JM: So Ada
stopped to bite her fingernails after she met Van? He seemed to feel great
tenderness for her harmed cushiony fingertips at that first period in
Ardis.
Dear
Jansy,
I speak
of Ada's fingernails in my article "'Traditions of a Russian family' in
Nabokov's Ada" (The Nabokovian, #52, Spring 2004, pp. 13-26). Btw., the
origins of the interesting word podnogotnaya ("the whole subunguality,
the secret under the nail") are explained in Aldanov's novel "Le Pont
de Diable".
JM: The mosquitoes were
associated to Chateaubriand, Goethe and the fictional Robert Brown. Now you see
a link to Gorky, an author Nabokov didn’t seem to appreciate much. Were his
references, then, satirical or neutral?
True,
VN loathed Gorky. But note that Bosch, whose Garden of The Earthly
Delights is so important in Ada, plays also a major role in
Gorky's novel "The Life of Klim Samgin" (see my article "The Fair Invention in
Nabokov's Ada and Gorky's The Life of Klim Samgin" in The
Nabokovian #58, Spring 2007). Gorky's hero is a namesake of Baron Klim Avidov
(anagram of "Vladimir Nabokov"; note that Baron is a character in Gorky's play
"At the Bottom"), Marina's former lover who gave her children the set
of Flavita (1.36). In Gorky's novel, one of the few women whom Samgin fails
to seduce is Marina Zotov. She is a namesake, one the one hand, of Van's
and Ada's mother, and, on the other, of one of the three cosmologists
(Xertigny, Yates and Zotov) who discovered Terra, Demonia's twin
planet (2.2). There is in The Life of Klim Samgin a cruel pun on
nasekomoe (Russian for "insect"). Finally, Gorky is the author of the
Foreword to the first Russian translation of Châteaubriand's
Rènè.
Alexey
Sklyarenko