>I don't
think that "dobro" in russian literature
really has these sexual connotations.

 
Dear Sergei Soloviev,
 
What is meant by "dobro" in Pushkin's lines: Ukho vsyak derzhal vostro / I khranil svoyo dobro ("Everybody was on his guard / And took care of his belongings")?
 
Incidentally, the word dobro is also used by Pushkin, in a different sense, in "The Bronze Horseman" (1833). Cf. Eugene's words to Falconet's monument to Peter I (Part Two, l. 177): Dobro, stroitel' chudotvornyi! ("All right, the wondrous builder!"). Note that, on Antiterra, Pushkin is the author of the poem "Headless Horseman" (1.28). If this poem is about the same monument to Peter I (and not about a murder in Texas), it seems that the tsar didn't take sufficient care of a certain part of his body. On the other hand, in Pushkin's long poem "Ruslan and Lyudmila" there is golova (head) still alive without the rest of the body. (About the idiomatic use of the word golova by certain Chernomorsk residents in Ilf and Petrov's "The Golden Calf" see my note in Russian "Van Veen or Ivan Golovin: What was the Real Name of Ada's Protagonist?" soon to appear in Zembla.)
 
Alexey Sklyarenko
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