Subject
soprano, etc.
From
Date
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As he speaks of Tolstoy's tale of Murat, the Navajo chieftain, a French general's bastard, shot by Cora Day in his swimming pool, Van Veen exclaims: "What a soprano Cora had been!" (1.28)
Charlotte Corday, who stabbed Marat in his bath, wasn't a singer.
There are no opera singers in Tolstoy's Hadji Murat, the novella set, except one chapter, in the Caucasus.
But there are several female singers in Tolstoy's Anna Karenin. At a crucial point of her adulterous romance with Vronsky (Part Five, XXXIII), Anna makes the mistake by going to the theatre to listen to Carlotta Patti (Adelina's elder sister). At the party given by Countess Bohl* (Part Seven, VI), the hostess says to Lyovin: "Очень хороша была Лукка" ("Lucca was superb yesterday").
Paoline Lucca, Austrian opera singer (dramatic soprano) of Italian extraction, happens to be a namesake of the city in Tuscany mentioned in the beginning of Tolstoy's previous novel, War and Peace:
"Eh bien, mon prince. Genes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des поместья, de la famille Buonaparte."**
(While "Lucques" is the setting of Heinrich Heine's Die Baeder von Lucca, the toponym "Genes" occurs in the title of another part of Heine's Italienische Reisebilder, Die Reise von Muenchen nach Genua. I discuss the allusions in Ada to these prose pieces by HH in my previous posts. Btw., Lucca is the home city of Giacomo Puccini, the famous operatic composer, while Genoa is the home city of Christopher Columbus)
From War and Peace back to Anna Karenin. When Lyovin takes adieux of Countess Bol' and her daughter, the ladies shake hands with him and bid him to convey mille choses to his wife (Kitty).
Chose is Van's University in Ada. In Part One, ch. 27, we see Van playing poker with another Chose student, a cardsharp. When the game is over, Van throws a handful of cards and chips into Dick's face.
Cf. in Anna Karenin (Part Three, XIX): "Such debts amounted to about four thousand: one thousand five hundred for a horse, and two thousand five hundred as surety for a young comrade, Venevsky, who had lost that sum to a cardsharper in Vronsky's presence. Vronsky had wanted to pay the money at the time (he had that amount then), but Venevsky and Yashvin had insisted that they would pay and not Vronsky, who had not played. That was so far well, but Vronsky knew that in this dirty business, though his only share in it was undertaking by word of mouth to be surety for Venevsky, it was absolutely necessary for him to have the two thousand five hundred roubles so as to be able to fling it at the swindler, and have no more words with him."
Venevsky + naiven = Ivan Veen + Nevsky
Yashvin = vishnya
G. A. Vronsky + Don Juan + Ada = d'Onsky + navajo + Guan + Dar
naiven - Russ., [he is] naive
Nevsky - Nevsky Avenue in St. Petersburg
vishnya - Russ., cherry
G. A. Vronsky - a character in Ada, one of Marina's lovers
d'Onsky - another lover of Marina
Guan - Don Guan, the hero of Pushkin's "The Stone Guest"
Dar - Russ., gift
As to the name Karenin, of Anna's husband, Tolstoy derived it from karenon (Greek for "head"), the word he found in Homer (see S. L. Tolstoy, "Очерки былого", Sketches of the Past). Cf. Golovin (from golova, "head"), the surname of the hero of Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich", golovotyapstvo (bungling; literally: "head-chopping") in Ilf and Petrov, and Headless Horseman, Captain Mayne Reid's novel that on Antiterra turns out to be a poem by Pushkin.
Actually, Pushkin is the author of The Bronze Horseman. The poem's original title is "Медный всадник". Медь is Russian for "copper". There is "copper" in Koperveyn, a character in Tolstoy's Hadji Murat. The emperor Nicolas I repeats the name Koperveyn several times as he walks, taking his morning exercise, along the Neva embankment (ch. XV). On the eve (December 31, 1851) he was in a masquerade where he met a masked girl. She turned out to be a Swedish governess' innocent daughter, who had been in love with the tsar since childhood, and he spent an hour with her in his top-secret garconniere.
VN's son Dmitri Nabokov was an opera singer (bass). Perhaps he can tell us more about several other opera-related details in Ada. There is, for instance, the young soprano Maria Kuznetsova, whom Ada resembles in the letter scene in Tschchaikow's opera Onegin and Olga (1.25). At the picnic in Ardis the Second (1.39) Marina sings the Green Grass aria from "Traverdiata" (trava is Russian for "grass" and the name Verdi comes from verde, Italian for "green").
*Графиня Боль; боль is Russian for "pain"; боль + векши = большевик (bolshevik); векши, nom. pl., gen. sing. of векша, obs., squirrel; cf. Mandelshtam: "И век бы падал векши легче" (And all my life I would fall down lighter than a squirrel)
**Ну, князь? Генуя и Лукка - поместья фамилии Бонапарте (Anna Pavlovna Sherer's words to Prince Vasiliy Bezukhov; Russian translation is by Tolstoy)
Alexey Sklyarenko
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Charlotte Corday, who stabbed Marat in his bath, wasn't a singer.
There are no opera singers in Tolstoy's Hadji Murat, the novella set, except one chapter, in the Caucasus.
But there are several female singers in Tolstoy's Anna Karenin. At a crucial point of her adulterous romance with Vronsky (Part Five, XXXIII), Anna makes the mistake by going to the theatre to listen to Carlotta Patti (Adelina's elder sister). At the party given by Countess Bohl* (Part Seven, VI), the hostess says to Lyovin: "Очень хороша была Лукка" ("Lucca was superb yesterday").
Paoline Lucca, Austrian opera singer (dramatic soprano) of Italian extraction, happens to be a namesake of the city in Tuscany mentioned in the beginning of Tolstoy's previous novel, War and Peace:
"Eh bien, mon prince. Genes et Lucques ne sont plus que des apanages, des поместья, de la famille Buonaparte."**
(While "Lucques" is the setting of Heinrich Heine's Die Baeder von Lucca, the toponym "Genes" occurs in the title of another part of Heine's Italienische Reisebilder, Die Reise von Muenchen nach Genua. I discuss the allusions in Ada to these prose pieces by HH in my previous posts. Btw., Lucca is the home city of Giacomo Puccini, the famous operatic composer, while Genoa is the home city of Christopher Columbus)
From War and Peace back to Anna Karenin. When Lyovin takes adieux of Countess Bol' and her daughter, the ladies shake hands with him and bid him to convey mille choses to his wife (Kitty).
Chose is Van's University in Ada. In Part One, ch. 27, we see Van playing poker with another Chose student, a cardsharp. When the game is over, Van throws a handful of cards and chips into Dick's face.
Cf. in Anna Karenin (Part Three, XIX): "Such debts amounted to about four thousand: one thousand five hundred for a horse, and two thousand five hundred as surety for a young comrade, Venevsky, who had lost that sum to a cardsharper in Vronsky's presence. Vronsky had wanted to pay the money at the time (he had that amount then), but Venevsky and Yashvin had insisted that they would pay and not Vronsky, who had not played. That was so far well, but Vronsky knew that in this dirty business, though his only share in it was undertaking by word of mouth to be surety for Venevsky, it was absolutely necessary for him to have the two thousand five hundred roubles so as to be able to fling it at the swindler, and have no more words with him."
Venevsky + naiven = Ivan Veen + Nevsky
Yashvin = vishnya
G. A. Vronsky + Don Juan + Ada = d'Onsky + navajo + Guan + Dar
naiven - Russ., [he is] naive
Nevsky - Nevsky Avenue in St. Petersburg
vishnya - Russ., cherry
G. A. Vronsky - a character in Ada, one of Marina's lovers
d'Onsky - another lover of Marina
Guan - Don Guan, the hero of Pushkin's "The Stone Guest"
Dar - Russ., gift
As to the name Karenin, of Anna's husband, Tolstoy derived it from karenon (Greek for "head"), the word he found in Homer (see S. L. Tolstoy, "Очерки былого", Sketches of the Past). Cf. Golovin (from golova, "head"), the surname of the hero of Tolstoy's "The Death of Ivan Ilyich", golovotyapstvo (bungling; literally: "head-chopping") in Ilf and Petrov, and Headless Horseman, Captain Mayne Reid's novel that on Antiterra turns out to be a poem by Pushkin.
Actually, Pushkin is the author of The Bronze Horseman. The poem's original title is "Медный всадник". Медь is Russian for "copper". There is "copper" in Koperveyn, a character in Tolstoy's Hadji Murat. The emperor Nicolas I repeats the name Koperveyn several times as he walks, taking his morning exercise, along the Neva embankment (ch. XV). On the eve (December 31, 1851) he was in a masquerade where he met a masked girl. She turned out to be a Swedish governess' innocent daughter, who had been in love with the tsar since childhood, and he spent an hour with her in his top-secret garconniere.
VN's son Dmitri Nabokov was an opera singer (bass). Perhaps he can tell us more about several other opera-related details in Ada. There is, for instance, the young soprano Maria Kuznetsova, whom Ada resembles in the letter scene in Tschchaikow's opera Onegin and Olga (1.25). At the picnic in Ardis the Second (1.39) Marina sings the Green Grass aria from "Traverdiata" (trava is Russian for "grass" and the name Verdi comes from verde, Italian for "green").
*Графиня Боль; боль is Russian for "pain"; боль + векши = большевик (bolshevik); векши, nom. pl., gen. sing. of векша, obs., squirrel; cf. Mandelshtam: "И век бы падал векши легче" (And all my life I would fall down lighter than a squirrel)
**Ну, князь? Генуя и Лукка - поместья фамилии Бонапарте (Anna Pavlovna Sherer's words to Prince Vasiliy Bezukhov; Russian translation is by Tolstoy)
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/