The narrator’s drunken vision — «handsome, twenty-two years old,» wearing a «yellow blouse,» smearing the shape of things into «a bowl of aspic» — is a direct lift from Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1913 poem «Nate!» («Here’s to You!»), which opens: «Я сразу смазал карту будня, плеснувши краску из стакана; я показал на блюде студня косые скулы океана» («I at once smeared the map of the weekday, splashing paint from a glass; I showed, on a plate of aspic, the slanting cheekbones of the ocean»). The yellow blouse itself was not just a poetic image but a real garment: as a young Futurist poet in the 1910s, Mayakovsky performed and gave public readings wearing a genuine yellow-and-black striped blouse, sewn for him by his sister, specifically designed to scandalize a bourgeois audience — a walking provocation before he’d even opened his mouth. By 1993, the phrase «yellow blouse» and this particular Mayakovsky poem were common enough currency in Russian literary culture that the narrator’s fogged, half-remembered paraphrase — and his own delighted «Yes! Exactly so!» at getting it right — reads as a wink shared directly with the reader.