Speaking of torf, "peat," Mikhail
Prishvin (an agronomist who became a writer, mainly of children's books,
1873-1954) is the author of a series of essays, entitled "Torf," about
peat-digging. Besides, one of Prishvin's best-known books is Kladovaya
solntsa ("The Sun's Pantry," 1945), about Russian peat
bogs.
In his essay on Gorky, Ivan Bunin mentions
Gorky's habit easily go into raptures over the work of his
colleagues and express his feelings in bombastic phrases, as, for example,
this one: "I'm happy, Prishvin, to live on the same planet with
you!" Nabokov (who considered Prishvin "a regional mediocrity") would
hardly have shared Gorky's exaltation. Can this be one of the reasons that
Ada's setting is not Earth, but its twin planet, the much
more colorful (even if also depraved and
cruel) Antiterra?
Like Golovin, the name Prishvin ends in
-vin.
torf = fort (cf. Californian Fort
Ross, mentioned in Ada: 2.8) = ftor ("fluorine;" the
Russian word comes from Greek phtoros, "decay") = Trofim - im
(im is a Russian personal pronoun that means "by him" and
"[to] them")
Alexey Sklyarenko