In a letter to Marina, his unfaithful mistress, Demon
wrote: "you spoke, I suppose, to the man with whom you had
spent the night (and whom I would have dispatched, had I not been overeager to
castrate him)" (1.2). Demon had a sword duel with Marina's lover,
Baron d'Onsky (according to Marina, a physical wreck and spiritual Samurai, who
had gone to Japan forever). "From a more reliable source
Demon learned the Samurai's real destination was smart little Vatican, a Riman
spa..."
In A. K. Tolstoy's poem "Bunt v Vatikane" ("A Riot in
Vatican," 1864) the Pope Pius IX is nearly castrated by his castrated
singers.
Correction of an earlier mistake: in my post of June 6
("Children of the Sun Horse") I wrote that Chernyshevsky died in Astrakhan. Of
course, he died in Saratov, his home city. He moved there from Astrakhan in
1889, a few months before his death.
Alexey Sklyarenko