person
Honoré de Balzac
Balzac
also: Бальзак
French novelist (1799-1850); Zinaida Fyodorovna invokes the ending of his novel "Père Goriot," in which the hero Rastignac looks down over Paris and vows to conquer it, as her model for her own defiant departure from Petersburg.
Reading notes
- Three Sisters §431 Balzac was married in Berdichev
A real biographical fact -- the French novelist Honoré de Balzac married Countess Ewelina Hańska in the town of Berdichev in 1850, shortly before his death -- that Chebutykin fixates on as a piece of trivia, emblematic of the disconnected scraps of information that have replaced any real reading in his life.