It is very hard to ignore the endless
centrifugal associations Nabokov evokes in us. The writer Sebastian
Knight (quoted by V.) once observed how difficult it was to follow a
single line of ideas while he was writing a novel. Nabokov (who probably
suffered from the same symptoms as SK's) solved his problem rather
neatly. By suppressing part of the content related to his
allusions, he let bits of "plums" stick
out from his texts, so that allusions, with their various
over-determined nodes, will now fall to the lot of Nabokovian
commentators, those who try to collect these various "plums."
For example. In the paragraph in which he deals with the "details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated)" we learn that they "had the singular effect of both causing
and cursing the notion of ‘Terra’ ...too well-known historically, and too
obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen
and lemans — and not to grave men or gravemen." In this
context, 'laymen and lemans" and "grave men or
gravemen," may stimulate us to reconsider his choice of the letter "L"
("Lettrocalamity"*). Is it possible to relate it to a similarly-sounding word,
associated to death, found in RLSK, namely
"Lehman"? Would "leman-lover" and its romantic and sexual innuendoes
present themselves in relation to Sebastian's unhappy love-affairs
and "heart-failure"? "She died of heart-failure
(Lehmann's disease)" [... ] "I suppose Sebastian
already knew from what exact heart-disease he was suffering. His mother had died
of the same complaint, a rather rare variety of angina pectoris, called by some
doctors 'Lehmann's disease'."
Apparently not.
Priscilla Meyer ("Nabokov and the Spirits: Dolorous Haze--Hazel
Shade" Nabokov’s World. Ed. Jane Grayson, Priscilla Meyer and Arnold
McMillin. London: Macmillan, 2001. 88-103. ) writes:
" Nabokov’s interest in spiritual phenomena is already clear in The
Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1938).11 The heart problem that carries off
Sebastian,‘Lehmann’s disease,’ is named for Alfred Georg Lehmann (1858-1921), a
Dane who wrote about colored hearing, and who compiled a detailed history of the
occult, witchcraft and spiritualism, the German translation of which, Aberglaube
und Zauberei (Superstition and Witchcraft), published in 1908, contains material
about the materialisation and photographing of spirits, and cites, among many
others, A. R. Wallace, F. W. H. Myers and the SPR.12. Sebastian is the first in
a series of Nabokov’s artists who die of some unspecified affliction of the
heart, and each death, physical or metaphorical, is associated with a set of
three motifs: 1) the transition from 999 to 1000, 2) a lake or sea, and 3)
indications of the uncanny. When Sebastian’s diagnosis is made, he and Clare
sense a gnome, a brownie and eerieness in the German beechwood on the coast
by a ‘steely grey sea’ (88). The novel begins with Sebastian’s birth in 1899
together with the record of the day’s weather kept by Olga Olegovna Orlova
(OOO), and is written by V. in nearly invisible collaboration with the spirit
world."
However, "Lehm," in German, means clay, loam, i.e., humus and
mortality. Perhaps the hint is here unidirectional. Ada's "leman"
won't serve to reveal anything about RLSK's "Lehman," but the play
with "leman/gravemen" in it might have arisen, even unconsciously,
because of a lingering overall meaning of RLSK, a novel in
which the theme of a tragic love affair, renunciation, exile and
death prevail.
Stan Kelly-Bootle remarks that " 'word precision' is
very much subjective," referring to a different issue from the one I'm
raising now, when annotators try to establish what particular, or
exclusive, meanings are to be found in a Nabokovian sentence, that
is, which pertain to the annotator's subjectivity and
idiosynchratic distortions, which are Nabokov's own.
................................................................................................................................................
* Cf. 147.1:
"Lettrocalamity (Vanvitelli's old joke!)": There is
no Giorgio Vanvitelli...but there is a Luigi Vanvitelli (1700-1770), the son of
the Dutch painter Gaspard Van Wittel (1653-1736), but seems to be unrelated to
the Lettrocalamity imagined here.
Soundwise, we can see that the "L" in
"Lettrocalamity" suggests "Lucette" and "Vanvitelli" suggests "Van Veen".
Lettrocalamity, as Nabokov notes, means "electromagnet," which refers to the
casette tape recorder that Van and Ada would have used had it not been
forbidden. In Italian the word divides into "elettro" and "calamita" suggesting
"electric calamity," the "L disaster" mentioned in Chapter 3 (17:1).
Annotations to Ada (7), Kyoto circle:
vnjapan.org/main/ada/notes.22.24.pdf