ALEXANDER. What do you mean! Why, this year you’re due to get Privy Councillor…
PYOTR IVANOVICH. Yes… But Madam Privy Councillor is not well…
ALEXANDER. But for that you’re really turning down such a career…
PYOTR IVANOVICH ( aloud, unconcerned ). Is your bride’s dowry large?
ALEXANDER. Three hundred thousand! (Expectantly and triumphantly looks at his uncle and aunt. ) And I’m to be master of five hundred serfs. Three hundred dowry and five hundred serfs! Well? A government career and a fortune! Yet you, Uncle, said I’m not an Aduyev! And all this I owe to you… Why did you sigh, dear Aunt?
ELIZAVETA ALEXANDROVNA. For the Alexander you once were.
ALEXANDER ( laughing ). It can’t be helped, dear Aunt. It’s the times we live in! I’m keeping pace with the times, you can’t lag behind! And the times, one must admit, are good! By the way, Uncle, are you getting ready to sell your factory? I could… Don’t you think? And perhaps I could borrow from you for a short while around ten thousand… Ouch, my back! (Joyously puts his hand to his back. )What do you know? (Chuckles. )My back hurts. Oh, my back!
Curtain
NOTES
1. I. A. Goncharov, Sobranie sochineniia v 8 tt. (M. 1977-80), vol. 7, p. 353.
2. See John Bayley, “Oblomov’s Travels,” New York Review of Books, 3 March 1988, XXXV, 3:34-35.
3. The italics are Goncharov’s. Op. cit., vol. 8, p. 108.
1. The hero of Alexander Pushkin’s verse epic, The Bronze Horseman.
2. Quoted from Pushkin’s poem, “I remember the wonderful moment…” written in 1825 for his neighbor in the country, Anna Petrovna Kern.
3. Frédéric Soulié (1800-47), French Romantic, author of Gothic novels, predecessor of Eugène Sue and Alexandre Dumas père.
4. Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, trans. Walter Arndt (Ardis, 1992), VI, 17: 6-10.
5. Alexander Pushkin, “The Commander.”
6. Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, I, 49:13, trans. Walter Arndt.
7. Alexander Pushkin, Collected Narrative and Lyrical Poetry, trans. Walter Arndt (Ardis, 1984), p. 40.
8. LaFontaine’s seventeenth-century classic French fables were reworked by Ivan Krylov (1769-1844) in satiric nineteenth-century Russian versions which became proverbial in Russia.
9. A reference to Alexander Griboedov’s satiric verse play Woe from Wit, Act III, scene 9. Upon his arrival at Famusov’s ball, the card-sharp and man-about-town Zagoretsky presents the daughter of the house, Sophie, with tickets for the next day’s sold-out theater show and boasts about the obstacles he had overcome in order to obtain them.
10. “Hardly were we leaving the gates of the Peloponnesian peninsula,” Phaedra, 1677.
11. Gustave Drouineau, The Green Manuscript (1831); Eugène Sue, The Seven Mortal Sins (1847-49); Jules Janin, The Dead Ass (1829).
12. Heinrich Jung-Stilling, Pietist, 1740-1817, part of whose work, Heinrich Stillings Jugend (Heinrich Stilling’s Youth), Goethe edited, Strasburg, 1777.
13. Christian Felix Weisse, 1726-1804, Anacreontic poet, author of musical works for the Leipzig stage, publisher of Kinderfreund (The Children’s Friend), a didactic weekly for youth, 24 vols., 1775-82.
14. “Now I’ve got it!”
15. The first line, “Beatus ille qui procul negotiis…” from Horace’s Epode II, Iambics, 41-31 B.C.
16. Alexander Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, I: 46, trans. Walter Arndt.
17. An allusion to the Russian version of pays de Cocaigne or Schlaraffenland, where roast partridge flew about with a fork in them, ready to eat, and the streams flowed with cranberry juice; see Afanasiev’s Tales, No. 130.
18. Pushkin, Eugene Onegin, I, Stanza 50, trans. Walter Arndt.
19. From Pushkin’s “Renewal” (Vozrozhdenie), first published in 1828. The last four lines read: “My aberrations disappear thus/ From my tormented consciousness/ And the visions return/ Of my early pure youth.”
20. Alexander Pushkin, The Gypsies, in Alexander Pushkin, Collected Narrative and Lyrical Poetry (Ardis, 1984), trans. Walter Arndt.
An Ordinary Story Page 47
