AAA is Andrey Andreevich
Aksakov, Van's chaste, angelic Russian tutor (1.24).
AAG is Andrey Andreevich Gromyko (the Minister of
Foreign Affairs in Brezhnev's government) and Aleksandr
Aleksandrovich Gromeko, the father of Antonina Zhivago in
Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (known on Antiterra as Les
Amours du Docteur Mertvago and Mertvago
Forever).
D. B. Mertvago (1760-1824) was a god-father of S. T. Aksakov
(the author of The Family Chronicle, 1856 and The
Childhood Years of Grandson Bagrov, 1858). In 1857 Aksakov published
his Reminiscences of Dmitri Borisovich Mertvago (a statesman and author
of Zapiski, "Memoirs," 1887). Various members of the Mertvago
family are mentioned in The Family Chronicle:
В таком расположении духа приехали они в Старую
Мертовщину, где жила в то время замечательно умная старуха Марья Михайловна
Мёртвая.*
(In such a mood they arrived in Old Mertovshchina where
Maria Mikhalovna Mertvaya,* a remarkably clever old woman, then
lived.)
*Aksakov's footnote: Впоследствии
правительство позволило изменить это страшное слово, и сыновья её стали
называться Мертваго. (The government later allowed her to change
that terrible word and her sons received the name Mertvago. Part Four,
The Young Couple in Bagrovo)
and in The Childhood Years of Grandson
Bagrov.
Van's tutor gently courted Mlle L.,
wrote 'decadent' Russian verse in sprung rhythm, and drank, in Russian
solitude. (1.10)
In 'Ursus' (a Franco-Russian restaurant in Manhattan,
2.8) Van, Ada and Lucette listen, among other
songs, to the celebrated
pseudo-gipsy guitar piece by Apollon Grigoriev (another friend of Uncle
Ivan's):
O you, at least, do talk to me,
My seven-stringed companion,
Such yearning ache invades my soul,
Such moonlight fills the canyon!
The author of Tsyganskaya vengerka (1855),
Apollon Aleksandrovich Grigoriev (AAG, 1822-64) traveled to Venice as a tutor of
Prince Trubetskoy's children. Grigoriev pil myortvuyu
("drank hard") and eventually died of alcoholism - but it was long
before the "decadent" period in Russian poetry. A great admirer of
Grigoriev, A. A. Blok (AAB) wrote a book (1915) on him. In Blok's
Incognita (1906) the drunks in a restaurant cry out: "in vino
veritas!"
Blok is the author of Ital'yanskie stikhi (Italian
Verses, 1909). All roads lead to Rome, the city where Gogol wrote Myortvye
dushi (Dead Souls, 1842).
Alexey Sklyarenko