There was a very famous restaurant Яр [Yar] in Moscow, founded in 1826 in the central city (on Kuznetsky Most) but best known in its later incarnation in Petrovsky Park, just outside of the (nineteenth-century) city on what is now Leningradsky Prospekt (and if anyone knows exactly where, please tell me — I like being able to place things on the map). I had thought it was named for the Russian word яр ‘steep bank, ravine’ (borrowed from Turkic), but in the fantastic new Poemas del río Wang post by frequent LH commenter Dmitry Pruss (aka MOCKBA) on the tango “Ojos negros que fascinan” (“I spent years trying to solve the riddles and mysteries surrounding Dark Eyes, a song about fatal love and perdition which almost prophetically touched most of the talents who ever touched it, making them vanish from history”), which I urge anyone interested in music, history, or the untangling of tangled tales to go read at once, Dmitry writes “the famous suburban restaurant, the ‘Yard,’” and sure enough, the accompanying image of a postcard has “Restaurant ‘Yard.'” Why “Yard”?
Well, the Russian Wikipedia article says it was founded by a Frenchman named Tranquille Yard, and this information is also purveyed in a couple of books (e.g., Max Fram’s The Motherland of Elephants: “The original restaurant in central Moscow was founded and owned by the Frenchman Tranquille Yard”). But I don’t believe it. “Yard” is not, so far as I know, a French surname, and Tranquille is only a (rare) surname, not (so far as I can tell) a given name. Of course if irrefutable evidence exists of such a person with such a name, I’ll accept it, but for the moment it seems far more likely to me that something has gotten garbled in the nearly two centuries since the founding of the restaurant. A similar mystification is noted in Dmitry’s post about one of the creators of the song, Florian (or Feodor) Hermann:
Most often, we are told that Hermann was French, and came to Russia with Napoleon’s Grand Army. Sometimes we hear that his Valse Hommage started as a march of the advancing French troops in 1812. But sometimes, that it mourns the French army losses as it forded the icy Berezina river on retreat from Moscow. We even hear that Florian Hermann visited the home estate of Evgeny Grebenka, the author of the lyrics of the future song, during the Napoleonic Wars! But sometimes Florian Hermann turns out to be a German rather than Frenchman. We are even told that the lived in Strasbourg. One has to note that Valse Hommage is always titled in French in the international score catalogs, while some of the other Hermann’s compositions are titled in German. However, my research shows that Florian Hermann was a Russian patriot from the Wilno strip area of Poland / Lithuania, and that he composed some of his most popular pieces in 1870s through 1890s. And very recently, I was able to find out a few details about his youth and his family in Wilno (now Vilnius, Lithuania).
As always, I welcome all thoughts from the Varied Reader.
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