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Re: children's rhymes
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Alexey: I'm not refuting Jansy's arguments, I merely wish to change the perspective[...]Here are Mandelstam's rhymes on her [Maria], from his "Anthology of the Wordly Stupidity:"This is Madam Maria./Coal is almost what peat is./But not every Maria/Has the surname Benkendorf[...] Maria Budberg (whose pet name was Mura, and who is accused of bringing ailing Gorky poisonous sweets[...] Veen (the family name of most of Ada's characters) means "peat bog" in Dutch. Russian for "peat" is torf (the rhyme-word of the name Benkendorf; cf. Torfyanka, a village near Ardis Hall and the adjective torfyanuyu, "peaty," composed by Ada in a Flavita game: 1.36). TORF = FTOR = FORT = ORT + F = ROT + F = TROFEY - EY[...] One of the songs that Van, Ada and Lucette listen to in Ursus: "There's a crag on the Ross; overgrown with wild moss"; fort is also German for "away;" Ort is German for "place;" rot is Russian for "mouth" and German for "red;" trofey is Russian for "trophy;" ey is a form of the Russian pronoun ona, "she," in the dative, "to her"); there are other possibilities.
J. Aisenberg: I am in fact one of those poor Americans to whom you referred who has only the one language, though I have read up on many thoughts about the texture of the book, and dabbled in Russian literary history. That's why I'm sort of trying to grasp the method of Mr. Sklyarenko's thinking. It reminds me a little of Brian Boyd's Pale Fire book.
JM: Alexey, your report is a fascinating one, with one information leading onto another while offering various strands of stories to follow and relate to VN in a unique way.
I wonder, though, if like J.Aisenberg, I would compare your "method" to the one I find in Briand Boyd's annotations. You seem to thoroughly and competently explore every polisemic lead that Nabokov's wide vocabulary is able to stimulate.
Besides, you not only rely on the dictionarized words themselves to derive associations from their etymological richness, but you follow parallel clues extracted from anagrams, puns and hidden allusions, a risky business.
And yet, you recognized the lurking dangers when you added: "there are other possibilities" since, quite often, your extended clues veer off Nabokov's writerly conscious control.
Nevertheless you may be onto something - should one of your possible working-assumptions proceeds as in the following sample:
Should VN have departed from "peat" or "bog" to determine the surname "Veen", while keeping in mind "torf", he might have dispersed, at various points in his novels, these distinct allusions ( as those presented thru the Flavita game, or a Brueghel painting, or flower-cum-butterfly favorite perch) before he continued to explore new surnames and unplanned poetic references to carry on using the now recognizable bits that have been engendered by these signifiers. In this way he could extend his plots rather consistently and embrace a wealth of images, songs, analogies, rhymes.
The only hitch ( quite a big one) arises from one of the possible conclusions: that parts of any paragraph or chapter in "Ada" or "Pale Fire" would have been built following the leads offered by words and polisemia and not the other way round. Agatha Christie might have found inspiration for a plot following a children's rhyme ( "One Two Buckle My Shoe", "Three Blind Mice", "A Pocketful of Rye", etc) but I don't think VN would have used a similar procedure, unless...?
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J. Aisenberg: I am in fact one of those poor Americans to whom you referred who has only the one language, though I have read up on many thoughts about the texture of the book, and dabbled in Russian literary history. That's why I'm sort of trying to grasp the method of Mr. Sklyarenko's thinking. It reminds me a little of Brian Boyd's Pale Fire book.
JM: Alexey, your report is a fascinating one, with one information leading onto another while offering various strands of stories to follow and relate to VN in a unique way.
I wonder, though, if like J.Aisenberg, I would compare your "method" to the one I find in Briand Boyd's annotations. You seem to thoroughly and competently explore every polisemic lead that Nabokov's wide vocabulary is able to stimulate.
Besides, you not only rely on the dictionarized words themselves to derive associations from their etymological richness, but you follow parallel clues extracted from anagrams, puns and hidden allusions, a risky business.
And yet, you recognized the lurking dangers when you added: "there are other possibilities" since, quite often, your extended clues veer off Nabokov's writerly conscious control.
Nevertheless you may be onto something - should one of your possible working-assumptions proceeds as in the following sample:
Should VN have departed from "peat" or "bog" to determine the surname "Veen", while keeping in mind "torf", he might have dispersed, at various points in his novels, these distinct allusions ( as those presented thru the Flavita game, or a Brueghel painting, or flower-cum-butterfly favorite perch) before he continued to explore new surnames and unplanned poetic references to carry on using the now recognizable bits that have been engendered by these signifiers. In this way he could extend his plots rather consistently and embrace a wealth of images, songs, analogies, rhymes.
The only hitch ( quite a big one) arises from one of the possible conclusions: that parts of any paragraph or chapter in "Ada" or "Pale Fire" would have been built following the leads offered by words and polisemia and not the other way round. Agatha Christie might have found inspiration for a plot following a children's rhyme ( "One Two Buckle My Shoe", "Three Blind Mice", "A Pocketful of Rye", etc) but I don't think VN would have used a similar procedure, unless...?
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/