>I
don't
think that "dobro" in russian literature
really has these sexual
connotations.
Dear Sergei Soloviev,
What is meant by "dobro" in Pushkin's
lines: Ukho vsyak derzhal vostro /
I khranil svoyo dobro ("Everybody was on his guard / And took care of his
belongings")?
Incidentally, the word dobro is also used
by Pushkin, in a different sense, in "The Bronze Horseman" (1833).
Cf. Eugene's words to Falconet's monument to Peter I (Part Two, l.
177): Dobro, stroitel' chudotvornyi! ("All right, the wondrous builder!").
Note that, on
Antiterra, Pushkin is the author of the poem "Headless Horseman" (1.28).
If this poem is about the same monument to Peter I (and not about a murder
in Texas), it seems that the tsar didn't take sufficient care of a
certain part of his body. On the
other hand, in Pushkin's long poem "Ruslan and Lyudmila" there is
golova (head) still alive without the rest of the body.
(About the idiomatic use of the word golova by certain Chernomorsk
residents in Ilf and Petrov's "The Golden Calf" see my note in Russian "Van
Veen or Ivan Golovin: What was the Real Name of Ada's Protagonist?"
soon to appear in Zembla.)
Alexey
Sklyarenko