I was astonished to read this quote from Robin Williams, talking about Jack Nicholson:
“He once was with me at a benefit and leaned over and said, ‘Even oysters have enemies’. In a very intense voice, I responded with, ‘Increase your dosage’. More fascinated than scared. He says things that even Buddha goes, ‘What did you mean?’”
To an English-speaker, “Even oysters have enemies” sounds like weirdness from the outer limits, but any reader of Russian literature would immediately recognize it as a version of “И устрица имеет врагов!” [Even an oyster has enemies!], No. 86 in Плоды раздумья [Fruits of meditation] by the great (and fictional) Kozma Prutkov. I have no idea how it wound up in the brain of Jack Nicholson, but it gave me a frisson of delight.
(Incidentally, устрица ‘oyster’ is borrowed from Dutch oester, which is from Latin ostrea; our oyster comes from the same Latin word, but via French. And враг ‘enemy’ is borrowed from Old Church Slavonic; the inherited doublet is во́рог, which is archaic or folk-poetic.)
The appropriate response to a seemingly random statement about the enemies of oysters is probably: “The Walrus and the Carpenter” (or a line or two from the poem).
Could Tolstoy have influenced Dodgson? one wonders doubtfully.
On one of the exhibit cases at the Field Museum of Natural History with a fossil walrus skeleton inside, there is a sign headed, “The time has come to talk about walrus tusks.” Presumably, the individual responsible is Ken Angielczyk, a curator there who does research on tusk evolution.
Tusk.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Or_All_the_Seas_with_Oysters
cf also Thomas Pynchon no doubt…