Kindly condescending to notice, and even to review (!!), our December number of Lucifer, the Saturday Review, in its issue of December 22nd, 1888, writes as follows in reference to a story called “Accursed,” [see Lucifer, Oct-Dec, 1888] translated from the Russian:
“… there came a thunderstorm and the cross was knocked off by lightning. … That same flash knocked off all the letters (of the deceased woman’s name) except the first two of Acsenia, the first two and the fourth of Cuprianovna, and the first three of Sedminska, which spell ‘Accursed.’ ‘This coincidence,’ observes Vera Jelihovsky, the author, ‘was stranger than all!’”
“But it was stranger still,” remarks the sagacious critic in the Saturday Review, “that the lightning should have spoken English when the defunct sinner was some kind of Pole.”
And this remark, we may say, in our turn, is stranger still. Had the story been originally written in English, it might have necessitated some explanation with regard to such linguistic capacity on the part of the lightning. As the story, however, first appeared in Russian, in the St. Petersburg Grajdanine, whence it was translated by us with the author’s permission, it does not require an excessive amount of very ordinary penetration to guess that the name had to be changed in order to be adapted to the English word “accursed.” Had we written the word proklyata, the Russian for “accursed,” the “coincidence” would have had no meaning.
The story is half fiction, both in the original and in the translation; but it is based on a true and historical fact, as explained at its close. But since the real names had to be withheld, any names would do in order to set forth the strange and, to this day, inexplicable fact, which has become, since its occurrence, one of the prominent legends of the country where it happened.