It occurs to me that R. G. Stonelower might be an allusion/anagram to
George Steiner.Make of it what you will.
Anna Arkadievitch Karenina,
transfigured into English by R. G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880
(Ada: 1.1)
"R. G. Stonelower" blends George Steiner* with Robert Lowell,
but also hints (as I suggest in my article on Pushkin's, Tolstoy's,
Mayakovsky's, Pasternak's and VN's optimism "Всё хорошо, что хорошо
кончается"**) at Nikifor Lapis-Trubetskoy, a character in Ilf & Petrov's
"The Twelve Chairs." The poet-ignoramus whom the editor Persitsky calls
Lapsus, Lapis is the author of the immortal phrase "волны перекатывались через мол и падали вниз
стремительным домкратом" ("the
waves rolled across the pier and fell headlong below like a jack"). Because
Lapis doesn't know what a jack is, Persitsky opens a volume of the Brockhaus
encyclopaedia and reads: "Домкрат (Germ., Daumkraft) is a machine for lifting
heavy weights. A simple jack used for lifting carriages, etc., consists of a
mobile toothed bar gripped by a rod which is turned by means of a lever... In
1879 John Dixon set up the obelisk known as Cleopatra's Needle by means of four
workers operating four hydraulic jacks." And this instrument, in your opinion,
can fall headlong? So Brockhaus has deceived humanity for fifty
years?"***
Lapis is Latin for "stone." "Камень" ("The Stone,"
1915) was Mandelshtam's first collection of poetry. On the other hand, VN's
"faithful Zoilos," the critic Georgiy Adamovich**** mentions the stone in his
essay on VN included in his book "Одиночество и свобода" (The Solitude and
Freedom, 1955): камень обернулся у него какой-то пушинкой и
сочиняет он роман за романом, один другого страшнее и «отчаяннее», с видимым
удовольствием и без всякого внутреннего препятствия ("the stone proved with him a light bit of
fluff and he composes one novel after another
that grow ever more terrifying and "desperate," with visible pleasure and
without any inner obstacle").
Chekhov famously compared a novel to a palace: "Чтобы строить роман, необходимо хорошо
знать закон симметрии и равновесия масс. Роман – это целый дворец, и надо, чтобы
читатель чувствовал себя в нём свободно, не удивлялся бы и не скучал, как в
музее" (To build a novel
one must know well the law of symmetry and the balance of forms. A novel is a
big palace and the reader should be at ease in it, he shouldn't be surprised or
bored, as in a museum*****). VN (to whom stones were fluff-light) needed no
jacks when he "built" his palatial novels.
пушинка = Пушкина = Книпуша
домкрат + Sosso = дом + Сократ + SOS
пушинка - a bit of
fluff******
Пушкина - the poet's wife Natal'ya
Pushkin (1812-63), née Goncharov, in the second marriage Lanskoy (cf. Praskovia
Lanskoy in Ada, mother of Percy de Prey)
Книпуша - Chekhov's name for his
wife, Olga Knipper (1868-1959), who spent several years in Polotnyanyi
Zavod, the Goncharov estate near Kaluga, prior to becoming an actress of
the Moscow Arts Theatre (whose directors were Stanislavsky and
Nemirovich-Danchenko)
домкрат - jack
Sosso - Khan Sosso, the ruler of
the ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate (2.2)
дом - home; house
Сократ - Socrates
The names Olga, of Chekhov's wife, and Socrates, of the
philosopher, remind one of Chernyshevsky's wife Olga Sokratovna, a character in
VN's The Gift. Another character in this novel
is the critic Christopher Mortus (whose review of Fyodor's book "The Life of
Chernyshevsky" is a parody of Adamovich's articles in Poslednie
novosti). Mortus (whose Latin penname reminds one of Lapis) is a namesake
of Ada's brother-in-law Christopher Vinelander - but also of Christopher
Columbus.*******
In "The 12 chairs" Bender and Vorob'yaninov visit the Columbus
Theatre where they watch an avant-garde stage version of Gogol's comedy
"Женитьба" ("The Marriage"). The actor who plays Stepan (Podkolyosin's valet)
gives his cues standing on his hands and there are other circus tricks and
dialogues that would have baffled the poor author. One is reminded of Van's
Mascodagama stunt (1.30), but also of the stage performance ("an American play based by some pretentious hack on a famous
Russian romance:" 1.2) watched by Demon Veen, in which Marina Durmanova
plays the heroine, a strange cross of Pushkin's Tatiana Larin with Pasternak's
Lara Antipov (who has a daughter Tatiana by Zhivago).
Btw., Transfiguration and Mount Tabor are mentioned in
Pasternak's poem August (one of "The Poems of Yuri Zhivago"). In his
essay on VN, Adamovich speaks of Pasternak's influence on VN's early
poetry.
*Stein is German for "stone"
**"All's Well that Ends Well" (the Russian text is available
in Topos)
***Chapter 29: "The Author of the
Gavriliada"
****there are Ada and Adam in
Adamovich
*****Serebrov, "On Chekhov" (III)
******an excerpt from my Russian in-vino-veritas article:
«пушинка» – пёрышко пуха, обычно птичьего; ср. Пушкин: «А
милый пол, как пух, легок»; ср. Чехов, слова Мымриной о распоротой женихом перине: «И пух-то
ведь какой! Пушинка к пушинке – ни одного пёрышка!»; ср. Мандельштам: «Хочешь, валенки сниму, / Как пушинку
подниму»
*******Ada's husband Andrey Vinelander is "an Arizonian
cattle-breeder whose fabulous ancestor discovered our country"
(5.6)
Alexey Sklyarenko
All private
editorial communications are read by both co-editors.