Subject
balsam - Balsamo - Cagliostro
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Date
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J. M.: Thank you, Alexey, for your patience.
What patience, Jansy? Or do you mean that by forming new words from the same letters I'm indulging in a kind of card patience (solitaire)?
But to return to the flowers on a window-sill in Varen'ka Dobrosyolova's room (Dostoevsky, "Poor Folks"). One of them, a balsam, also reminds me of Joseph Balsamo, aka "Count of Cagliostro" (who is mentioned by VN in Speak, Memory, as the man who foresaw a Versailles ditch full of human heads). What is interesting about Cagliostro (1743-1795?*), he was born in Palermo (in the heart of "Palermontovia," so to say) and his second wife was Josephine Tascher de la Pagerie, de Beauharnais in the second marriage, and, in the third, Madame Bonaparte (see A. Dumas pere's "Joseph Balsamo: Memoires d'un medecin," 1846-48, its sequel "Le collier de la reine," 1849-50, and M. Leblanc's "La comtesse de Cagliostro," 1924). Cf. Queen [sic!] Josephine, mentioned as one of the famous beauties by Marina (1.5) and Kim Beauharnais, a kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis. In my article "'Grattez le Tartar...' or Who were the parents of Ada's Kim Beauharnais" (The Nabokovian, # 59, 60), I argue that Kim is the son of Arkadiy Dolgorukiy, the hero of Dostoevsky's novel "The Adolescent" (1875), and Alfonsinka ("a local Josephine," as Arkadiy calls St. Petersburgian prostitutes), a character in the same novel.
* Some think that Cagliostro didn't die in his cell at the Castle of Saint-Leon in Urbin in 1795 where he was imprisoned in 1789, but managed to emigrate to America where he adopted a new name. According to their speculations, Arthur Gordon Pym, the hero of E. A. Poe's "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" (1837) can be Joseph Balsamo's son or even Cagliostro himself.
Alexey Sklyarenko
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What patience, Jansy? Or do you mean that by forming new words from the same letters I'm indulging in a kind of card patience (solitaire)?
But to return to the flowers on a window-sill in Varen'ka Dobrosyolova's room (Dostoevsky, "Poor Folks"). One of them, a balsam, also reminds me of Joseph Balsamo, aka "Count of Cagliostro" (who is mentioned by VN in Speak, Memory, as the man who foresaw a Versailles ditch full of human heads). What is interesting about Cagliostro (1743-1795?*), he was born in Palermo (in the heart of "Palermontovia," so to say) and his second wife was Josephine Tascher de la Pagerie, de Beauharnais in the second marriage, and, in the third, Madame Bonaparte (see A. Dumas pere's "Joseph Balsamo: Memoires d'un medecin," 1846-48, its sequel "Le collier de la reine," 1849-50, and M. Leblanc's "La comtesse de Cagliostro," 1924). Cf. Queen [sic!] Josephine, mentioned as one of the famous beauties by Marina (1.5) and Kim Beauharnais, a kitchen boy and photographer at Ardis. In my article "'Grattez le Tartar...' or Who were the parents of Ada's Kim Beauharnais" (The Nabokovian, # 59, 60), I argue that Kim is the son of Arkadiy Dolgorukiy, the hero of Dostoevsky's novel "The Adolescent" (1875), and Alfonsinka ("a local Josephine," as Arkadiy calls St. Petersburgian prostitutes), a character in the same novel.
* Some think that Cagliostro didn't die in his cell at the Castle of Saint-Leon in Urbin in 1795 where he was imprisoned in 1789, but managed to emigrate to America where he adopted a new name. According to their speculations, Arthur Gordon Pym, the hero of E. A. Poe's "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" (1837) can be Joseph Balsamo's son or even Cagliostro himself.
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/