"Nu, dali v mordu. Nu, tak chtozh?" he
muttered (Well, you've given me one in the mug. Well, what does it matter?).
Blood blotched the handkerchief he applied to his fat muzhikian
nose.
"Nu, dali," he repeated and presently wandered
away. (LATH, 5.3)
Oleg Orlov's words remind one of the closing lines of Pushkin's epigram
Kak satiroy bezymyannoy / lik Zoila ya pyatnal... ("As I smirched
Zoilus's face with an anonymous satire..." 1829):
В полученьи оплеухи
Расписался мой
дурак?
Did my fool sign
for receiving a slap in the face?
Vadim Vadimovich calls the critic Demian Basilevski "my faithful Zoilus".
(3.1) The name of VN's Zoilus was Georgiy Adamovich (whose personality is split
in LATH between Basilevski and Adam Atropovich). In The Gift
Adamovich is satirized as Christopher Mortus. Another joke was played
on Adamovich when VN published a poem signed with a new pen name,
Vasiliy Shishkov, and then wrote a story disclosing that Shishkov (whom
Adamovich had called "a great poet") was his invention.
When Adamovich realized that he had been fooled, he explained that VN "was
a sufficiently skillful parodist to mimic genius". VN's LATH is a self-parody
from beginning to end.
Alexey Sklyarenko