Speaking of Pushkin and Vyazemski in The Event:
On April 30, 1823, a few days before
Pushkin had begun Eugene Onegin in Bessarabia, Vyazemski in Moscow
wrote to Aleksandr Turgenev in Petersburg: "I have recently had a letter
from Pushkin, the Arabian devil [bes Arabskiy]" - a pun on
bessarabskiy, "the Bessarabian." The epithet should have been, of
course, arapskiy, from arap ("Blackamoor," an allusion to
Pushkin's Ethiopian blood), and not arabskiy, from arab
("Arab").*
bes arabskiy - bes
arapskiy
Barbashin - Barboshin
Vyazemski's nickname in the Arzamas Society was Asmodeus
(after the devil in Zhukovski's poem Gromoboy, 1810, the first part of
The Twelve Sleeping Maidens, 1814-17).
M. A. Antonovich's famous article on Ivan Turgenev's
Fathers and Children (1861) was entitled Asmodeus of Our
Time** and had the epigraph from Lermontov (the author of The Hero of
Our Time):
Печально я гляжу на наше поколенье
(I look sadly at our generation).
The critic's name and patronymic, Maksim Alekseevich,
mirrors that of Troshcheykin and Gorky.***
Vera recalls her sister's romance with Barbashin
and mentions Turgenev: "мы втроём сидели на веранде, и
я знала, что вам до крика хочется, чтоб я ушла, а я сидела в качалке и
читала Тургенева, а вы на диване, и я знала, что, как только уйду, вы будете
целоваться, и потому не уходила." ("The Event," Act One).
On the other hand, Meshaev the First gives Antonina Pavlovna
roses and exclaims: "How beautiful, how fresh were the roses!"**** (Act
Two)
*the EO Commentary (vol. II, p. 38)
**initially, the title of a novel (1858) by
Askochenski
***Btw., in 1901 Gorky was expelled to Arzamas (in the
province of Nizhniy Novgorod). In 1931 (when the writer was
still alive) his home city, Nizhniy Novgorod, was renamed
Gorky
****a line from Myatlev's poem made famous by
Turgenev who used it as the title of one of his poems in prose
(Senilia)
Alexey Sklyarenko