Matthew Evans: Speaking of "comic" and "cosmic"[...] "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.
SB: Webster's
Second gives as definition 3 of midget "the biting midge, punkie"...Robert
Grossmith: “Shaking the Kaleidoscope: Physics and Metaphysics in Nabokov's Bend
Sinister,” Russian Literature TriQuarterly 24 (1991): 151-162, mentions:"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
potential of misspelling."
JM: Even with the Webster's
Second definition approaching midget to midge, I think that the wonder remains:
both in the suggested image that charmed M.Evans and its biting correlate.
I couldn't understand why Evans linked the
dwarf to a Lorelei-like figure: a poem by H. Heine, Die
Lorelei, describes a youth that is plagued by nostalgia about a
vaguely remembered old-tale describing a mermaid combing her golden
hair with a golden comb. And yet, I remembered an indirect reference,
through Cahrles II and Fleur, to the Lorelei, in PF [ " the wistful mermaid from an
old tale] and, lo and behold, we find "sunbeam dust"
two paragraphs before her emergence [He
would sweep her out of his chair, his eyes still on his writing pad, and
stretching herself she would move over to the window seat and its dusty
sunbeam]
Heine had a peculiar position, among the Romantics
(from his exile in Paris, he wrote a critical book to introduce the French
to German Romanticism and their pantheistic, non-classical lust for
elves and fairies...).
Perhaps VN was, distantly, referring to Heine through
the midgets? You remember that in Ada the mosquitoes are, and
similarly "entomologically", linked to
Chateaubriand...). Kinbote's "Lorelei"
appears "in the vestibule of sleep" when nymphets are substituted by heaps
of putti cherubs...