Alexey Sklyarenko:At the family dinner in Ardis the Second (Ada: 1.38) Van tells
Demon:'You still beat me at fencing, but
I'm the better shot. That's not the real sudak, papa, though it's tops,
I assure you.' ...In Chapter Six of Pushkin's novel Onegin kills Lenski (in
Speak, Memory VN calls his Russian tutor 'Lenski') in a pistol
duel./ Although he is a good shot, Van is wounded in his pistol duel
with Captain Tapper (1.42). He recovers in the Kalugano Lakeview hospital
where he makes advances to the Russian nurse Tatiana (who spurns Van's advances
but later writes him a passionate love letter).Even before Van's birth Demon Veen had a sword duel
with Baron d'Onsky (nicknamed 'Skonky:' 1.2) In 1871, when Marina (Van's mother, but, officially, his
"aunt") was pregnant with Ada, she spent a rukuliruyushchiy month with
Demon at Kitezh (1.3). A great fisherman in his youth, Demon owned Lake Kitezh**
(the estate comprising, and practically consisting of, that large, oddly
rectangular though quite natural body of water near Luga) jointly with
his cousin Daniel Veen (who married Marina in December, 1871). A
perch uncle Dan had once clocked took half an hour to cross the Lake
Kitezh diagonally (1.1).[ ***on April 23,
1869, Demon married Marina's twin sister Aqua in Kaluga
]
JM: Great assembly of links, Alexey. The most
surprising for me were Van's nurse Tatiana (she spurns him and later writes him
a love letter as it happens in EO) and SM's tutor's designated
by Lenski.
I wonder if any scholar has ever isolated the dates
related to his characters that VN makes coincide with his birthday.
There must be a pattern waiting to emerge from them.*
btw: I noticed something of "mimetic interest' in relation to the
find-the-cat quizz I sent in my previous post. I found it hard to spot
the cat but,after I managed to find and miss it four or five times, something
was learned about its setting and colors for, as soon as I look
at the photo, my eyes automatically target the cat. Should I qualify
as a predator in this case, there seems to be a lesson to be learned from
that.
.........................................................................................................................................................................
* - Here's a special Sunday
bonus...Statistically Speaking ( A
Dictionary of Quotations, C C Gaither & A E Cavazos-Gaither, Institute of
Physics Publishing, 1996.)
Number of quotes citing: Bob Dylan = 1;
Trollope = 2; Virgil = 2 ;
Tolstoy = 3; Thurber = 4; Voltaire = 6; Albert Einstein = 8; Stan
Kelly-Bootle = 9