StooPAI, prastaFEELia, prazeVAyesh!
Get going, fool, [or] you'll miss [your chance]!
So says Pirogov (Mr. Hand Pie) to Piskarev (Mr. Squeak, but also daringly close to Pis'ka, which translates to a vulgar word for female genitalia [and in English a cat--wanting to keep things family-friendly here, since it's mostly my family and friends looking at this!]--but I'd need a native informant to confirm whether this is accurate).
Pevear and Volkhonsky (251) translate this “Go on, ninny, you’ll miss her!"
Just before this, Pirogov calls Piskarev a Простак! - prasTAHK - simpleton, which in a Russian context evokes a figure like the one above, not a relatively well-dressed Petersburg artist.
So what I love about простофиля (which can also mean dupe or simp, in the sense of an easy mark) is the evident mixing of the Russian "simple" (prasTOY) and (I'm guessing) the Greek filos. So Mr. Squeak is not just a simpleton, but a full-fledged lover of being fooled, as subsequent events in the story bear out.
And prazeVAHt' (the apostrophe here indicates a soft t sound, just the hint of a German z) certainly means "to miss out," but zeVAHt' on its own means "to yawn," which adds its own shading, especially as Piskarev spends so much time trying to sleep, perchance to dream.
I'm also grooving on the semantic puissance of these Russian words. Pevear and Volkhonsky's translation is fine, but it can't bear the full weight of the original.
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