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children of the Sun Horse
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In my previous post I mentioned Gorky's play Deti solntsa ("Children of the Sun") written when the author was imprisoned in St. Petersburg's Peter-and-Paul Fortress. As the readers of The Gift would know, another famous book written there was Chernyshevsky's Chto delat'? ("What to Do?"). Chernyshevsky and Gorky (and Lenin who also entitled his book Chto delat'?) are all natives of Volgan cities (Saratov, Nizhniy Novgorod and Simbirsk). Moreover, Chernyshevsky died in Astrakhan (a city at the mouth of the Volga) in 1889. Two centuries before (1670), Astrakhan was taken by Sten'ka Razin (a Don Cossack who led a major uprising against the nobility and Czar's bureaucracy in South Russia). One of Razin's comrades-in-arms (who governed Astrakhan while Sten'ka was busy taking other Volgan cities) was another Don Cossack, Vas'ka Us (a namesake of Red Vaska, the bouncer in a Volgan brothel in a story by Gorky).
Us means in Russian "whisker" and reminds one of Stalin's tarakan'i usishcha ("cockroach whiskers"), in Mandelshtam's poem (alluded to in Ada: 1.2) My zhivyom, pod soboyu ne chuya strany ("We live not feeling land beneath us..."). It was Stalin (whose personality is split on Antiterra between Colonel St. Alin and Khan Sosso) who renamed St. Petersburg (VN's home city) Leningrad, Tsaritsyn (yet another city on the Volga, now Volgograd) Stalingrad (Simbirsk became Ul'yanovsk, and Nizhniy Novgorod, Gorky). Grad (obs., city) + us = Gradus. Yacob Gradus is the killer in Nabokov's Pale Fire. In Ada (3.5), Pale Fire is a racehorse (in a painting above the Tobaks' bed in their cabin). On the other hand, we measure alcohol percentage in liquors in gradusy. Pod gradusom means in Russian "drunk." Also, gor'kiy (A. M. Peshkov's penname) means "bitter" and makes one think of the phrase gor'kiy p'yanitsa (hard drinker, sot). In Pushkin's Vystrel ("The Pistol Shot") the narrator refers to local sots gorkie (omitting the noun).
R (Razin's initial) + us = Rus (obs., Russia); Rus + us = Ursus (the best Franco-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan Major). One of the songs that Van, Ada and Lucette listen in Ursus (where they get drunk on champagne: 2.8) is "There's a crag on the Ross, overgrown with wild moss..." The original song about Sten'ka Razin begins: Est' na Volge utyos ("There's a crag on the Volga..."). In another popular song about Sten'ka ("Volga, Volga, mat' rodnaya..."), drunken Razin throws his concubine, a Persian princess, in the Volga.
Onboard the Tobakoff, Lucette drinks three Cossack ponies of Klass vodka - hateful, vulgar, but potent stuff - before she jumps in the Atlantic (3.5).
Razin = Arzni = Iran + z (in 1868 Razin made a sally in the North Iran)
Volga + shcheli + rusalka + gol' = vlagalishche + Rus + alkogol'
Arzni - mineral springs in Armenia; according to Mandelshtam, Arzni is "the most truthful water" (samaya pravdivaya voda)
shcheli - clefts, slits; cf. malebolge, zlye shcheli (evil slits), the eighth circle in Dante's Inferno
rusalka - mermaid
gol' - the poor, utterly destitute; bare place
vlagalishche - vagina
alkogol' - alcohol
As I pointed out before, Ursus is a character in Hugo's L'homme qui rit ("The Laughing Man"). Another character in that novel is a blind girl Dea (dea means in Latin "goddess" and is an anagram of eda, Russian for "food"). There are three blind characters in Ada (besides Amor, the blind god of love). But one is also reminded of Albinus, the hero of Nabokov's "Laughter in the Dark" who loses his sight, and Vasiliy Tyomnyi (Dark Vasiliy, the Great Prince of Moscow, 1415-62, dubbed thus because he was blinded by his rivals; cf. Dark Walter, Demon Veen's nickname; btw., Vas'ka is a derogatory form of Vasiliy). Vasiliy Tyomnyi (who took Demon, now Dem'yansk, an old city in the Province of Novgorod) was a grandson of Dmitri Donskoy (cf. Baron d'Onsky in Ada), the Great Prince of Moscow who defeated Khan Mamai in the Kulikovo battle (1380). On Antiterra, the Russians must have lost that battle and had to flee, crossing what was later called the Bering Strait (which may not exist, or be narrower, on Demonia), to America. That's why Van is surprised to learn that on Terra (Antiterra's twin planet) "instead of Khan Sosso and his ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate, a super Russia, dominating the Volga region and similar watersheds, was governed by a Sovereign Society of Solicitous Republics (or so it came through) which had superseded the Tsars, conquerors of Tartary and Trst." (2.2) Not only does Nabokov give his reader a whole planet, he also prolongs his reader's life to a number of centuries!
Alexey Sklyarenko
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Us means in Russian "whisker" and reminds one of Stalin's tarakan'i usishcha ("cockroach whiskers"), in Mandelshtam's poem (alluded to in Ada: 1.2) My zhivyom, pod soboyu ne chuya strany ("We live not feeling land beneath us..."). It was Stalin (whose personality is split on Antiterra between Colonel St. Alin and Khan Sosso) who renamed St. Petersburg (VN's home city) Leningrad, Tsaritsyn (yet another city on the Volga, now Volgograd) Stalingrad (Simbirsk became Ul'yanovsk, and Nizhniy Novgorod, Gorky). Grad (obs., city) + us = Gradus. Yacob Gradus is the killer in Nabokov's Pale Fire. In Ada (3.5), Pale Fire is a racehorse (in a painting above the Tobaks' bed in their cabin). On the other hand, we measure alcohol percentage in liquors in gradusy. Pod gradusom means in Russian "drunk." Also, gor'kiy (A. M. Peshkov's penname) means "bitter" and makes one think of the phrase gor'kiy p'yanitsa (hard drinker, sot). In Pushkin's Vystrel ("The Pistol Shot") the narrator refers to local sots gorkie (omitting the noun).
R (Razin's initial) + us = Rus (obs., Russia); Rus + us = Ursus (the best Franco-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan Major). One of the songs that Van, Ada and Lucette listen in Ursus (where they get drunk on champagne: 2.8) is "There's a crag on the Ross, overgrown with wild moss..." The original song about Sten'ka Razin begins: Est' na Volge utyos ("There's a crag on the Volga..."). In another popular song about Sten'ka ("Volga, Volga, mat' rodnaya..."), drunken Razin throws his concubine, a Persian princess, in the Volga.
Onboard the Tobakoff, Lucette drinks three Cossack ponies of Klass vodka - hateful, vulgar, but potent stuff - before she jumps in the Atlantic (3.5).
Razin = Arzni = Iran + z (in 1868 Razin made a sally in the North Iran)
Volga + shcheli + rusalka + gol' = vlagalishche + Rus + alkogol'
Arzni - mineral springs in Armenia; according to Mandelshtam, Arzni is "the most truthful water" (samaya pravdivaya voda)
shcheli - clefts, slits; cf. malebolge, zlye shcheli (evil slits), the eighth circle in Dante's Inferno
rusalka - mermaid
gol' - the poor, utterly destitute; bare place
vlagalishche - vagina
alkogol' - alcohol
As I pointed out before, Ursus is a character in Hugo's L'homme qui rit ("The Laughing Man"). Another character in that novel is a blind girl Dea (dea means in Latin "goddess" and is an anagram of eda, Russian for "food"). There are three blind characters in Ada (besides Amor, the blind god of love). But one is also reminded of Albinus, the hero of Nabokov's "Laughter in the Dark" who loses his sight, and Vasiliy Tyomnyi (Dark Vasiliy, the Great Prince of Moscow, 1415-62, dubbed thus because he was blinded by his rivals; cf. Dark Walter, Demon Veen's nickname; btw., Vas'ka is a derogatory form of Vasiliy). Vasiliy Tyomnyi (who took Demon, now Dem'yansk, an old city in the Province of Novgorod) was a grandson of Dmitri Donskoy (cf. Baron d'Onsky in Ada), the Great Prince of Moscow who defeated Khan Mamai in the Kulikovo battle (1380). On Antiterra, the Russians must have lost that battle and had to flee, crossing what was later called the Bering Strait (which may not exist, or be narrower, on Demonia), to America. That's why Van is surprised to learn that on Terra (Antiterra's twin planet) "instead of Khan Sosso and his ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate, a super Russia, dominating the Volga region and similar watersheds, was governed by a Sovereign Society of Solicitous Republics (or so it came through) which had superseded the Tsars, conquerors of Tartary and Trst." (2.2) Not only does Nabokov give his reader a whole planet, he also prolongs his reader's life to a number of centuries!
Alexey Sklyarenko
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/