Chose is French for "thing" and
quelque chose means "something". According to Pushkin (Eugene
Onegin, One: V: 1-2),
Мы все учились
понемногу
Чему-нибудь и
как-нибудь
All of us had a bit of
schooling
in something and
somehow.
This is rendered
by Turgenev and Viardot in their accurate prose translation of EO as
"Nous avons
tous, par petites bribes, appris fort peu de choses et fort
mal."
The name of
Aqua's talc powder, Quelques Fleurs (1.3), blends, as it were, the stock
phrase quelque chose with Baudelaire's Fleurs du mal ("Flowers
of Evil").
A learned fellow, Onegin never went to
school and never was a student. It is Lenski who studied abroad and who brought
from the Goettingen University the fruits of learning (uchyonosti
plody): liberty-loving dreams, a spirit impetuous and rather strange, an
always enthusiastic speech and shoulder-length black
curls.
Lenski's "fruits of learning" bring to
mind Plody prosveshcheniya ("The Fruits
of Education", 1891), a comedy by Tolstoy. Incidentally, the
phrase plody prosveshcheniya first appears in Karamzin's
Melodor k Filaletu ("Melodor to Filalet") and is quoted by Herzen
in S togo berega ("From the Other
Shore").
Lenski is Kant's votary and a poet. (Two: VI:
8) Kant is mentioned in Ada (2.5) by Van: 'It [the closet in which
Van and Ada locked up Lucette] had a keyless hole as big as Kant's
eye. Kant was famous for his cucumicolor iris.'
Он пел разлуку и
печаль,
и нечто, и туманну
даль
He [Lenski] sang parting and
sadness,
and something, and the misty
distance. (Two: X: 7-8)
Turgenev and Viardot: Il chantait aussi l’absence et la tristesse, et le vague inconnu, et
le lointain vaporeux.
Van's University is in England. Albion
(England) is mentioned in the unfinished Canto Ten of EO. In the same
chapter Pushkin uses the gallicism siloyu veshey (par
la force des choses). In
Ada (2.7) Van translates this stock phrase as "the fever of
intercourse" (see also my article in Zembla "The Naked Truth
or the Reader's Sentimental Education in Ada's Quelque Chose
University").