Word: fyodor
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...late Czar; he spoke fluent French and a kind of Russian that was half church-Slavic, half Latin; he carried an icon with the initials A.I. The peasants began to wonder if this might not be Alexander the Blessed. When the stranger, who gave his name as Fyodor Kuzmich but could produce no papers to prove it, was sentenced to 20 lashes for vagrancy, a strange thing happened. Out from Moscow rode Grand Duke Michael, Alexander's younger brother. He personally threatened the judge with a lashing of his own. But after talking privately and reverentially with Kuzmich, Michael...
...semester's course of study by this great University! These men are: Aristophanes (Greek 105a) Aristotle (Philosophy 105) Bertolt Brecht (German 160) Hieronymus Bosch (Fine Arts 156) Miguel Cervantes (Spanish 124) Geoffrey Chaucer (English 115) Samuel Coleridge (English 257) Dant'e Alighieri (Italian 120) Charles Dickens (English 259a) Fyodor Dostoevsky (Slavic 155) Jonathan Edwards (English 276) T.S. Eliot (English 267) Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German 120) Nikolai Gogol (Slavic 154) Henrik Ibsen (Scandinavian 1) Immanuel Kant (Philosophy 130) John Keats (English 256) Lucretius (Latin 107a) Thomas Mann (German 285) Michelangelo Buonarroti (Fine Arts 257) John Milton (English 131) Freidrich Nietzsche...
...Gift is full of the gratuitous delights that a child finds in toys or picture books. Fyodor, like most young men who want to make their name and make love in the same breath, is a bit of a fool. In one wonderful scene his clothes are stolen as he polishes his poetry and suntan in a Berlin park. He would as gladly split a bottle as a hair...
Blind, Deaf Blockhead. Fyodor has no politics (except to prefer a regime where "there is no equality and no authorities either"); he does not hanker for the Return; he does not brood on the past or hope for the future. His fellow emigres regard him as "a useless handicraftsman," a "trickster" and an "arabesquer," and he in turn regards the typical Russian emigre intellectual as "blind like Milton, deaf like Beethoven, and a blockhead to boot...
...Fyodor lives in a world of emigres; their cards of identity have been canceled, the houses they built of them have collapsed. In Fyodor's mind the irony inherent in the lives of displaced persons becomes explicit; it becomes a dancing landscape, in which his private Russian past of butterflies, poetry and childhood games blurs into the hateful Berlin present of landladies, "Germani-cally stupid" language students, and menacing politics, as the Weimar Republic, "oppressive as a headache," clumsily snuffles toward its collapse. Fyodor's trilingual life enables Nabokov to play complicated games with the meanings of words...