Veltman’s Lunatik.

Russian лунатик [lunátik] and English lunatic are the faux-est of faux amis: the English word means only ‘madman’ and the Russian one only ‘sleepwalker’; I should really have called the post Veltman’s Sleepwalker, but that would have sounded weird to me, since I think of it with the Russian word, so Lunatik it is. If the novel ever gets translated, I can use “Sleepwalker” for the resultant post. At any rate, this is one of those novels that wound up disappointing me, not because it is bad but because it started out looking like it was going to be much wilder and more intriguing than it turned out to be. After Raina (see this post) I was really hoping for a return to Veltmanian form with his 1834 novel Лунатик, and I was thrilled when I saw the title of the first chapter: “1–∞ год” [Year 1–∞]. “That’s the stuff!” (I said to myself), and read the first couple of paragraphs: Beneath the light-blue vault of the Universe, on the path to infinity, rolls the languid companion of the sun, the…