Dear subscribers: The UCSB has had sporadic outages over the last two
days. Presumably things will settle down after the holiday weekend.
To add a side note to George Shimanovich's enticing date coincidence:
Pushkin first heard Krylov's fable "The peasant and the ass" at a
birthday or name day party for Anna Kern (I don't have the date handy;
it should be in Kern's memoir). Krylov's poem is the well-known
subtext for the opening line to Eugene Onegin ("My uncle has
most honest principles" in a rough version of VN's translation).
Engineer Kern himself echoes that very line in the The Gift's
discussion of Chernyshevsky: " 'My uncle', said Kern, cracking a nut,
'was expelled from the university for reading [Chernyshevsky's] What
Is To Be Done' ". Sorry for the approximate quotation and lack of
page ref.
Stephen Blackwell