Sharaban is like abazhur: it makes sense once you separate the French elements to char à bancs or abat-jour. You can find both charabanc and abat-jour in an English dictionary. The name char à bancs means carriage with benches, and it sounds like in France and England, these were a kind of nineteenth-century public transit. French Wikipédia (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Char_%C3%A0_bancs): the char à bancs “rapidly became a means of urban public transportation, belonging to the omnibus family. The largest ones could be harnessed to five horses and transport thirty-five to forty people and had solid [?] brakes, but the average capacity in Paris around 1890 was 18 people, with only two horses.” English Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charabanc) says the charabanc was used “as a mobile grandstand” for “race meetings” and “hunting or shooting parties,” and was “especially popular for sight-seeing or ‘works outings’ to the country or the seaside, organized by businesses once a year.” Much of the Russian Wikipedia article follows the English one, repeating a photograph of a large vehicle with four rows of benches, not counting the driver’s (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A8%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B1%D0%B0%D0%BD#/media/%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%B9%D0%BB:Charabanc_horse_drawn_wagon_late_19th_century.jpg). However, a picture in a pre-revolutionary Russian encyclopedia that I used when I came across a different carriage word (https://xixvek.wordpress.com/2014/04/08/words-new-to-me-%d0%bc%d0%b0%d0%bb%d1%8c%d0%bf%d0%be%d1%81%d1%82/) twelve years ago has a much smaller typical sharaban, with just one bench behind the driver. The sharaban is in the top center: https://xixvek.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/sovremennye-ekipazhi.jpg The photograph below, attributed to the L. N. Tolstoy State Museum, shows the same small design for a sharaban in 1909 (I found the picture in an interesting 2024 post by Aleksei Iukhtangov about the lighthearted song “Sharaban” as sung by the anti-Bolshevik underground during the Civil War (https://rodina-history.ru/2024/04/14/reg-pfo/o-nesereznoj-pesne-kuda-dokatilsia-sharaban-po-dorogam-grazhdanskoj-vojny.html)): https://xixvek.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/sharaban-1909-photo-from-rodina-history-ru-article.webp I associate carriage realia with Gogol and Leskov, but the distinctions matter in Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya’s Ursa Major (Большая медведица (https://ru.wikisource.org/wiki/%D0%91%D0%BE%D0%BB%D1%8C%D1%88%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%BC%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B2%D0%B5%D0%B4%D0%B8%D1%86%D0%B0_(%D0%A5%D0%B2%D0%BE%D1%89%D0%B8%D0%BD%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F)/%D0%92%D0%95_1870_(%D0%94%D0%9E)), 1870–71) too. In part 3, Verkhovskoi’s awful wife Lidiia Matveevna brings most of her guests on a Sunday church outing for which a kareta and a sharaban are ordered (jointly called ekipazhi). While they are gone, Lesichev shows up in a tarantas, interrupting two who stayed behind, Verkhovskoi and Katerina (who recently refused Lesichev and loves Verkhovskoi). When those three and Mme Volkareva go back to town, they travel in a kareta and a tarantas, with the two men in the latter. I wonder if the tarantas felt like a period detail to 1870 readers (the story begins in May 1854); Russian Wikipedia says the tarantas was “popular in Russia in the first half of the nineteenth century (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%81),” and the Google Books Ngram suggests the word was used about twice as often in 1854 as in 1870 (https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%82%D0%B0%D1%81%D1%8A&year_start=1800&year_end=1900&corpus=ru&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=false).