Subject
Bishop of Yeslove & Onhava cathedral in Pale Fire; Discours sur
les ombres in The Gift
les ombres in The Gift
From
Date
Body
In his Commentary to Shade’s poem Kinbote (who imagines that he is Charles
the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions the Bishop of
Yeslove and the Onhava cathedral:
John Shade and Sybil Swallow (see
<http://www.shannonrchamberlain.com/commentary.html#comline247> note to line
247) were married in 1919, exactly three decades before King Charles wed
Disa, Duchess of Payn. Since the very beginning of his reign (1936-1958)
representatives of the nation, salmon fishermen, non-union glaziers,
military groups, worried relatives, and especially the Bishop of Yeslove, a
sanguineous and saintly old man, had been doing their utmost to persuade him
to give up his copious but sterile pleasures and take a wife. It was a
matter not of morality but of succession. As in the case of some of his
predecessors, rough alderkings who burned for boys, the clergy blandly
ignored our young bachelor's pagan habits, but wanted him to do what an
earlier and even more reluctant Charles had done: take a night off and
lawfully engender an heir.
He saw nineteen-year-old Disa for the first time on the festive night of
July the 5th, 1947, at a masked ball in his uncle's palace. She had come in
male dress, as a Tirolese boy, a little knock-kneed but brave and lovely,
and afterwards he drove her and her cousins (two guardsmen disguised as
flowergirls) in his divine new convertible through the streets to see the
tremendous birthday illumination, and the fackeltanz in the park, and the
fireworks, and the pale upturned faces. He procrastinated for almost two
years but was set upon by inhumanly eloquent advisors, and finally gave in.
On the eve of his wedding he prayed most of the night locked up all alone in
the cold vastness of the Onhava cathedral. Smug alderkings looked at him
from the ruby-and-amethyst windows. Never had he so fervently asked God for
guidance and strength (see further my
<http://www.shannonrchamberlain.com/commentary.html#lines433434> note to
lines 433-434).
After <http://www.shannonrchamberlain.com/palefirepoem.html#line275> line
274 there is a false start in the draft:
I like my name: Shade, Ombre, almost "man"
In Spanish...
One regrets that the poet did not pursue this theme--and spare his reader
the embarrassing intimacies that follow. (note to Line 275)
The name of Zembla’s capital, Onhava seems to hint at heaven. “Yes, love”
and “heaven” occur close to each other in a line of Byron’s poem The
Giaour (1813):
Yes, Love indeed is light from heaven;
A spark of that immortal fire
With angels shared, by Alla given,
To lift from earth our low desire. (ll. 1132-1135)
Byron died in Missolonghi, Greece, on April 7/19, 1824. In a letter of June
24-25, 1824, to Vyazemski Pushkin says that Byron’s genius blednel (paled)
with his youth:
По твоим письмам к княгине Вере вижу, что
и тебе и кюхельбекерно и тошно; тебе груст
но по Байроне, а я так рад его смерти, как в
ысокому предмету для поэзии. Гений Байрон
а бледнел с его молодостию. В своих трагед
иях, не выключая и Каина, он уже не тот пла
менный демон, который создал ?Гяура? и ?Чил
ьд-Гарольда?. Первые две песни ?Дон Жуана?
выше следующих. Его поэзия видимо изменял
ась. Он весь создан был навыворот; постепе
нности в нём не было, он вдруг созрел и воз
мужал ― пропел и замолчал; и первые звуки
его уже ему не возвратились ― после 4-ой пе
сни Child Harold Байрона мы не слыхали, а писал
какой-то другой поэт с высоким человеческ
им талантом.
According to Pushkin, in his tragedies Byron is not that fiery demon anymore
who created The Giaour and Child Harold. “The first two Cantos of Don Juan
are artistically superior to the next.” In Chapter Seven (XXII: 5) of
Eugene Onegin Pushkin mentions “the singer of the Giaour and Juan:”
Хотя мы знаем, что Евгений
Издавна чтенье разлюбил,
Однако ж несколько творений
Он из опалы исключил:
Певца Гяура и Жуана
Да с ним ещё два-три романа,
В которых отразился век
И современный человек
Изображён довольно верно
С его безнравственной душой,
Себялюбивой и сухой,
Мечтанью преданной безмерно,
С его озлобленным умом,
Кипящим в действии пустом.
Although we know that Eugene
had long ceased to like reading,
still, several works
he had exempted from disgrace:
the singer of the Giaour and Juan
and, with him, also two or three novels
in which the epoch is reflected
and modern man rather correctly represented
with his immoral soul, selfish and dry,
to dreaming measurelessly given,
with his embittered mind
boiling in empty action.
Canto Eleven of Byron’s Don Juan begins as follows:
When Bishop Berkeley said "there was no matter,"
And proved it―'twas no matter what he said:
They say his system 'tis in vain to batter,
Too subtle for the airiest human head;
And yet who can believe it! I would shatter
Gladly all matters down to stone or lead,
Or adamant, to find the World a spirit,
And wear my head, denying that I wear it.
The stanza’s last line brings to mind the English title of VN’s novel
Priglashenie na kazn’ (1935), Invitation to a Beheading. The epigraph to IB
is from the invented French thinker Delalande:
Comme un fou se croit Dieu
nous nous croyons mortels.
Delalande. Discours sur les ombres
Describing the death of Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski (a character in
VN’s novel Dar, 1937), Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev (the main
character and narrator in “The Gift”) also quotes Delalande’s Discours
sur les ombres:
Когда однажды французского мыслителя
Delalande на чьих-то похоронах спросили, почем
у он не обнажает головы (ne se découvre pas), он от
вечал: я жду, чтобы смерть начала первая
(qu’elle se découvre la première). В этом есть метафизи
ческая негалантность, но смерть большего
не стоит. Боязнь рождает благоговение, бл
агоговение ставит жертвенник, его дым вос
ходит к небу, там принимает образ крыл, и с
клонённая боязнь к нему обращает молитву.
Религия имеет такое же отношение к загроб
ному состоянию человека, какое имеет мате
матика к его состоянию земному: то и друго
е только условия игры. Вера в Бога и вера в
цифру: местная истина, истина места. Я зна
ю, что смерть сама по себе никак не связан
а с внежизненной областью, ибо дверь есть
лишь выход из дома, а не часть его окрестн
ости, какой является дерево или холм. Выйт
и как-нибудь нужно, ?но я отказываюсь виде
ть в двери больше, чем дыру, да то, что сдел
али столяр и плотник? (Delalande, Discours sur les ombres
p. 45 et ante). Опять же: несчастная маршрутная
мысль, с которой давно свыкся человечески
й разум (жизнь в виде некоего пути) есть гл
упая иллюзия: мы никуда не идём, мы сидим д
ома. Загробное окружает нас всегда, а вовс
е не лежит в конце какого-то путешествия.
В земном доме вместо окна \xa8C зеркало; дверь
до поры до времени затворена; но воздух вх
одит сквозь щели. ?Наиболее доступный для
наших домоседных чувств образ будущего п
остижения окрестности долженствующей ра
скрыться нам по распаде тела, это \xa8C освобо
ждение духа из глазниц плоти и превращени
е наше в одно свободное сплошное око, зара
з видящее все стороны света, или, иначе го
воря: сверхчувственное прозрение мира пр
и нашем внутреннем участии? (там же, стр.
64). Но все это только символы, символы, кот
орые становятся обузой для мысли в то мгн
овение, как она приглядится к ним…
When the French thinker Delalande was asked at somebody’s funeral why he
did not uncover himself (ne se découvre pas), he replied: “I am waiting
for death to do it first” (qu’elle se découvre la première). There is a
lack of metaphysical gallantry in this, but death deserves no more. Fear
gives birth to sacred awe, sacred awe erects a sacrificial altar, its smoke
ascends to the sky, there assumes the shape of wings, and bowing fear
addresses a prayer to it. Religion has the same relation to man’s heavenly
condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the
other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers:
local truth and truth of location. I know that death in itself is in no way
connected with the topography of the hereafter, for a door is merely the
exit from the house and not a part of its surroundings, like a tree or a
hill. One has to get out somehow, “but I refuse to see in a door more than
a hole, and a carpenter’s job” (Delalande, Discours sur les ombres, p.
45). And then again: the unfortunate image of a “road” to which the human
mind has become accustomed (life as a kind of journey) is a stupid illusion:
we are not going anywhere, we are sitting at home. The other world surrounds
us always and is not at all at the end of some pilgrimage. In our earthly
house, windows are replaced by mirrors; the door, until a given time, is
closed; but air comes in through the cracks. “For our stay-at-home senses
the most accessible image of our future comprehension of those surroundings
which are due to be revealed to us with the disintegration of the body is
the liberation of the soul from the eye-sockets of the flesh and our
transformation into one complete and free eye, which can simultaneously see
in all directions, or to put it differently: a supersensory insight into the
world accompanied by our inner participation.” (Ibid. p. 64). But all this
is only symbols―symbols which become a burden to the mind as soon as it
takes a close look at them…. (Chapter Five)
Poor Alexander Yakovlevich went mad after the suicide of his son Yasha.
Similarly, Professor Vsevolod Botkin (an American scholar of Russian
descent) went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic
death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade of Kinbote’s Commentary).
In the same letter of June 24-25, 1824, to Vyazemski Pushkin mentions Count
Vorontsov (the governor of New Russia who was Pushkin’s chief in Odessa):
Я ждал отъезда Трубецкого, чтоб написать
тебе спустя рукава. Начну с того, что всег
о ближе касается до меня. Я поссорился с В
оронцовым и завёл с ним полемическую пере
писку, которая кончилась с моей стороны п
росьбою в отставку.
In Zhizn’ Chernyshevskogo (“The Life of Chernyshevski”), Chapter Four of
“The Gift,” Fyodor points out that Chernyshevski (a radical critic)
repeated Vorontsov’s words about Pushkin:
Говоря, что Пушкин был ?только слабым подр
ажателем Байрона?, Чернышевский чудовищн
о точно воспроизводил фразу графа Воронц
ова: ?Слабый подражатель лорда Байрона?. И
злюбленная мысль Добролюбова, что ?у Пушк
ина недостаток прочного, глубокого образ
ования? \xa8C дружеское аукание с замечанием
того же Воронцова: ?Нельзя быть истинным п
оэтом, не работая постоянно для расширени
я своих познаний, а их у него недостаточн
о?. ?Для гения недостаточно смастерить Евг
ения Онегина?, \xa8C писал Надеждин, сравнивая
Пушкина с портным, изобретателем жилетны
х узоров, и заключая умственный союз с Ува
ровым, министром народного просвещения, с
казавшим по случаю смерти Пушкина: ?Писат
ь стишки не значит еще проходить великое
поприще?.
When Chernyshevski said that Pushkin was “only a poor imitator of Byron,”
he reproduced with monstrous accuracy the definition given by Count
Vorontsov (Pushkin’s boss in Odessa): “A poor imitator of Lord Byron.”
Dobrolyubov’s favorite idea that “Pushkin lacked a solid, deep education”
is in friendly chime with Vorontsov’s remark: “One cannot be a genuine
poet without constantly working to broaden one’s knowledge, and his is
insufficient.” “To be a genius it is not enough to have manufactured
Eugene Onegin,” wrote the progressive Nadezhdin, comparing Pushkin to a
tailor, an inventor of waistcoat patterns, and thus concluding an
intellectual pact with the reactionary Count Uvarov, Minister of Education,
who remarked on the occasion of Pushkin’s death: “To write jingles does
not mean yet to achieve a great career.”
The surname Nadezhdin comes from nadezhda (hope). In his famous epigram
(1824) on Vorontsov Pushkin mentions nadezhda:
Полу-милорд, полу-купец,
Полу-мудрец, полу-невежда,
Полу-подлец, но есть надежда,
Что будет полным наконец.
Half-milord, half-merchant,
Half-sage, half-ignoramus,
Half-scoundrel, but there is hope
That he will be a full one at last.
There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and
commits suicide (on October 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin’s Lyceum),
Botkin will be "full" again.
According to Fyodor, Lermontov came off luckier with the radical critics:
Счастливее оказался Лермонтов. Его проза
исторгла у Белинского (имевшего слабость
к завоеваниям техники) неожиданное и прем
илое сравнение Печорина с паровозом, сокр
ушающим неосторожно попадающихся под его
колёса. В его стихах разночинцы почуяли т
о, что позже стало называться ?надсоновщи
ной?. В этом смысле Лермонтов \xa8C первый над
сон русской литературы. Ритм, тон, бледны
й, слезами разбавленный стих гражданских
мотивов до ?Вы жертвою пали? включительно,
все это пошло от таких лермонтовских стро
к, как: ?Прощай, наш товарищ, недолго ты жи
л, певец с голубыми очами, лишь крест дере
вянный себе заслужил да вечную память меж
нами?. Очарование Лермонтова, даль его поэ
зии, райская её живописность и прозрачный
привкус неба во влажном стихе \xa8C были, коне
чно, совершенно недоступны пониманию люд
ей склада Чернышевского.
Lermontov came off luckier. His prose jerked from Belinski (who had a
weakness for the conquests of technology) the surprising and most charming
comparison of Pechorin to a steam engine, shattering all who were careless
enough to get under its wheels. In his poetry the middle-class intellectuals
felt something of the sociolyrical strain that later came to be called
“Nadsonism.” In this sense Lermontov was the first Nadson of Russian
literature. The rhythm, the tone, the pale, tear-diluted idiom of “civic”
verse up to and including “as victims you fell in the fateful contest”
(the famous revolutionary song of the first years of our century), all of
this goes back to such Lermontov lines as:
Farewell, our dear comrade! Alas, upon earth
Not long did you dwell, blue-eyed singer!
A plain cross of wood you have earned, and with us
Your memory always shall linger….
Lermontov’s real magic, the melting vistas in his poetry, its paradisial
picturesqueness and the transparent tang of the celestial in his moist
verse―these, of course, were completely inaccessible to the understanding
of men of Chernyshevski’s stamp. (Chapter Four)
In his poem Net, ya ne Bayron, ya drugoy… (“No, I’m not Byron, I’m
another…” 1832) Lermontov mentions nadezhd razbitykh gruz (a load of
broken hopes) that lies in his soul, as in the ocean:
Нет, я не Байрон, я другой,
Ещё неведомый избранник,
Как он, гонимый миром странник,
Но только с русскою душой.
Я раньше начал, кончу ране,
Мой ум немного совершит;
В душе моей, как в океане,
Надежд разбитых груз лежит.
Кто может, океан угрюмый,
Твои изведать тайны? Кто
Толпе мои расскажет думы?
Я - или бог - или никто!
Lermontov’s poem ends in the lines:
Who will tell the crowd my thoughts?
Myself - or God - or nobody.
Bog + nikto + ladon’ + Nabokov = Botkin + ogon’ + bok + Aldanov
Bog - God
nikto - nobody
ladon’ - palm (of a hand)
ogon’ - fire
bok \xa8C side
Aldanov - Mark Aldanov (1886-1957), a writer; the main character in
Aldanov’s novel Mogila voina (“A Soldier’s Grave,” 1938) is Byron;
Aldanov’s novel has the epigraph from Byron’s poem On This Day I Complete
My Thirty-Sixth Year (1824):
Seek out -- less often sought than found
A soldier's grave, for thee the best,
Then look around and choose thy ground,
And take thy rest.
In the first stanza of his last poem Byron says that he cannot be beloved:
'Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it has ceased to move:
Yet though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love!
Kinbote imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last king of Zembla.
Zembla is mentioned by Pope in Essay on Man. Ombre is almost hombre (‘man’
in Spanish).
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,dana.dragunoiu@gmail.com,shvabrin@humnet.ucla.edu
Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
AdaOnline: "http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/
The Nabokov Society of Japan's Annotations to Ada: http://vnjapan.org/main/ada/index.html
The VN Bibliography Blog: http://vnbiblio.com/
Search the archive with L-Soft: https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A0=NABOKV-L
Manage subscription options :http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=NABOKV-L
the Beloved, the last self-exiled king of Zembla) mentions the Bishop of
Yeslove and the Onhava cathedral:
John Shade and Sybil Swallow (see
<http://www.shannonrchamberlain.com/commentary.html#comline247> note to line
247) were married in 1919, exactly three decades before King Charles wed
Disa, Duchess of Payn. Since the very beginning of his reign (1936-1958)
representatives of the nation, salmon fishermen, non-union glaziers,
military groups, worried relatives, and especially the Bishop of Yeslove, a
sanguineous and saintly old man, had been doing their utmost to persuade him
to give up his copious but sterile pleasures and take a wife. It was a
matter not of morality but of succession. As in the case of some of his
predecessors, rough alderkings who burned for boys, the clergy blandly
ignored our young bachelor's pagan habits, but wanted him to do what an
earlier and even more reluctant Charles had done: take a night off and
lawfully engender an heir.
He saw nineteen-year-old Disa for the first time on the festive night of
July the 5th, 1947, at a masked ball in his uncle's palace. She had come in
male dress, as a Tirolese boy, a little knock-kneed but brave and lovely,
and afterwards he drove her and her cousins (two guardsmen disguised as
flowergirls) in his divine new convertible through the streets to see the
tremendous birthday illumination, and the fackeltanz in the park, and the
fireworks, and the pale upturned faces. He procrastinated for almost two
years but was set upon by inhumanly eloquent advisors, and finally gave in.
On the eve of his wedding he prayed most of the night locked up all alone in
the cold vastness of the Onhava cathedral. Smug alderkings looked at him
from the ruby-and-amethyst windows. Never had he so fervently asked God for
guidance and strength (see further my
<http://www.shannonrchamberlain.com/commentary.html#lines433434> note to
lines 433-434).
After <http://www.shannonrchamberlain.com/palefirepoem.html#line275> line
274 there is a false start in the draft:
I like my name: Shade, Ombre, almost "man"
In Spanish...
One regrets that the poet did not pursue this theme--and spare his reader
the embarrassing intimacies that follow. (note to Line 275)
The name of Zembla’s capital, Onhava seems to hint at heaven. “Yes, love”
and “heaven” occur close to each other in a line of Byron’s poem The
Giaour (1813):
Yes, Love indeed is light from heaven;
A spark of that immortal fire
With angels shared, by Alla given,
To lift from earth our low desire. (ll. 1132-1135)
Byron died in Missolonghi, Greece, on April 7/19, 1824. In a letter of June
24-25, 1824, to Vyazemski Pushkin says that Byron’s genius blednel (paled)
with his youth:
По твоим письмам к княгине Вере вижу, что
и тебе и кюхельбекерно и тошно; тебе груст
но по Байроне, а я так рад его смерти, как в
ысокому предмету для поэзии. Гений Байрон
а бледнел с его молодостию. В своих трагед
иях, не выключая и Каина, он уже не тот пла
менный демон, который создал ?Гяура? и ?Чил
ьд-Гарольда?. Первые две песни ?Дон Жуана?
выше следующих. Его поэзия видимо изменял
ась. Он весь создан был навыворот; постепе
нности в нём не было, он вдруг созрел и воз
мужал ― пропел и замолчал; и первые звуки
его уже ему не возвратились ― после 4-ой пе
сни Child Harold Байрона мы не слыхали, а писал
какой-то другой поэт с высоким человеческ
им талантом.
According to Pushkin, in his tragedies Byron is not that fiery demon anymore
who created The Giaour and Child Harold. “The first two Cantos of Don Juan
are artistically superior to the next.” In Chapter Seven (XXII: 5) of
Eugene Onegin Pushkin mentions “the singer of the Giaour and Juan:”
Хотя мы знаем, что Евгений
Издавна чтенье разлюбил,
Однако ж несколько творений
Он из опалы исключил:
Певца Гяура и Жуана
Да с ним ещё два-три романа,
В которых отразился век
И современный человек
Изображён довольно верно
С его безнравственной душой,
Себялюбивой и сухой,
Мечтанью преданной безмерно,
С его озлобленным умом,
Кипящим в действии пустом.
Although we know that Eugene
had long ceased to like reading,
still, several works
he had exempted from disgrace:
the singer of the Giaour and Juan
and, with him, also two or three novels
in which the epoch is reflected
and modern man rather correctly represented
with his immoral soul, selfish and dry,
to dreaming measurelessly given,
with his embittered mind
boiling in empty action.
Canto Eleven of Byron’s Don Juan begins as follows:
When Bishop Berkeley said "there was no matter,"
And proved it―'twas no matter what he said:
They say his system 'tis in vain to batter,
Too subtle for the airiest human head;
And yet who can believe it! I would shatter
Gladly all matters down to stone or lead,
Or adamant, to find the World a spirit,
And wear my head, denying that I wear it.
The stanza’s last line brings to mind the English title of VN’s novel
Priglashenie na kazn’ (1935), Invitation to a Beheading. The epigraph to IB
is from the invented French thinker Delalande:
Comme un fou se croit Dieu
nous nous croyons mortels.
Delalande. Discours sur les ombres
Describing the death of Alexander Yakovlevich Chernyshevski (a character in
VN’s novel Dar, 1937), Fyodor Konstantinovich Godunov-Cherdyntsev (the main
character and narrator in “The Gift”) also quotes Delalande’s Discours
sur les ombres:
Когда однажды французского мыслителя
Delalande на чьих-то похоронах спросили, почем
у он не обнажает головы (ne se découvre pas), он от
вечал: я жду, чтобы смерть начала первая
(qu’elle se découvre la première). В этом есть метафизи
ческая негалантность, но смерть большего
не стоит. Боязнь рождает благоговение, бл
агоговение ставит жертвенник, его дым вос
ходит к небу, там принимает образ крыл, и с
клонённая боязнь к нему обращает молитву.
Религия имеет такое же отношение к загроб
ному состоянию человека, какое имеет мате
матика к его состоянию земному: то и друго
е только условия игры. Вера в Бога и вера в
цифру: местная истина, истина места. Я зна
ю, что смерть сама по себе никак не связан
а с внежизненной областью, ибо дверь есть
лишь выход из дома, а не часть его окрестн
ости, какой является дерево или холм. Выйт
и как-нибудь нужно, ?но я отказываюсь виде
ть в двери больше, чем дыру, да то, что сдел
али столяр и плотник? (Delalande, Discours sur les ombres
p. 45 et ante). Опять же: несчастная маршрутная
мысль, с которой давно свыкся человечески
й разум (жизнь в виде некоего пути) есть гл
упая иллюзия: мы никуда не идём, мы сидим д
ома. Загробное окружает нас всегда, а вовс
е не лежит в конце какого-то путешествия.
В земном доме вместо окна \xa8C зеркало; дверь
до поры до времени затворена; но воздух вх
одит сквозь щели. ?Наиболее доступный для
наших домоседных чувств образ будущего п
остижения окрестности долженствующей ра
скрыться нам по распаде тела, это \xa8C освобо
ждение духа из глазниц плоти и превращени
е наше в одно свободное сплошное око, зара
з видящее все стороны света, или, иначе го
воря: сверхчувственное прозрение мира пр
и нашем внутреннем участии? (там же, стр.
64). Но все это только символы, символы, кот
орые становятся обузой для мысли в то мгн
овение, как она приглядится к ним…
When the French thinker Delalande was asked at somebody’s funeral why he
did not uncover himself (ne se découvre pas), he replied: “I am waiting
for death to do it first” (qu’elle se découvre la première). There is a
lack of metaphysical gallantry in this, but death deserves no more. Fear
gives birth to sacred awe, sacred awe erects a sacrificial altar, its smoke
ascends to the sky, there assumes the shape of wings, and bowing fear
addresses a prayer to it. Religion has the same relation to man’s heavenly
condition that mathematics has to his earthly one: both the one and the
other are merely the rules of the game. Belief in God and belief in numbers:
local truth and truth of location. I know that death in itself is in no way
connected with the topography of the hereafter, for a door is merely the
exit from the house and not a part of its surroundings, like a tree or a
hill. One has to get out somehow, “but I refuse to see in a door more than
a hole, and a carpenter’s job” (Delalande, Discours sur les ombres, p.
45). And then again: the unfortunate image of a “road” to which the human
mind has become accustomed (life as a kind of journey) is a stupid illusion:
we are not going anywhere, we are sitting at home. The other world surrounds
us always and is not at all at the end of some pilgrimage. In our earthly
house, windows are replaced by mirrors; the door, until a given time, is
closed; but air comes in through the cracks. “For our stay-at-home senses
the most accessible image of our future comprehension of those surroundings
which are due to be revealed to us with the disintegration of the body is
the liberation of the soul from the eye-sockets of the flesh and our
transformation into one complete and free eye, which can simultaneously see
in all directions, or to put it differently: a supersensory insight into the
world accompanied by our inner participation.” (Ibid. p. 64). But all this
is only symbols―symbols which become a burden to the mind as soon as it
takes a close look at them…. (Chapter Five)
Poor Alexander Yakovlevich went mad after the suicide of his son Yasha.
Similarly, Professor Vsevolod Botkin (an American scholar of Russian
descent) went mad and became Shade, Kinbote and Gradus after the tragic
death of his daughter Nadezhda (Hazel Shade of Kinbote’s Commentary).
In the same letter of June 24-25, 1824, to Vyazemski Pushkin mentions Count
Vorontsov (the governor of New Russia who was Pushkin’s chief in Odessa):
Я ждал отъезда Трубецкого, чтоб написать
тебе спустя рукава. Начну с того, что всег
о ближе касается до меня. Я поссорился с В
оронцовым и завёл с ним полемическую пере
писку, которая кончилась с моей стороны п
росьбою в отставку.
In Zhizn’ Chernyshevskogo (“The Life of Chernyshevski”), Chapter Four of
“The Gift,” Fyodor points out that Chernyshevski (a radical critic)
repeated Vorontsov’s words about Pushkin:
Говоря, что Пушкин был ?только слабым подр
ажателем Байрона?, Чернышевский чудовищн
о точно воспроизводил фразу графа Воронц
ова: ?Слабый подражатель лорда Байрона?. И
злюбленная мысль Добролюбова, что ?у Пушк
ина недостаток прочного, глубокого образ
ования? \xa8C дружеское аукание с замечанием
того же Воронцова: ?Нельзя быть истинным п
оэтом, не работая постоянно для расширени
я своих познаний, а их у него недостаточн
о?. ?Для гения недостаточно смастерить Евг
ения Онегина?, \xa8C писал Надеждин, сравнивая
Пушкина с портным, изобретателем жилетны
х узоров, и заключая умственный союз с Ува
ровым, министром народного просвещения, с
казавшим по случаю смерти Пушкина: ?Писат
ь стишки не значит еще проходить великое
поприще?.
When Chernyshevski said that Pushkin was “only a poor imitator of Byron,”
he reproduced with monstrous accuracy the definition given by Count
Vorontsov (Pushkin’s boss in Odessa): “A poor imitator of Lord Byron.”
Dobrolyubov’s favorite idea that “Pushkin lacked a solid, deep education”
is in friendly chime with Vorontsov’s remark: “One cannot be a genuine
poet without constantly working to broaden one’s knowledge, and his is
insufficient.” “To be a genius it is not enough to have manufactured
Eugene Onegin,” wrote the progressive Nadezhdin, comparing Pushkin to a
tailor, an inventor of waistcoat patterns, and thus concluding an
intellectual pact with the reactionary Count Uvarov, Minister of Education,
who remarked on the occasion of Pushkin’s death: “To write jingles does
not mean yet to achieve a great career.”
The surname Nadezhdin comes from nadezhda (hope). In his famous epigram
(1824) on Vorontsov Pushkin mentions nadezhda:
Полу-милорд, полу-купец,
Полу-мудрец, полу-невежда,
Полу-подлец, но есть надежда,
Что будет полным наконец.
Half-milord, half-merchant,
Half-sage, half-ignoramus,
Half-scoundrel, but there is hope
That he will be a full one at last.
There is a hope that, when Kinbote completes his work on Shade’s poem and
commits suicide (on October 19, 1959, the anniversary of Pushkin’s Lyceum),
Botkin will be "full" again.
According to Fyodor, Lermontov came off luckier with the radical critics:
Счастливее оказался Лермонтов. Его проза
исторгла у Белинского (имевшего слабость
к завоеваниям техники) неожиданное и прем
илое сравнение Печорина с паровозом, сокр
ушающим неосторожно попадающихся под его
колёса. В его стихах разночинцы почуяли т
о, что позже стало называться ?надсоновщи
ной?. В этом смысле Лермонтов \xa8C первый над
сон русской литературы. Ритм, тон, бледны
й, слезами разбавленный стих гражданских
мотивов до ?Вы жертвою пали? включительно,
все это пошло от таких лермонтовских стро
к, как: ?Прощай, наш товарищ, недолго ты жи
л, певец с голубыми очами, лишь крест дере
вянный себе заслужил да вечную память меж
нами?. Очарование Лермонтова, даль его поэ
зии, райская её живописность и прозрачный
привкус неба во влажном стихе \xa8C были, коне
чно, совершенно недоступны пониманию люд
ей склада Чернышевского.
Lermontov came off luckier. His prose jerked from Belinski (who had a
weakness for the conquests of technology) the surprising and most charming
comparison of Pechorin to a steam engine, shattering all who were careless
enough to get under its wheels. In his poetry the middle-class intellectuals
felt something of the sociolyrical strain that later came to be called
“Nadsonism.” In this sense Lermontov was the first Nadson of Russian
literature. The rhythm, the tone, the pale, tear-diluted idiom of “civic”
verse up to and including “as victims you fell in the fateful contest”
(the famous revolutionary song of the first years of our century), all of
this goes back to such Lermontov lines as:
Farewell, our dear comrade! Alas, upon earth
Not long did you dwell, blue-eyed singer!
A plain cross of wood you have earned, and with us
Your memory always shall linger….
Lermontov’s real magic, the melting vistas in his poetry, its paradisial
picturesqueness and the transparent tang of the celestial in his moist
verse―these, of course, were completely inaccessible to the understanding
of men of Chernyshevski’s stamp. (Chapter Four)
In his poem Net, ya ne Bayron, ya drugoy… (“No, I’m not Byron, I’m
another…” 1832) Lermontov mentions nadezhd razbitykh gruz (a load of
broken hopes) that lies in his soul, as in the ocean:
Нет, я не Байрон, я другой,
Ещё неведомый избранник,
Как он, гонимый миром странник,
Но только с русскою душой.
Я раньше начал, кончу ране,
Мой ум немного совершит;
В душе моей, как в океане,
Надежд разбитых груз лежит.
Кто может, океан угрюмый,
Твои изведать тайны? Кто
Толпе мои расскажет думы?
Я - или бог - или никто!
Lermontov’s poem ends in the lines:
Who will tell the crowd my thoughts?
Myself - or God - or nobody.
Bog + nikto + ladon’ + Nabokov = Botkin + ogon’ + bok + Aldanov
Bog - God
nikto - nobody
ladon’ - palm (of a hand)
ogon’ - fire
bok \xa8C side
Aldanov - Mark Aldanov (1886-1957), a writer; the main character in
Aldanov’s novel Mogila voina (“A Soldier’s Grave,” 1938) is Byron;
Aldanov’s novel has the epigraph from Byron’s poem On This Day I Complete
My Thirty-Sixth Year (1824):
Seek out -- less often sought than found
A soldier's grave, for thee the best,
Then look around and choose thy ground,
And take thy rest.
In the first stanza of his last poem Byron says that he cannot be beloved:
'Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it has ceased to move:
Yet though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love!
Kinbote imagines that he is Charles the Beloved, the last king of Zembla.
Zembla is mentioned by Pope in Essay on Man. Ombre is almost hombre (‘man’
in Spanish).
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,dana.dragunoiu@gmail.com,shvabrin@humnet.ucla.edu
Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
AdaOnline: "http://www.ada.auckland.ac.nz/
The Nabokov Society of Japan's Annotations to Ada: http://vnjapan.org/main/ada/index.html
The VN Bibliography Blog: http://vnbiblio.com/
Search the archive with L-Soft: https://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?A0=NABOKV-L
Manage subscription options :http://listserv.ucsb.edu/lsv-cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=NABOKV-L