In Vivian Calmbrood’s poem “The Night Journey” (1931) Chenston (the fictitious poet to whom Pushkin ascribed “The Covetous Knight”) mentions a certain Johnson whom they beat with a candlestick for a marked article:

Дни Ювенала отлетели.
Не воспевать же, в самом деле,
как за краплёную статью
побили Джонсона шандалом?

Johnson = Ivanov. “A marked article” is G. Ivanov’s abusive review in Chisla (The Numbers, No. 1, 1930) of Sirin’s novels and stories. According to Chenston, the days of Juvenal have passed. A few lines further into the poem Chenston mentions “a new Petronius” who with a half-smile on his lips and with the last turquoise rose in his fingers is getting into the bath:

Ущерб, закат... Петроний новый
с полуулыбкой на устах,
с последней розой бирюзовой
в изящно сложенных перстах,
садится в ванну.

G. Ivanov is the author of “Roses” (1930), a collection of verses. Suicide is a major theme in G. Ivanov’s poetry. The characters in G. Ivanov’s novel Tretiy Rim (“The Third Rome,” the first part was published in 1929) include a shuler (cardsharp) on whose forehead there is a scar left by a candlestick:

Седоватый господин, породистого и высокомерного вида, с рубцом на лбу, чистивший грушу, был матёрым шулером: рубец, похожий на след от сабли, был следом от подсвечника. (chapter II)

In G. Ivanov’s novel the action takes place in St. Petersburg (“the Third Rome”) in 1916. The name and patronymic of the novel’s main character, Boris Nikolaevich Yur’ev, hints at Andrey Bely (B. N. Bugaev, 1880-1934), the author of Peterburg (1915). St. Petersburg is VN’s home city. Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (who also was born “upon the Neva’s banks”) had enough knowledge of Latin to descant on Juvenal (One: VI: 3-5). In a dropped introduction to EO Pushkin mentions, among other writers, Juvenal and Petronius:

Juvenal, Catullus, Petronius, Voltaire, and Byron far from seldom failed to retain due respect toward readers and toward the fair sex.

Incidentally, G. Adamovich (the critic who, like G. Ivanov, is satirized in “The Night Journey”) and G. Ivanov completed the Russian translation of Voltaire’s Pucelle d’Orléans (1755). The poem’s first twenty-five lines were translated by Pushkin in 1825, in Mikhaylovskoe. It was Gumilyov (the poet who in August, 1921, was executed by the Bolsheviks) who for Gorky’s publishing house Vsemirnaya literatura (“The World Literature”) took over the translation of La Pucelle but whom death prevented to finish it.

La Pucelle is Jeanne d’Arc (1412-31), French national heroine and martyr who raised the siege of Orléans. Pushkin’s last article (a literary hoax) was Posledniy iz svoistvennikov Ioanny d’Ark (“The Last of Jeanne d’Arc’s Relatives,” 1837). The poems in VN’s collection of stories and poems Vozvrashchenie Chorba (“The Return of Chorb,” 1928) criticized by G. Ivanov include La Bonne Lorraine (1924):

Жгли англичане, жгли мою подругу,

на площади в Руане жгли её.

Палач мне продал черную кольчугу,

клювастый шлем и мёртвое копьё.

Ты здесь со мной, железная святая,

и мир с тех пор стал холоден и прост:

косая тень и лестница витая,

и в бархат ночи вбиты гвозди звёзд.

Моя свеча над ржавою резьбою

дрожит и каплет воском на ремни.

Мы, воины, летали за тобою,

в твои цвета окрашивая дни.

Но опускала ночь своё забрало,

и, молча выскользнув из лат мужских,

ты, белая и слабая, сгорала

в объятьях верных рыцарей твоих.

La Bonne Lorraine of the poem is Jeanne d’Arc.

Vale,

Alexey Sklyarenko