Speaking of Demon Veen (Dark Walter) and his cousin
Daniel (Durak Walter or Red Veen), I mentioned in my previous posts
Gorky's Vas'ka krasnyi (Red Vaska) and Vasiliy Tyomnyi (Dark
Vasily), the Grand Prince of Moscow (1415-62) who was blinded by his cousin
Dimitry Shemyaka. Shemyaka had a younger brother, Dimitry Krasnyi (who
probably wasn't red-haired but must have had good looks, krasnyi
meaning in the old days both "red" and "beautiful"). Daniel Veen dies an odd
Boschean death (2.10). The death of Dimitry Krasnyi (as described by
Karamzin) was also odd enough. He lost sense of smell, hearing and his nostrils
had to be plugged, because his nose was bleeding incessantly. Having
received the last Communion, he fell asleep but everybody thought he was
dead. The boyars covered his body with silk or some other
fabric and had a funeral feast, drinking a lot of mead until they
all fell asleep in the same room. But in the night they were shocked to hear
the dead man sing church hymns and talk about religious
subjects. He kept singing and talking three days and only then
died.
Passing to the next, 16th, century: according to a
legend, Ivan the Terrible had the architect/architects of St. Basil's
Cathedral (Sobor Vasiliya Blazhennogo) in the Red/Beautiful Square
blinded not to let him/them build anything as beautiful.
Barma = ambar = ambra = Abram
= rabam
Barma - the architect/one of the
architects of St. Basil's Cathedral in Moscow; barma, sing. of barmy (small shoulder mantles
worn by Moscow princes)
ambar - Russ., barn; cf.
Night of the Burning Barn in Ada (1.19); in the closing poem of
Tristia Mandelshtam compares Hagia Sophia in Constantinople and
St. Peter's Basilica in Rome to barns full of air and light
(Sobory vechnye Sofii i Petra, / Ambary vozdukha i sveta)
ambra - ambergris; note
that "amber" (fossil resin, Fr. ambre, Germ. Bernstein,
Russ. yantar'; cf. unmentionable 'lammer' banned on Antiterra after the
L disaster: 1.3) comes from anbar, Arabic for "ambergis"; in
Russian, anbar is an obsolete and dialectal form of
ambar; anbar = baran (ram, sheep) = barin (master) +
a - i; barin = brain = Brian (Russian spelling of
Briand, the French statesman mentioned in The Golden Calf:
Brian - eto golova; "B. has a good head indeed")
Abram - a male given name; an
earlier name of Abraham
rabam - to the slaves
(Dat. pl. of rab, "slave")
Alexey Sklyarenko