-------- Original Message --------
Speaking of "comic" and "cosmic": has anyone else noted in that same
paragraph (I think; going from memory) of Nabokov's "Gogol," (New
Directions edition that prominently features NG's prominent nose) that
the "sunset midges" are actually rendered as "sunset midgets"?
I don't want to believe that this is a typo, because I am utterly
charmed by the idea of a golden twilight dwarf. The image conjures an
almost Lorelei-like figure, palisade-side, standing in tiny silhouette
against the setting sun.
EDNote:
Robert Grossmith
discusses this phrase and its echo in Bend Sinister in
“Shaking the Kaleidoscope: Physics and Metaphysics in Nabokov's Bend Sinister,” Russian Literature
TriQuarterly 24 (1991): 151-162.
I reproduce his
footnote five, which is a rich resource for this topic:
-------- Original Message --------
Speaking of "comic" and "cosmic": has anyone else noted in that same
paragraph (I think; going from memory) of Nabokov's "Gogol," (New
Directions edition that prominently features NG's prominent nose) that
the "sunset midges" are actually rendered as "sunset midgets"?
I don't want to believe that this is a typo, because I am utterly
charmed by the idea of a golden twilight dwarf. The image conjures an
almost Lorelei-like figure, palisade-side, standing in tiny silhouette
against the setting sun.
[EDNote:
Robert Grossmith
discusses an echo of this same phrase in Bend Sinister in
“Shaking the Kaleidoscope: Physics and Metaphysics in Nabokov's Bend Sinister,” Russian Literature
TriQuarterly 24 (1991): 151-162.
I reproduce his
footnote five, which is a rich resource:
"5. The sense and context here
clearly suggest
"midges" rather than "midgets," and
one would be inclined to
regard the latter as an unintentionally comic misprint were
it not for the fact that the
"error" is retained in later editions and occurs on at least
two other occasions elsewhere
in Nabokov. In Nikolay Gogol (London:
Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1973), p. 81, there
is a reference to "sunset midgets," and in The Real Life
of Sebastian Knight (New
York: New Directions, 1977), p. 138, to "midgets ... per
forming a primitive native
dance in a sunbeam" (in the 1982 Penguin edition this is
altered to
"midges"). One suspects some minor Nabokovian wordplay, punning on
the midges' small size, a
possibility borne out—at least in relation to the Nikolay
Gogol "midgets"—by
the fact that the latter work deliberately exploits the comic po
tential of misspelling.
Robert Bowie, "A Note on Nabokov's Gogol," The Nabokovian,
16 (Spring 1986), pp. 25-30,
remarks on this and also quotes Nabokov's comment, in
a letter to Edmund Wilson written
at the time of the book's original publication, that
"Its brilliancy is due
to a dewy multitude of charming little solecisms" (The Nabokov-
Wilson Letters, ed. Simon
Karlinsky [New York: Harper Colophon Books,
1980], p.
139). Incidentally, the Gogol
"midgets" appear shortly after Nabokov has discussed a
simile in Dead Souls
involving buzzing flies, which he glosses as "A parody of the
'swarming flies' in the
Iliad, II, 469-72" (Nikolay Gogol, p. 78n.)."
I can confirm that Webster's Second gives as definition 3 of midget
"the biting midge, punkie". ~SB]