Dorothy Vinelander
retired to a subarctic monastery town (Ilemna, now Novostabia) where eventually
she married 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.
(Ada, 3.8)
In his poem "Когда в тёплой ночи
замирает..." (1918) Mandelshtam calls
Moscow "the new Herculanum:"
И как новый встаёт
Геркуланум,
Спящий город в сияньи
луны...
Accordings to a proverb, Москва от копеечной
свечки сгорела ("Moscow was burned down by a penny candle"). Свеча
горела ("A candle burned") is the refrain in "Зимняя ночь" (Winter Night), Pasternak's poem
included in The Poems of Yuri Zhivago. In another Zhivago poem, "Сказка" (A Fairy Tale), brod (ford)
is mentioned:
У ручья
пещера.
Пред пещерой -
брод.
Сомкнутые
веки.
Выси.
Облака.
Воды. Броды.
Реки.
Годы и
века.
Adamovich called Mandelshtam's
poetry "bred angela" (an angel's delirium). Many of Pasternak's
poems are even more hallucinatory.
The epithet goreloe (burnt) is used
by VN as a noun (in the sense "smell of burning") in The Spring in
Fialta: "Смешно как они одинаково пахнут,
горелым сквозь духи, все эти сухие хорошенькие
шатеночки" ("Funny, how they all smell alike, burnt leaf through whatever
perfume they use, those angular dark-haired girls"). The barbarous Moscow and
that elaborate Kremlinesque night are also mentioned in VN's
story.
Alexey
Sklyarenko