As is stressed in the beginning of
Gorky's "The Life of Klim Samgin," Klim is a rare name. Indeed,
apart from Samgin and ADA's Baron Klim Avidov, I was able to remember
only two Klims, one real and one fictional. The real one is Klim
(short of Kliment) Voroshilov (1881-1969), Soviet general (who appears as a
character in Babel's Konarmiya, 1926), president of the Soviet
Union in 1953-60. The fictional one is Klim Chugunkin, a character in Bulgakov's
story Sobach'ye serdtse ("Heart of a Dog," 1925, first published
in 1987*), a drunkard killed in a tavern row, whose hypophysis was
surgically transplanted into the body of the dog Sharik, which turned him into a
man (who then accepts the family name Sharikov). Unlike the rare human name
Klim, Sharik is a very common name of a male dog. It means "little
round object" and comes from shar (sphere; globe**). SHAR + ADA =
SHARADA (charade).
Interestingly, Bulgakov is the author of Batum (1940, first
published by Ardis in 1977), the play whose hero is... young Stalin. I
suspect that Nabokov has heard of this play and knew its
title, even if he didn't read it. BATUM (a city in Georgia, on the Black Sea
coast, twice visited by Chekhov and once by father Fyodor in Ilf and Petrov's
"The Twelve Chairs") = TUMBA (curbstone; Morris pillar) = TABU (taboo) + M
= MUTABOR – OR. Mutabor (from
muto,*** Latin for "I change") is the magic word that helps
the hero of Hauf's fairy tale "The Caliph Stork"(1826) to turn into any
creature he wishes and become man again. (After he broke the
taboo and laughed, the caliph, metamorphosed to a stork, forgets this word and
can not become man again.)
Many of ADA's characters look (to me, at least) like birds or beasts in
human disguise, while several animals in the novel, like the dackel
Dack, have something human about them. But then we often see metamorphoses of
this kind in life, as well as in art. One especially remembers the bestiary
in Voloshin's poem Russia (1924): "Wolf Menshikov, carrion-crow
Yaguzhinsky, / Fox Tolstoy, marten Osterman" with
their fangs tearing apart the legacy of the deceased Peter
I. Voloshin's lines are echoed by Georgiy Ivanov in his "Stanzas" (II: "And
here lies on the magnificent pedestal..." 1953) written on the death of
Stalin: "Here is Molotov. Here is Beria, who resembles / a werewolf
expecting a picket."
Note that there is Ovid (the
author of "Metamorphoses") in Avidov.***** OVID = VOID = DIVO (wonder) = GVIDON + U –
GNU (Prince Gvidon is the hero of Pushkin's "The Tale of Tsar Saltan;"
gnu is an African antelope; cf. Antelope Gnu, the name given by Ostap
Bender to Adam Kozlevich's car).
*The author has read his bold satire
on the Soviet régime before a large audience of
fellow writers, some of whom, like Zamyatin, might have emigrated
afterwards, so it is not unlikely that Nabokov knew the plot
of Bulgakov's story and the names of some of its
characters.
** In the Russian North the word
shar also means "strait" (cf. the strait Matochkin Shar that
separates the two islands of the Novaya Zemlya Archipelago).
***muto is also Latin for
"penis."
****Actually, BARON KLIM AVIDOV
= BARAN (ram) + KLIMOV (Grigory Klimov, the penname of Igor' Kalmykov,
1918-2007, an émigré writer, author of "The Machine of Terror,"
1951, and seven more books written after 1969) + OVID.
Alexey Sklyarenko