The Tambov Treasurer's Wife

Tambov Treasurer's Wife (Tambovskaya kaznacheysha, Тамбо′вская казначе′йша) is a poem by Mikhail Lermontov, written and published by Sovremennik in 1838.[1]

Hot featherbed's forgotten...
M.Rashevsky's engraving (based on Mikhail Klodt's drawing). 1874

Summary

A visiting uhlan falls in love with the 18-year-old wife of the old Tambov's treasurer and, after several attempts to woo her, 'wins' her from her husband in the game of cards.[2]

History

On February 15, 1838 Lermontov informed M.A.Lopukhina (writing in French): "I've been to Zhukovsky and, following his request, brought him Tambov Teasurer's Wife. He took it to Vyazemsky, they read it together and liked it a lot. It will be printed in the next Sovremennik issue." Since Lermontov speaks of the poem as if it had already been read by Lopukhina, it must have been finished by mid-January, when he left Moscow.[1]

The poem (signed "-v") was published in No.3 issue of Sovremennik, with both editorial (by Zhukovsky) and censorial cuts. The title was curtailed to just Kaznatcheysha (A Treasurer's Wife). The manuscript of the poem has been lost. None of the omitted lines has been restored since.[1]

The way the poem was treated outraged Lermontov. Ivan Panayev remembered: "...I found Lermontov at Krayevsky's greatly agitated. He [Lermontov] held a thin pink book of Sovremennik in his hands showing the intention to tear it apart, but Krayevsky wouldn't let him. "It's Devil knows what! - Lermontov was shouting, shaking the journal. - Is it permissible at all to do such things? That's unbelievable!" Then he sat at the table, took a large red pencil and on the sleeve of the journal where his Treasurer's Wife was published, drew some sort of caricature."[3]

gollark: There is also the "secondary processor exemption" thing, which caused the Librem people to waste a lot of time on having a spare processor on their SoC load a blob into the SoC memory controller from some not-user-accessible flash rather than just using the main CPU cores. This does not improve security because you still have the blob running with, you know, full control of RAM, yet RYF certification requires solutions like this.
gollark: It would be freer™, in my opinion, to have all the firmware distributed sanely via a package manager, and for the firmware to be controllable by users, than to have it entirely hidden away.
gollark: So you can have proprietary firmware for an Ethernet controller or bee apifier or whatever, but it's only okay if you deliberately stop the user from being able to read/write it.
gollark: No, it's how they're okay with things having proprietary firmware *but only if the user cannot interact with it*.
gollark: http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-kth.html

References
  1. Commentaries to Tambov Treasurer's Wife. The Works of M.Yu.Lermontov in 4 volumes. Khudozhestvennaya Literatura Publishers. Moscow, 1958. Vol. 2. Pp. 495-497.
  2. Michael Wachtel. "The Development of Russian Verse: Meter and Its Meanings". Retrieved 2014-01-13.
  3. Panayev, I.I., Literature Memoirs. Goslitizdat, Leningrad, 1950, p.135
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