«Karabas» lands on the ear two ways at once for a Russian reader, and the novel is clearly enjoying both. It’s the natural nickname for a man surnamed Karabanov (confirmed a chapter later, when Anatoly Stepanovich reports having released him), but it’s also unmistakably a nod to Karabas-Barabas, the cruel, bearded puppet-master villain of Alexei Tolstoy’s «The Golden Key, or the Adventures of Buratino» (1936), the Soviet reworking of Pinocchio and one of the most widely read children’s books in Russia. On top of that, «Karabas» sits a syllable away from «карабин» («carbine»), which gives Zhorik’s later line about «loading Karabas» its extra, deliberately unsettling edge — is he talking about arming a man, or something else entirely?