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...?