"The Event" ends in Meshaev the Second
(who toyed with occult studies during
the long winter evenings in the country) reading Lyubov's
hand and then pausing over that of Barboshin. Svyatki (Yuletide, the
twelve days from the birth of Christ to Epiphany) is the traditional time
of divination. In Eugene Onegin (Five: VII-XXI) Tatiana plans to
conjure on a Yuletide night but suddenly gives up and goes to bed
and dreams a wondrous dream.
"Onegin, our prankster" is mentioned by Vyazemski in
Svyatochnaya shutka" ("The Yuletide Joke"):
Кто сват его: Европы ль Вестник,
Или Онегин, наш шалун?
(Who is his [the devil's] matchmaker: Europe's
Herald
or Onegin, our prankster?)
Shutka (joke) comes from shutit' (to joke)
and is related to shut (jester, buffoon, clown), the
word sometimes used as an euphemism of chyort (the devil). Here is
the closing stanza of Fet's poem "Полно смеяться! что
это с вами?.." ("Stop laughing! What's the matter with you?..") from the
cycle "Гадание" ("Divination,"
1842):
"Гроб забивают крышей большою,
Кто-то
завыл!
Страшно, сестрицы! знать, надо мною
Шут
подшутил."
("They are hammering down the big coffin lid.
Somebody started to wail!
It is terrible, my sisters! The devil
must have played a joke on me.")
Alfred Afanasievich Barboshin shares his patronymic with
Afanasiy Afanasievich Fet (1820-92). Just as Shenshin
(Fet's "real" surname), the names
Barbashin and Barboshin end
in -shin.
Another word that comes from shutit' is
shutnik (joker, in the sense "a person who jokes"). In
Chekhov's play Three Sisters* (1901) Tuzenbakh calls Solyonyi (who
later kills Tuzenbakh in a duel) shutnik.
In Pushkin's novel in verse (Chapter Six) Onegin
kills in a duel Lensky. Barboshin, as he prepares to perform his duty of
the private detective hired by Troshcheykin, sings from Chaykovski's opera:
Начнём пожалуй ("Yes, if you like, let's
start").**
Like Yegor, a character
in Chekhov's story "Na svyatkakh" ("At Christmas Time,"
1900), Barboshin is poshlust' itself. But, according
to Nikitin, the main character in Chekhov's story "The Teacher of
Literature" (1894), there is nothing more terrible in the world
than poshlust'. Ergo, the private detective Barboshin is as
terrible as his alter ego, the killer Barbashin. In fact,
Barbashin and Barboshin are two incarnations of one and the same old
character: the devil. It is the devil who plays a joke on
Troshcheykin, the portrait painter who forgets the saying "the devil is not
as terrible as he is painted" and fails to recognize him in "cozy and
terribly original" Barboshin. Moreover, with a little help of Meshaev the Second
and the maidservant Martha the devil turns Troshcheykin and his wife, the
two "provincial guinea pigs" (as in a letter to Suvorin Chekhov calls the
characters of "The Teacher of Literature"), into regular swines (a similar
metamorphosis happens to a character in Chekhov's story "The Gooseberries,"
1898).
*In "The Event" (Act One) Troshcheykin complains of the
misrable existence his family leads in a provincial town and mentions Chekhov's
Three Sisters: мы разлагаемся в захолустной
обстановке, как три сестры.
**In Pushkin's novel Lenski speaks these words with a
different intonation: "Let's start if you are willing."
Alexey Sklyarenko