Lieutenant Lobytko

Reading notes

• The Kiss §12 славившийся в бригаде своим чутьем

  The Russian sets up the extended metaphor the translation preserves throughout: Lobytko is nicknamed "the setter" (a hunting dog breed prized for scenting game at a distance) for his supposed knack of sensing women nearby, and the story keeps returning to hunting vocabulary ("scent," "game," the command "Fetch!" in loc 22) to frame his skirt-chasing as a kind of blood sport.

• The Kiss §22 "пиль!"

  "Pil!" (rendered "Fetch!") is the Russian hunting-dog command telling a pointer or setter to retrieve or flush game; the narrator's aside that a clever setter would read the blonde's indifferent "Really?" as a sign he won't be given this command completes the hunting-dog conceit applied to Lobytko throughout the opening scenes.

• The Kiss §86 Подобный же случай был однажды со мной

  Lobytko's train-compartment anecdote is deliberately coarse barracks humor, told in the leering, boastful register expected of a self-styled ladies' man among fellow officers -- risqué by 1887 standards but not directed at or degrading toward any protected group; its narrative function is structural, not merely comic. It self-destructs on Merzlyakov's dry, logical objection two lines later (loc 87: how could he see her lips in the dark?), exposing Lobytko as an inveterate liar exactly as the narrator warned in loc 83 ("who lied a great deal himself"). This is precisely why Ryabovich recoils and resolves never to confide in his comrades again (loc 88): his own genuinely mysterious, unexplainable kiss has just been answered with an obviously fabricated, crudely sexualized one, and he cannot bear to see the two placed side by side.