Alexey Sklyarenko [ to JM
"When Van enthusses about the "dark blue"
association in his velvety family tree...] Tyomno-siniy means "dark-blue" in
Russian. Temnosiniy is a historical name of a princely family included, like
Pushkin, Golovin and many other names, in the Barkhatnaya kniga ("Velvet Book")
of Russian aristocrats.
JM: But for you, I'd
never learn about all these nuances from reading the English
text alone ( "Prince Ivan Temnosiniy, father of the children’s
great-great-grandmother, Princess Sofia Zemski (1755-1809), and a direct
descendant of the Yaroslav rulers of pre-Tartar times, had a millennium-old name
that meant in Russian ‘dark blue.’ [...] Van could not help feeling
esthetically moved by the velvet background he was always able to distinguish as
a comforting, omnipresent summer sky through the black foliage of the family
tree.")
Re-reading it now I see
that Van did set down "a millennium-old name...dark blue," but not
that his velvet background is actually the "Barkhatnaya kniga."
What about Van Veen's ancestors in
connection to Guermantes? The subject hasn't changed, but there
seems to be a "jump" from the Temnosiniy blue into Proust's "purple hues," when
Van writes that "his favorite purple
passage remained the one concerning the name ‘Guermantes,’ with whose hue his
adjacent ultramarine merged in the prism of his mind, pleasantly teasing Van’s
artistic vanity."