[EDNote--due to some editorial juggling, we missed Alexey's correction
yesterday. Here is his corrected post. ~SB]
In "Khorosho" ("Good")
Mayakovski gives Kerenski's name and patronymic the feminine ending:
Byt' Kerenskomu bitu i obodranu!
Uzh my podymem s tsaryovoi krovati
etu samuyu Aleksandru Fyodorovnu.
Kerenski will be beaten and stripped
of his belongings!
We shall raise from the tsar's bed
this notorious Aleksandra Fyodorovna.
VN's "late namesake"* plays on the
fact that Aleksandr Fyodorovich Kerenski (1881-1970), the premier in the autumn of 1917, until the
October coup d'etat, when Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power, was a
"namesake" of the last Russian Empress, Aleksandra Fyodorovna
Romanov, the wife of Nicolas II. He also hints at the rumors that
Kerenski fled from the Winter palace in woman's clothes. What is not
only "in bad taste" but preposterous on Mayakovski's part, is making
Kerenski sleep in the tsar's bed (the tsar's entire family was arrested
by the Provisional Government and executed in 1918 by the Bolsheviks).
A little later, Mayakovsky
affectionately refers to Lenin by patronymic:
A v Smol'nom, v dumakh o bitve i
voyske,
Ilyich grimirovannyi mechet shazhki
And in the Smol'ny,** in meditations
about battle and army,
Ilyich, in his make-up, paces the
corridor with his little steps.
Ilyich (a propos, il is
French for "he") is the patronymic of Ivan Golovin, the hero of
Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich". You can meet the two Ilyichs,
Nikifor Lapis-Trubetskoy, Ostap Bender (the hero of Ilf and
Petrov's "The 12 Chairs" and "The Golden Calf") and a lot of other more
or less amusing people in my "All's Well that Ends Well": http://topos.ru/articles/0907/03_05.shtml (article
in Russian).
*see VN's poem "On the Rulers" (1945)
**the former Smol'nyi Institute of
Noble Maidens in St. Petersburg; a naive (or depraved) reader of
Mayakovski can be fooled into thinking that Lenin was made up as a
headmistress
Alexey Sklyarenko