I notice that Emmanuil de Saint Priest is a namesake of
Emmanuel Poiré (1858-1908), the French political cartoonist
known as Caran d'Ache. Born in Moscow, Caran d'Ache (a play on
karandash, "pencil") was the grandson of an Officer-Grenadier
in Napoleon's army who, wounded during the Battle of Borodino, had stayed behind
in Russia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caran_d'Ache).
Interestingly, Caran d'Ache and
Stalin are both mentioned in VN's story A Busy Man (1931):
"author of topical jingles in the émigré papers over a not
very witty pen name (unpleasingly reminding one of the "Caran d'Ache" adopted by
an immortal cartoonist)"; "those wooden couplets
whose rhythm recalled the seesaw of the Russian toy featuring a muzhik and a
bear and in which shrilly rhymed with Dzhugashvili."*
Speaking of karandash, this word occurs in
Pushkin's 1828 poem To Dawe, Esq.**
Why does
your wondrous pencil strive
My Moorish profile to elicit?
Your art will
help it to survive,
But Mephistopheles will hiss it.
Draw
Miss Olenin's face. To serve
His blazing inspiration's duty,
The genius
should spend his verve
On homage but to youth and
beauty.
There is of course Lenin in Olenin. Although Lenin
was not as popular with (foreign) cartoonists as Stalin (known on Terra as Uncle
Joe and on Antiterra as Khan Sosso, the current ruler of the Golden
Horde), he was lovingly portrayed by many Soviet or
pro-Soviet artists.
A priest and a pencil (karandash) also
meet in Ilf and Petrov's novel "The 12 chairs" (chapter 12: "The Sultry Woman, a
Poet's Dream"):
Ostap bent down to the keyhole, cupped his hand to
his mouth, and said
clearly:
"How much is opium
for the people?"
There was silence behind the
door:
"Dad, you're a nasty old man," said Ostap
loudly.
That very moment the point of Father
Theodore's pencil shot out of the
keyhole and wiggled in
the air in an attempt to sting his enemy. The
concessionaire jumped
back in time and grasped hold of it. Separated by the
door, the
adversaries began a tug-of-war. Youth was victorious, and the
pencil,
clinging like a splinter, slowly crept out of the keyhole.
Ostap
returned with the trophy to his room, where the partners
were still more
elated.
"And the enemy's in
flight, flight, flight," he crooned.
He carved a
rude word on the edge of the pencil with a pocket-knife,
ran into the
corridor, pushed the pencil through the priest's keyhole, and
hurried
back.
Ostap + Lenin + or = Olenin +
pastor (cf. "Les Amours du Docteur Mertvago, a mystical romance
by a pastor", 1.8; the hero of Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago" hates Stalin
but admires Lenin)
*in the Russian original, Stalin rhymed
with protalin ("the thawed patches" in Genitive) in Graf It's
verses (in the English version Graf It became Grafitski)
**transl. Babette Deutsch
Alexey Sklyarenko