Subject
Re: Sun Horse and Pale Fire
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Date
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Alexey Sklyarenko: Speaking of Pale Fire, the racehorse in a painting mentioned by Lucette (3.5): in Russian, kon' (horse) rhymes with ogon' (fire). Cf. Pushkin, The Bronze Horseman, Part Two, ll. 145-164):А в сем коне какой огонь!/Куда ты скачешь, гордый конь,...What fire in yonder charger flames! /Proud charger, whither art thou ridden...
JM: I must have lost track of the source that identifies a painting with "Pale Fire" as a racehorse with "Tom Cox Up". Can Alexey refresh my memory about it?
The only easy but very distant link came in a sentence, written by Mary McCarthy in her (non deranged!) appraisal of "Pale Fire" She writes:
"Nabokov's tenderness for human eccentricity, for the freak, the "deviate," is partly the naturalist's taste for the curious. But his fond, wry compassion for the lone black piece on the board goes deeper than classificatory science or the collector's choplicking. Love is the burden of Pale Fire, love and loss. Love is felt as ...the straining of the soul's black horse to unite with the white. The sense of loss in love, of separation (the room beyond, projected onto the snow, the phantom moves of the chess knight, that deviate piece, off the board's edge onto ghostly squares), binds mortal men in a common pattern --the elderly couple watching TV in a lighted room, and the "queer" neighbor watching them from his window. But it is most poignant in the outsider: the homely daughter stood up by her date, the refugee, the "queen," the bird smashed on the window pane." TNR, " A Bolt from the Blue" June 4, 1962
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JM: I must have lost track of the source that identifies a painting with "Pale Fire" as a racehorse with "Tom Cox Up". Can Alexey refresh my memory about it?
The only easy but very distant link came in a sentence, written by Mary McCarthy in her (non deranged!) appraisal of "Pale Fire" She writes:
"Nabokov's tenderness for human eccentricity, for the freak, the "deviate," is partly the naturalist's taste for the curious. But his fond, wry compassion for the lone black piece on the board goes deeper than classificatory science or the collector's choplicking. Love is the burden of Pale Fire, love and loss. Love is felt as ...the straining of the soul's black horse to unite with the white. The sense of loss in love, of separation (the room beyond, projected onto the snow, the phantom moves of the chess knight, that deviate piece, off the board's edge onto ghostly squares), binds mortal men in a common pattern --the elderly couple watching TV in a lighted room, and the "queer" neighbor watching them from his window. But it is most poignant in the outsider: the homely daughter stood up by her date, the refugee, the "queen," the bird smashed on the window pane." TNR, " A Bolt from the Blue" June 4, 1962
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/