In the table drawer they found his passport. The dead man turned out to be
of foreign birth, though a Russian subject. His name was Jeremy Smith, and he
was a mechanical engineer, seventy-eight years old. (ibid.)
The novelist Ivan Shipogradov nicknamed his old rival,
Vasiliy Sokolovski, "Jeremy":
A far less engaging figure was I. A.
Shipogradov's old rival, a fragile little man in a sloppy suit, Vasiliy
Sokolovski (oddly nicknamed "Jeremy" by I.A.), who since the dawn of
the century had been devoting volume after volume to the mystical and
social history of a Ukrainian clan that had started as a humble family of three
in the sixteenth century but by volume six (1920) had become a whole
village, replete with folklore and myth. (2.1)
The characters of Dostoevski's novel Podrostok (The
Adolescent, 1875) include old Prince Sokolski and his young son. The names
Sokolski and Sokolovski both come from sokol (falcon).
"The eminent novelist
and recent Nobel Prize winner," I. A. Shipogradov reminds one of
I. A. Bunin (1870-1953). Bunin famously loathed Dostoevski for his
"spilling Jesus all over the place." According to Vadim (whose novel
The Dare includes a concise biography and critical appraisal of
Fyodor Dostoyevski), Dostoevski's novels are "absurd with their
black-bearded killers presented as mere negatives of Jesus Christ's conventional
image, and weepy whores borrowed from maudlin romances of an earlier age." (2.5)
In the Bible Jeremiah is the "weeping prophet." Jeremiah is mentioned by
Turkevich, a character in Korolenko's story V durnom obshchestve
(In Bad Company, 1885):
"Иду!.. Как пророк Иеремия... Иду обличать
нечестивых!"
"I'm going forth like the prophet Jeremiah to chastise the
wicked!"
Turkevich's words are quoted by D. S. Merezhkovski (Bunin's
rival who must have been the model of LATH's Sokolovski; although he was
nominated for the Nobel Prize several times, Merezhkovski, 1865-1941, never
won it) in his essay The Stories of Vladimir Korolenko (1889). The
setting of In Bad Company is a city in West Ukraine where Korolenko
came from and where the action of most of his stories takes place. Korolenko is
the author of Sokolinets (1885), a story about the tramps who escaped
from Sakhalin (Sokolinets title actually hints at the place of penal
servitude in the Tsarist Russia). In his essay on Korolenko Merezhkovski
also mentions Dostoevski's Humiliated and Insulted. LATH's Sokolovski
also reminds one of Adam Sokolovich, the protagonist of Bunin's story
Petlistye ushi (Loopy Ears, 1917).
Jeremy Smith is obviously English. According to Vadim, Count
Starov sported some English blood (6.1).
Ninel Ilinishna Langley is a namesake of Nina Voronskoy,
"that Cleopatra of the Neva" with whom in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin
Princess N. sits at a table. On the other hand, in
his Commentary to Annette's farewell letter Vadim twice calls
Ninella Langley (who used to call Vadim's wife "Netty") "Nelly:"
The first four or five lines are no
doubt authentic, but then come various details which convince me that not Netty
but Nelly masterminded the entire communication. Only a Soviet woman would speak
like that of America. (3.4)
Good-bye, Netty and Nelly. Good-bye, Annette and Ninette.
Good-bye, Nonna Anna. (ibid.)
In Humiliated and Insulted Nelly is Jeremy Smith's
grand-daughter, a thirteen-year-old orphan who moves to the
narrator after her grandfather's death. (But she suffers from epilepsy and
eventually dies of consumption.)
Ninel is Lenin
backwards. Leaving her husband, Annette moves with Ninel to Rustic
Roses (3.4). A roza upala na lapu Azora (And the rose fell on
Azor's paw) is one of Russian most famous palindromes (composed by
A. Fet).
Btw., the
Azores are mentioned in LATH:
In all their habits of expression Ben Kulich and Miss Haworth [Vadim's translators, a Russian-born New Yorker and an
Englishwoman who had spent three years in Moscow] were so close that
I now think they might have been secretly married to one another and had
corresponded regularly when trying to settle a tricky paragraph;
or else, maybe, they used to meet midway for lexical picnics on the
grassy lip of some crater in the Azores.
(2.10)
Alexey
Sklyarenko