TMoP - Chapter one - Core Characters

[Richard Ryan]

Didn't know this possible Solzhenitsyn reference - thanks Mark.

You are perhaps also aware that Anna Sergeyevna is the given name and patronymic of one of the leading characters in Turgenev's Fathers and Sons (to whit, Anna Sergeyevna Odintsova) - TMoP seems to me to filled with obvious references to "F&S"....

--- On Sun, 9/21/08, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: TMoP - Chapter one - Core Characters
> To: "Pynchon-L" <pynchon-l at waste.org>, "Richard Ryan" <richardryannyc at yahoo.com>
> Date: Sunday, September 21, 2008, 9:04 PM
> Re: Matronya
> 
> "Matronya's Home" or "Matronya's
> House" is one of Solzhenitsyn's more famous short
> novels...about a woman who, as the last lines indicated, was
> one of the secret doers of good---one of the humble
> righteous---without which no village, nor land, stands.
> 
> Allusion?. [slight spoiler]. Daughter of her mother? 
> 
> Orig 1963...In English, early 70s. Coetzee reading hard
> then, it would seem.
> 
> More on Anna later.
> 
> 
> 
> --- On Sun, 9/21/08, Richard Ryan
> <richardryannyc at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> > From: Richard Ryan <richardryannyc at yahoo.com>
> > Subject: TMoP - Chapter one - Core Characters
> > To: "Pynchon-L" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> > Date: Sunday, September 21, 2008, 5:03 AM
> > By the end of Chapter One ("Petersburg") of
> The
> > Master of Petersburg, we've met the four of the
> > characters who will be crucial to this story - namely:
> > 
> > Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky - 47, already a famous
> > writer at the time of TMoP.  The historical Dostoevsky
> would
> > have by this point published much of his greatest
> work,
> > including Notes from Underground, Crime and
> Punishment, and
> > The Idiot (this last appearing in the year in which
> TMoP is
> > set.)  For those who know the details of the
> historical
> > Dostoevsky's biography, Coetzee immediately begins
> > leaving clues that the novel's Dostoevsky is
> > emphatically NOT to be identified with his "real
> > world" counterpart.  Most significant of these
> > biographical divergences is the fact that the
> historical
> > Doestoevsky's stepson outlived the novelist.     
> > 
> > Pavel Alexandrovich Isaev -  Dostoevsky's deceased
> > stepson.  Dead under mysterious circumstances, though
> the
> > possibility of suicide is strongly implied.
> > 
> > Anna Sergeyevna Kolenkina - Mid 30s, Pavel's
> landlady
> > at his final residence, 63 Svechnoi Street in the
> Haymarket
> > district of St. Petersburg.
> > 
> > Matryona ("Matroyosha") - Anna
> Sergeyevna's
> > daughter.