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Re: RES: [NABOKV-L] fires and fingernails
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JM: So Ada stopped to bite her fingernails after she met Van? He seemed to feel great tenderness for her harmed cushiony fingertips at that first period in Ardis.
Dear Jansy,
I speak of Ada's fingernails in my article "'Traditions of a Russian family' in Nabokov's Ada" (The Nabokovian, #52, Spring 2004, pp. 13-26). Btw., the origins of the interesting word podnogotnaya ("the whole subunguality, the secret under the nail") are explained in Aldanov's novel "Le Pont de Diable".
JM: The mosquitoes were associated to Chateaubriand, Goethe and the fictional Robert Brown. Now you see a link to Gorky, an author Nabokov didn't seem to appreciate much. Were his references, then, satirical or neutral?
True, VN loathed Gorky. But note that Bosch, whose Garden of The Earthly Delights is so important in Ada, plays also a major role in Gorky's novel "The Life of Klim Samgin" (see my article "The Fair Invention in Nabokov's Ada and Gorky's The Life of Klim Samgin" in The Nabokovian #58, Spring 2007). Gorky's hero is a namesake of Baron Klim Avidov (anagram of "Vladimir Nabokov"; note that Baron is a character in Gorky's play "At the Bottom"), Marina's former lover who gave her children the set of Flavita (1.36). In Gorky's novel, one of the few women whom Samgin fails to seduce is Marina Zotov. She is a namesake, one the one hand, of Van's and Ada's mother, and, on the other, of one of the three cosmologists (Xertigny, Yates and Zotov) who discovered Terra, Demonia's twin planet (2.2). There is in The Life of Klim Samgin a cruel pun on nasekomoe (Russian for "insect"). Finally, Gorky is the author of the Foreword to the first Russian translation of Châteaubriand's Rènè.
Alexey Sklyarenko
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Dear Jansy,
I speak of Ada's fingernails in my article "'Traditions of a Russian family' in Nabokov's Ada" (The Nabokovian, #52, Spring 2004, pp. 13-26). Btw., the origins of the interesting word podnogotnaya ("the whole subunguality, the secret under the nail") are explained in Aldanov's novel "Le Pont de Diable".
JM: The mosquitoes were associated to Chateaubriand, Goethe and the fictional Robert Brown. Now you see a link to Gorky, an author Nabokov didn't seem to appreciate much. Were his references, then, satirical or neutral?
True, VN loathed Gorky. But note that Bosch, whose Garden of The Earthly Delights is so important in Ada, plays also a major role in Gorky's novel "The Life of Klim Samgin" (see my article "The Fair Invention in Nabokov's Ada and Gorky's The Life of Klim Samgin" in The Nabokovian #58, Spring 2007). Gorky's hero is a namesake of Baron Klim Avidov (anagram of "Vladimir Nabokov"; note that Baron is a character in Gorky's play "At the Bottom"), Marina's former lover who gave her children the set of Flavita (1.36). In Gorky's novel, one of the few women whom Samgin fails to seduce is Marina Zotov. She is a namesake, one the one hand, of Van's and Ada's mother, and, on the other, of one of the three cosmologists (Xertigny, Yates and Zotov) who discovered Terra, Demonia's twin planet (2.2). There is in The Life of Klim Samgin a cruel pun on nasekomoe (Russian for "insect"). Finally, Gorky is the author of the Foreword to the first Russian translation of Châteaubriand's Rènè.
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/