Dear Jansy and all,
I'm not refuting Jansy's arguments, I merely wish
to change the perspective. I already mentioned Gorky's secretary and
translator (and lover?) Maria Zakrevskaya-Benkendorf-Budberg (Nina Berberova has
written a book about her, "The Iron Lady"). Here are Mandelstam's rhymes on her,
from his "Anthology of the Wordly Stupidity:"
Eto est' Madam Maria -
Ugol' est' pochti chto torf,
No ne kazhdaya Maria
Mozhet zvat'sya Benkendorf.
This is Madam Maria.
Coal is almost what peat is.
But not every Maria
Has the surname Benkendorf.
Count Aleksandr Hristoforovich Benkendorf
(Benckendorff, 1783-1844) is a Russian general, who participated in the war
against Napoleon (the troops under his commandment freed Holland) and
who, since 1826, was the chief of the Gendarmes Corps and the
so-called "Third Department" (tsar's political police). He acted as a
go-between in Pushkin's relationships with the tsar Nicolas I (who had
proclaimed himself Pushkin's only censor). In a letter written on November
21, 1836, the poet informed Benkendorf of the challenge to a
duel he had sent to d'Anthes but had withdrawn two weeks later,
upon learning that d'Anthes, who had been making advances to Pushkin's wife
Natal'ya Nikolaevna, had proposed to her sister Ekaterina. In this letter
Pushkin named the Dutch ambassador Baron Heckereen (d'Anthes's
foster-father and lover) as the author of the anonymous letters (in
which the poet was welcomed as a new member and
historiographerto of the Order of Cuckolds) that Pushkin's friends had
received on November 4.
Maria Budberg (whose pet name was Mura,*
and who is accused of bringing ailing Gorky poisonous sweets given
her by Yagoda,** the head of the secret police) was in no way related
to Count Benkendorf. Neither was she a descendant of Agrafena
Zakrevskaya, a famous beauty of Pushkin's times, Baratynsky's and Pushkin's
lover, whom Pushkin used to call mednaya Venera ("the bronze
Venus") in his letters (and who could have served as a model
for Nina Voronskaya, "that Cleopatra of the Neva," in "Eugene
Onegin").
Veen (the family name of most of
Ada's characters) means "peat bog" in Dutch. Russian for
"peat" is torf (the rhyme-word of the name Benkendorf; cf.
Torfyanka, a village near Ardis Hall and the adjective torfyanuyu,
"peaty," composed by Ada in a Flavita game: 1.36). TORF = FTOR = FORT
= ORT + F = ROT + F = TROFEY - EY (ftor is Russian for
"fluorine;" it comes from the Greek word phtoros, decay,
destruction; fort is a fortified place, fortress; cf. the once
Russian Fort Ross in California and one of the songs that Van, Ada and Lucette
listen to in Ursus: "There's a crag on the Ross;** overgrown with
wild moss" 2.8; fort is also German for
"away;" Ort is German for "place;" rot is Russian for
"mouth" and German for "red;" trofey is Russian for "trophy;"
ey is a form of the Russian pronoun ona, "she," in the dative,
"to her"); there are other possibilities.
*Mura = Amur = Raum = arum; Mura, or
Murka, accented on the first syllable, is a usual name of a
she-cat. As a noun, mura is accented on the second syllable and
means "nonsense." Cf. Mandelstam's poem Net, ne spryatat'sya mne ot velikoy
mury ("No, I can't hide from the great nonsense," 1931) that mentions
kurva-Moskva (Moscow the whore). Cf. in Ada (1.2): "At an invisible
sign of Dionysian origin, they all [young gardeners wearing the garb of
Georgian tribesmen, in the stage version of a famous Russain novel] plunged into
the violent dance called kurva or 'ribbon boule'..." Dionysos is the
Greek god of wine. Amur is Russian for Amor, the Roman God of love. It
is also the name of the Far-Eastern river. Raum is German for "space;"
cf. Lebensraum, a term of the Nazi propaganda. Arum
is the plant arum lily or calla lily, its flowers imitate the smell of
rotting flesh in order to attract flies. This word is mentioned in a Pasternak
poem, I don't remember which (I'm not very fond of Pasternak's
poetry).
**yagoda (accented on the first syllable)
is Russian for "berry." (The Jewish family name Yagoda is stressed on the second
syllable.)
***This song actually begins: "Est' na
Volge utyos, dikim mokhom obros" ("There's a crag on the Volga, overgrown
with wild moss"). It tells the story of Stepan Razin, the only man believed
to have reached the crag's top (the song's words are by A.
Navrotsky). Not only Nizhniy Novgorod (Gorky's home city), but also
Astrakhan (famed for Razin's riots), Simbirsk (Vladimir Ul'yanov-Lenin's
place of birth, now Ul'yanovsk) and Tsaritsyn (immodestly but aptly renamed
by Stalin Stalingrad, now Volgograd) are situated on the banks of
the "Mother-Volga."
Alexey
Sklyarenko