the roof of a gallery amidst tossing remonstrative trees. Hugh vainly reasoned with her...

Nobody, least of all her mother, could understand why Armande married a rather ordinary American with a not very solid job, but we must end now our discussion of love.(chapter 17)

Turgenev is the author of Pervaya lyubov' (First Love, 1860) and Pesn' torzhestvuyushchey lyubvi (The Song of Triumphant Love, 1881). (The latter story is dedicated to the memory of Gustave Flaubert.) In his poem January 29, 1837 [the day of Pushkin's death, OS] Tyutchev says that Russia's heart, like first love, will never forget Pushkin. In his vile story Raspad atoma ("Atomic Disintegration," 1938) G. Ivanov mentions Pushkin's fatal duel:

Раненый Пушкин упирается локтем в снег и в его лицо хлещет красный закат.

and the fact that Turgenev shook hands with d'Anthès:

Дантес убьёт Пушкина, а Иван Сергеевич Тургенев вежливенько пожмёт руку Дантесу, и ничего, не отсохнет его рука.

Raspad atoma has the epigraph from the second part of Goethe's Faust:

HP's first whore takes him to one of the better beds in a hideous old roominghouse - to the precise "number," in fact, where ninety-one, ninety-two, nearly ninety-three years ago a Russian novelist had sojourned on his way to Italy... The main problem now is whether to confide to his knapsack or mail in his grip his manuscripts: rough drafts of letters, an unfinished short story in a Russian copybook bound in black cloth, parts of a philosophical essay in a blue cahier acquired in Geneva, and the loose sheets of a rudimentary novel under the provisional title of Faust in Moscow. (chapter 6)

At the end of his negative review of Raspad atoma Hodasevich expresses his fear that Ivanov's story can be reprinted in Moscow as a proof of moral decline in the emigration:

И вот тут становится жутковато: как бы не взяли в Москве да не перепечатали бы всю книгу полностью, как она есть, – с небольшим предисловием на тему о том, как распадается и гниёт эмиграция от тоски по «красивой жизни» и по нетрудовому доходу.

Turgenev is the author of Faust, a story in nine letters (1855). In his memoir essay on Esenin (included in Necropolis, 1939) Hodasevich quotes from Alexander Shiryaevets's letter to him, in which Shiryaevets (a peasant poet) mentions the Turgenevian family estates:

Пусть уж о прелестях современности пишет Брюсов, а я поищу Жар-птицу, пойду к Тургеневским усадьбам, несмотря на то, что в этих самых усадьбах предков моих били смертным боем.

In his essay Hodasevich quotes the lines from Esenin's poem Pevushchiy zov ("The Melodious Call," 1917) in which yudo (monster) rhymes with chudo (wonder, marvel; miracle):

Сгинь ты, английское юдо,
Расплещися по морям!
Наше северное чудо
Не постичь твоим сынам!

In the same poem Esenin (who was born in a village near Ryazan) mentions yabloni (the apple trees):

Не хочу твоей победы,
Дани мне не надо!
Все мы - яблони и вишни
Голубого сада.

Все мы - гроздья винограда
Золотого лета,
До кончины всем нам хватит
И тепла и света!

Кто-то мудрый, несказанный,
Всё себе подобя,
Всех живущих греет песней,
Мёртвых - сном во гробе.