In my previous post I mentioned Vas'ka krasnyi
(Red Vaska), the eponymous hero of a story by Gorky. Vas'ka is a common
name of tomcats. In Krylov's fable Kot i povar ("The Tomcat
and the Cook") the tomcat is called Vas'ka. The
phrase "a Vas'ka slushaet da est" ("Vaska listens to the cook and
eats") from this fable became proverbial. There is kot Vas'ka
in Pushkin's poem Domik v Kolomne ("The Small House in
Kolomna," 1830) written in the octaves: Ob ney
zhaleli v dome, vsekh zhe bole / Kot Vas'ka ("In the house
they felt sorry for her [the deceased cook], particularly the tomcat
Vaska").
One of the characters in Garshin's story "Nadezhda
Nikolaevna" (1885) is a hunchbacked painter Gelfreich who draws nothing but
cats. The story's hero and narrator, Andrey Lopatin, is also a painter who
works on a portrait of Charlotte Corday (known on Antiterra as Cora Day, an
opera singer who shot dead Murat, the Navajo chieftain, in his swimming pool:
1.28). Nadezhda Nikolaevna is a prostitute who poses for this portrait (at
the end of the story Bessonov, NN's former lover and a friend of Lopatin, shoots
her dead and is stabbed by Lopatin).
The author of Krasnyi tsvetok ("The Red Flower,"
1883) and Chetyre dnya ("Four Days," 1877), Garshin committed suicide
by jumping from the fifth floor of an appartment building. In Ada (2.6), M-r Arshin (Garshin - G) is a patient in the Kingston Clinic
(where Van Veen works as a psychiatrist and researcher) who suffers from
acrophobia (pathological fear of heights).
Chekhov dedicated to the memory of
Garshin his story Pripadok (A Nervous Breakdown, 1889). Its
hero is a law student who suffers mental anguish after he was dragged by his
friends on a tour of brothels. His surname, Vasilyev, comes from
the male given name Vasiliy (Basil). Vas'ka is a
pejorative form of Vasiliy.
Garshin's "The Red Flower" is dedicated to
the memory of Turgenev. In Ada (2.3), all the hundred floramors
(palatial brothels, also known as "Villa Venus") opened simultaneously on
September 20, 1875. On this very day Turgenev moved to the new-built chalet at
his and Viardot's villa Les Frênes ("The Ash Trees") in
Bougival.
Btw., kot (tomcat) is Russian slang
for "souteneur."
There are cats and polecats in
Ada.
I never heard that story about Catherine's
favorite stallion (not that it does not exist).
Alexey Sklyarenko