The name Berdnikov reminds one of bredni (ravings;
fantasies), the word used by Pushkin in the Fragments of Onegin's
Journey ([XIX]: 1-4):
Порой дождливою намедни,
Я, завернув на скотный двор...
Тьфу! Прозаические
бредни,
Фламандской школы пёстрый сор!
The other day, during a rainy period,
as I had dropped into the cattle yard -
Fie! Prosy divagations,
the Flemish School's variagated dross!
On his way back to the hotel from the dinner he
had with Berdnikov and his son-in-law in the Bois de Boulogne
Samgin looks at the variagated crowd of smart courtesans and rich
satisfied men and recalls Bosch's paintings he saw in Berlin:
"Нужен дважды гениальный Босх, чтоб превратить вот
такую действительность в кошмарный гротеск" [it
would take a genius twice as great as Bosch to transform such a reality into a
nightmarish grotesque] - подумал Самгин, споря с
кем-то, кто ещё не успел сказать ничего, что требовало бы
возражения.
Bredni comes from bred (delirium;
ravings; gibberish). Dorothy Vinelander (Ada's sister-in-law) eventually marries
a Mr Brod or Bred, tender and passionate, dark and
handsome, who traveled in eucharistials and other sacramental objects throughout
the Severnïya Territorii and who subsequently was to direct, and still may
be directing half a century later, archeological reconstructions at Goreloe
(the 'Lyaskan Herculanum'); what treasures he dug up in matrimony is another
question. (3.8) Mrs Brod or Bred is a namesake of Dorothy Hare, the
heroine of George Orwell's novel A Clergyman's Daughter
(1935). The author of Animal Farm (in Russian, "Скотный двор"), Eric Blair (Orwell's
real name) is a namesake of Eric Veen (the young author of 'Villa
Venus: an Organized Dream'), the grandson of David van Veen, a wealthy
architect of Flemish extraction (2.3). The architect's nephew and heir, an
honest but astoundingly stuffy clothier in Ruinen (somewhere near Zwolle, I'm
told), reminds one of Onegin, "the heir of all his
relatives" whose "uncle has most honest principles."
All the hundred floramors [built by David van Veen in memory of his
grandson] opened simultaneously on September 20, 1875 (and by a
delicious coincidence the old Russian word for September, 'ryuen','
which might have spelled 'ruin,' also echoed the name of the ecstatic
Neverlander's hometown). (2.3)
Pushkin completed the Fragments of Onegin's
Journey on September 18, 1830, in Boldino.
Btw., Orange is a member of European princely
family ruling in the United Kingdom from 1688 to 1694 and in the
Netherlands since 1815.
Alexey Sklyarenko