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THOUGHTS: Hazel in Pale Fire and Solus Rex
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from Alexey Sklyarenko:
I've read very little criticism (perhaps, none at all) on Pale Fire; anyway, I'm certainly not the first one to notice this. Hazel, the name of a character in PF, was the name of a beverage (хэйзель, sounds very exotic and almost magical to a Russian ear) in PF's Russian predecessor, Solus Rex (1942):
"Exhausted by lengthy tension, harrowed by having been forced to wallow in another's filth, and involuntarily staggered by the prosecutor's blast, the luckless scholar [Dr. Onze] lost his nerve and, after a few incoherent mumblings, suddenly started, in a new, hysterically clear voice, to tell how one night in his youth, having drunk his first glass of hazel brandy, he accepted to go with a classmate to a brothel, and how he didn't get there only because he fainted in the street".
This of course reminds one of Chekhov's story "Припадок" (The Fit, 1888) written to honor the memory of Vsevolod Garshin, the writer who comitted a suicide by falling from a staircase landing (I have mentioned this tragic incident in connection with ADA).
The queer name Onze sounds to a Russian ear rather like the phrase он же ("alias") pronounced with a Jewish accent.
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I've read very little criticism (perhaps, none at all) on Pale Fire; anyway, I'm certainly not the first one to notice this. Hazel, the name of a character in PF, was the name of a beverage (хэйзель, sounds very exotic and almost magical to a Russian ear) in PF's Russian predecessor, Solus Rex (1942):
"Exhausted by lengthy tension, harrowed by having been forced to wallow in another's filth, and involuntarily staggered by the prosecutor's blast, the luckless scholar [Dr. Onze] lost his nerve and, after a few incoherent mumblings, suddenly started, in a new, hysterically clear voice, to tell how one night in his youth, having drunk his first glass of hazel brandy, he accepted to go with a classmate to a brothel, and how he didn't get there only because he fainted in the street".
This of course reminds one of Chekhov's story "Припадок" (The Fit, 1888) written to honor the memory of Vsevolod Garshin, the writer who comitted a suicide by falling from a staircase landing (I have mentioned this tragic incident in connection with ADA).
The queer name Onze sounds to a Russian ear rather like the phrase он же ("alias") pronounced with a Jewish accent.
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/