Dear all,
When writing about 'Gory
Mary,' I forgot to mention Pushkin's poem "From Barry Cornwall" (1830)
that begins "P'yu za zdravie Meri..." ("I'm drinking to the health of
Mary...") and has the English poet's line "Here's a health to thee,
Mary" for an epigraph. On the day of his fatal duel, Jan. 27,
1837, Pushkin sent a volume of Barry Cornwall's plays to the children's
writer A. O. Ishimova asking her to translate several pieces from it (it was
Pushkin's last letter, written a few hours before he went to Chyornaya
Rechka). Interestingly, Ishimova's address in St. Petersburg was the
Furshtadtskaya Street (many years later, Vera Slonim was born in a house on
that street), the house of a certain Эльтиков (Eltikov, a rare
and amusing surname), 53. Эльтиков = эль + виток; виток = китов
= Виктор - p (эль is Russian for "ale" and the modern name of
the letter L; vitok means "spire," "coil;" kitov means "of the
whales;" Виктор is the male given name Victor; cf. King Victor, aka
Mr Ritkov and Vrotic, in Ada; I hope the Cyrrilc
characters will come through and be visible to everybody)
Perhaps, I should have also mentioned Mary, a
character in Pushkin's play "Pir vo vremya chumy" ("Feast at the Time
of the Plague," 1830), the Scottish girl, who sings a melancholy song.
And of course I should have spoken in more detail
about certain "autobiographic" passages in "Gavriliada" and, on the other hand,
about the mention of persty ("fingers") in Pushkin's poem
Vinograd ("Grapes") and in Ada. But I'm lazy!
And, yes, Lermontov's "Princess Mary" (a novella in
Lermontov's novel "A Hero of our Time," 1840) is also
worth mentioning, in view of the fact that Lermontov (who, in "Princess
Mary," has Pechorin kill Grushnitsky in a duel), too, was killed in a
duel.
Alexey Sklyarenko (who was born in a maternity home
on the Furshtadtskaya Street and who lives on the bank of Chyornaya Rechka, the
Black River, in a five-minute walk from the spot of Pushkin's
duel)