concept
Queen Tamara (allusion)
Queen Tamara
also: царица Тамара
Kryukov teases his cousin that he has 'his own Queen Tamara in this district,' invoking the medieval Georgian queen as refracted through Lermontov's popular narrative poem 'Tamara' (1841), in which a seductive, murderous Georgian queen lures travelers to her tower for a night of passion before having them killed and thrown into the river -- a stock 19th-century Russian byword for a beautiful, dangerous, exoticized seductress, applied here to Susanna.
Reading notes
- To K. S. Barantsevich, 12 August 1888. Sumy. §4 Tamara
The legendary medieval Georgian queen of Lermontov's narrative poem "Tamara," a seductive, murderous figure associated with the Daryal Gorge in Russian Romantic literature; Chekhov calls the Georgian Military Road itself a poem "dedicated to Tamara."
- To N. A. Leikin, 12 August 1888. Sumy. §6 a demon who is in love with Tamara
An allusion to Lermontov's narrative poem "Tamara" and its companion piece "The Demon," both set in the Daryal Gorge on the Georgian Military Highway; see also the near-identical image in to Barantsevich, written the same day.