Dear List,
It's unnecessary to enter into famous descriptions
of duels (Véra's father's, VN's father's, Sebastian's
father's...Pushkin's own) unless there were anything new to add. And
yet, when in V&V Nabokov described Lermontov, in his introduction ("The
Lermontov Mirage"), I couldn't avoid remembering Turgêniev's 1846
short-story, written five years after Lermontov's death in a duel, describing
a provocative character, Lútchkov.
My recollection must have led me astray. I
checked my collection of stories on duels ( foreword
by Claudio Figueiredo), and found no reference to Turgêniev's
possible recreation of Lermontov in it (represented as Lútchkov and as his
rival Kister as well!).
When he introduced another poet, Koltsov, VN compared
him to Housman (p.266) - & not any minute wink to Whitman's
"prostor" mood - but he returns to Housman in a more specific
vein when quotes Lermontov's own "magic
brush", which presented the "pigments of definite
landscapes", "both irrational and founded on concrete
sensual experience". The European romantic longing for distant lands is
placed in relation to "an unofficial English
rose" (mentioned also in TRLSK by an elaborate reversion of
perspective) and "... 'the spires and farms' seen from
a hilltop in Shrophshire..." .
Alexey Sklyarenko has already published the links bt.
Lermontov's and Ada's "triple dream." [ Cf. VN-Archives (AS to
C.Nicol,Aug.18,2008) "You must be thinking of Lermontov's poem "The Dream"
("In a noon's heat, in a dale of Dagestan..." 1841). It was translated by VN and
included in "Three Russian Poets" (1945) and later in the Foreword to VN's
translation (1958), in collaboration with DN, of Lermontov's "A Hero of Our
Time" (1841), where it is analysed as a "triple dream" (a dream within a dream
within a dream). Let me add that in my article "Ada as a Triple Dream" (The
Nabokovian # 53) I cite this poem and argue that Nabokov's novel is also a
triple dream. In another article, "Fathers and Children in Ada" (The Nabokovian
# 54), I argue that Ada was in part inspired by Pushkin's famous poem "Na
kholmakh Gruzii lezhit nochnaya mgla..." ("The night murk lies on the hills of
Georgia; / The Aragva thunders before me..." 1829).
Wrote Nabokov on M.L:"You must
imagine him as a sturdy, shortish, rather shabby-looking Russian army
officer with [...] velvety eyes that "seemed to absorb light instead of
emitting it," [...] took pleasure in offending people, but there can hardly be
any doubt that the bully in him was the shell and not the core[...] Finally, a
quarrel with a fellow-officer, whom he had most methodically annoyed, but a stop
to his not very happy life [...]somehow managed...to produce verse and prose of
such virility, beauty, and tenderness that the following generation placed him
higher than Pushkin [...]
"...what Darwin called 'struggle for
existence' is really a struggle for perfection, and in that respect Nature's
main and most admirable device is optical illusion" (p.274)... From Darwin to mirages in art and emotional
paradoxes.
QUERY: Nabokov placed inside quotes... velvety eyes that "seemed to absorb light instead of emitting it".
Who is he quoting, is it L's
"Demon"?