Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0019861, Wed, 21 Apr 2010 23:03:21 +0400

Subject
La Jeune Captive & The Caucasian Captive
Date
Body
Pushkin took as an epigraph to Andrey Shen'e (1825) a line from Chenier's La Jeune Captive (written in the prison de Saint-Lazar, a few weeks before the poet's execution in July, 1794):

Ainsi, triste et captif, ma lyre toutefois S'eveillait...

In his elegy (ll. 101-102) Pushkin mentions Chenier's poem as Узница:

...может быть, и Узница моя,
Уныла и бледна, стихам любви внимая...

...may be, also my fair Captive,
cheerless and pale, hearkening to verses of love...

Now, узница (female prisoner) needs but one letter to become its rhyme-word, кузница (forge, smithy). Кузница и усадьба ("Forge and Country Estate") is the (invented) literary circle mentioned by Ostap Bender in Ilf and Petrov's The Golden Calf (chapter VIII: "Crisis of the Genre"):

Я ошибся, - заметил Остап. - Ему, должно быть, приснился не митрополит Двулогий, а широкий пленум литературной группы "Кузница и усадьба".

"I was mistaken," remarked Ostap. "He must have been dreaming not of the Metropolitan Dilogius, but of a large plenum of the "Forge and Country Estate" literary circle."

пленум (plenum) = плен (captivity) + ум (intellect, wits)

плен + никогда (never) - года (years) = пленник (male captive)

"Кавказский пленник" (The Caucasian Captive) is Pushkin's narrative poem (1821) and a story by Tolstoy (1876).

Жилин + костыль + ё = Костылин + жильё

Жилин & Костылин - characters in Tolstoy's "The Caucasian Captive"
костыль - crutch
жильё - habitation, lodging
ё - character of the Cyrrilic alphabet (that has no match in the Roman one)

I don't mind, if some listers find my anagrams irrelevant and I receive "no marks" for them.

Alexey Sklyarenko

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