On Demon Veen's death and references to
circumnavigation in "Ada":
When he described Demon
Veen´s interest in a Pacific island, Nabokov inserted a discrete reference to
the Russians who traveled around the world by the sea. Before that, Van's
memoirs privileged special travels and unfulfilled projects to explore Africa
and South America. There was also reference to Julius Verne's various
novels (Capt. Grant's, and also "Around the World in Eighty days"). Uncle Dan,
himself, circled the globe three times before he married
Marina.
I discovered that, in
1803-06, Captain I. F. Kruzenshtern and Commander Lisianski were the first
Russians to circumnavigate the globe. There's an “Atlas of Kruzenshtern's
Circumnavigation”, published by the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1813, in St.
Petersburg. Kruzenshtern and his deputy commander Lisianski Urey were
separated at the Hawaiian Islands and Lisianski continued his voyage to the
island that carries his name in the Hawaiian Chain. The indication made by
Nabokov for the Kruzenshtern and Lisianski travels, inserted in a paragraph
about Van´s father Demon Veen, mentions that Demon died after the
“gigantic flying machine had inexplicably disintegrated at fifteen thousand feet
above the Pacific between Lisiansky and Laysanov Islands in the Gavaille
region”(A, 504) Lisianski Urey discovered the island that carries
his name in the Hawaiian Chain. It is also in Gavaille (Hawaii) where we find
the Laysan island (paired to Lisianski island) and the Laysan albatross
(Diomedeidae) which breeds on islands in the mid-Pacific, especially those of
Hawaii. Lisiansky himself translated into Enlgish his book “A Voyage round the
World”, published in 1814. *
There is an interesting link between Van and Lucette hours before she threw
herself overboard of the “Tobakoff”:
connections: Marina “saw giant flying sharks with lateral eyes taking
barely one night to carry pilgrims through black ether across an entire
continent from dark to shining sea” (A,xx) Next, “The porcelain-white,
eye-spotted Cowl (or ‘Shark’) larva (…) had safely achieved its next
metamorphosis, but Ada’s unique Lorelei Underwing had died (A,xx ).
Fiunally ...‘But you swim faster,’ as Lucette complained(…): ‘Mezhdu prochim (by
the way), is it true that a sailor in Tobakoff’s day was not taught to swim so
he wouldn’t die a nervous wreck if the ship went down’...Van: ‘When michman
Tobakoff himself got shipwrecked off Gavaille, he swam around comfortably for
hours, frightening away sharks with snatches of old songs and that sort of
thing, until a fishing boat rescued him — one of those miracles that require a
minimum of cooperation from all concerned, I imagine’. Demon, she said, had told
her, last year at the funeral, that he was buying an island in the
Gavailles”.
Van's records link ships (vapors) and airplanes using the image of the
shark. In the same stroke he also referred to Hawaii (Demon´s Gavailles over
which his plane exploded and Tobakoff suffered a shipwreck) and to the songs by
sirens (a Sirin mermaid Lucette sending messages as Lorelei?). B.Boyd observed
that the words “a doubled ocean” could mean, among other things, “the Atlantic
and the Pacific, as marking the east and west boundaries of the Americas and the
west and east of Russia (18:01)”, a meaning suggested by the Lisianski island
reference in Ada.
btw: The information above was part of a text on "Mascodagama" in which I
tried to examine links with Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama (whose adventures
are narrated in the Epic "Os Lusíadas" by poet Camões, translated into English
by Sir Richard Burton). At the time I hadn't realized that another person, with
strong links with Brazil (and reported to have collected at least a thousand
different butterfly specimens) had joined Lisianski and Kruzenshtern's
expeditions. His name, in Russian, is Grigori Ivanovitch Langsdorff.
Considering Nabokov's references to the chief navigators and his interest in the
"blues" found in Brazil, or one of Marina's lovers trips to Rio de
Janeiro, I wonder why there was no reference, by Nabokov, do Baron von
Langsdorff (or perhaps I didn't spot it?) Unless the missing documents, or their
inability to preserve the butterfly specimens, were particularly
frustrating to Nabokov, for even Alexander Humboldt has been
considered in connection to Ada. I cannot remember the Baron
anywhere...**
......................................................................................................................
*Krusenstern, Adam J. Von. A Voyage Round the World in
the Years 1803-1806... on Board the Ships Nadeshda and Neva (St. Petersburgh,
1809-1812 3 volumes; German version 1810-1814 3 volumes; London, 1812 2 volumes;
French version 1821 2 volumes; Amsterdam, N. Israel, 1968).
Lisianksy, Urey.
A Voyage Round the World in the Years 1803-06... in the Ship Neva (St.
Petersburg, 1812; London, 1814; Amsterdam, N. Israel, 1968).
Langsdorff,
George H. Von. Bemerkungen auf einer Reise um die Welt in den Jahren 1803 bis
1807 (Frankfurt: Friedrich Wilmans, 1812).
Langsdorff, George H. Von. Voyages
and Travels in Various Parts of the World During the Years 1893-7 (London,
1813-1814 2 volumes; Amsterdam: N. Israel, 1968).
Kotzebue, Otto Von. A
Voyage of Discovery into the South Sea and Beering's Straits, for the Purpose of
Exploring a North East Passage... in the Ship Ruruck (Weimer, 1821; London,
1821; Amsterdam, N. Israel, 1968)
Choris, Louis. Voyage Pittoresque Autor du
Monde, avec des Portraits de Sauvages d'Amerique... des Paysages, des Vues
Maritimes (Paris, 1822-26)
books.google.com.br/books?isbn=0295986018...
-
:www.abcbookworld.com/view_author.php?.-
Robert B. Honeyman, Jr. Collection of
Early Californian and Western American Pictorial Material brought to you by
the Online Archive of California (OAC), an initiative of the California
Digital Library http://www.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf9p3012wq
- **From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Georg Heinrich von Langsdorff, Baron de Langsdorff (b.
Wöllstein, Germany, April 8, 1774; d. Freiburg, Germany, June 9, 1852) was a
Prussian aristocrat, politician and naturalist. He lived in Russia and was
better known by his Russian name, Grigori (Gregory) Ivanovitch. He was a
member and correspondent of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences and a
respectedphysician, graduated in medicine and natural history at the
University of Göttingen, Germany.Langsdorff first participated as naturalist
and physician in the great Russian scientific circumnavigation expedition
commanded byIvan Fedorovich Kruzenshtern, from 1803 to 1805. He left the
expedition in Kamchatka to explore the Aleutians, Kodiak and Sitka; and
returned from San Francisco by ship to Siberia and thence to Saint Petersburg
by land, arriving in 1808. In 1813 Langsdorff was nominated consul general of
Russia in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He acquired a farm (named "Mandioca",
ormanioc) in the north of Rio and collected plants, animals and minerals. He
hosted and entertained foreign naturalists and scientists, such as Johann
Baptist von Spix (1781-1826) and Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius
(1794-1868), and explored the flora, fauna and geography of the province of
Minas Gerais with French naturalist Augustin Saint-Hilaire from 1813 to
1820.
The Langsdorff Expedition, was "proposed to the
Tsar Alexander I and to the Academy of Sciences to lead an ambitious
exploratory and scientific expedition from São Paulo to Pará, in the Amazon,
via a fluvial route. In March 1822, he returned to Rio in the company of
scientists Édouard Ménétries (1802-1861), Ludwig Riedel(1761-1861), Christian
Hasse and Nester Gaverilovitch Rubtsov (1799-1874), who would take care of
zoological, botanical, astronomical and cartographical observations during the
expedition. With the aim of illustrating and documenting his findings, the
Baron hired painters Hércules Florence, Johann Moritz Rugendas and Adrien
Taunay. The inventor of the bicycle Karl von Drais was also a participant in
the expedition...Most of the members of the expedition became ill with
tropical fevers (most probably yellow fever), including the Baron de
Langsdorff. As a consequence of the febrile attacks, he became insane at the
Juruena River on May 1828. The expedition was joined again in Belém and
returned by ship to Rio de Janeiro, arriving on March 13, 1829, almost three
years and 6,000 km after its departure... Huge scientific collections were
deposited into Kunstkamera and later formed basis for South American
collections of Russian museums. However, the rich scientific records of the
expedition, comprising many descriptions and discoveries in zoology, botany,
mineralogy, medicine, linguistics and ethnography, that were sent to Saint
Petersburg by the expedition, were not published and were lost in the archives
for a century. They were found again by Soviet researchers in funds of the
USSR Academy of Sciences archive in 1930.[2] Due to the travel's hardships,
Langsdorff team was unable to collect many biological specimens or study them
in detail, so most of their account is geographic and ethnographic, being
particularly interesting on the many indigenous people of Brazil they met,
many of which became extinct. Today, a large part of the material has been
recovered and is in the Ethographic Museum, the Zoological Museum and in the
repositories of the Academy of Sciences of St.
Petersburg.