A. Sklyarenko
sends: "A moment later, however, Van remarked: 'I think I'll
take an Alibi - I mean an Albany - myself.' 'Please
note, everybody,' said Ada, 'how voulu that slip was! I like a smoke
when I go mushrooming, but when I'm back, this horrid tease insists I smell of
some romantic Turk or Albanian met in the woods.' (Ada, 1.38)
Chekhov (who loved to go mushrooming) is the aurhor of two
monologues entitled O vrede tobaka (On the Harm of Tobacco, 1886,
1903).
Jansy Mello: A nice round
of faintly disguised allusions to Turkish cigarettes ( like Quilty's
"Camel/Dromes") and "Albany" cigarettes, that Ada seems to favour, instead
of the rich smell of mushrooms, in contrast to what Nabokov, in his
memoirs, lovingly remembered in connection to his excursions into the woods
with his mother, when he describes the pleasurable thrill in his nostrils (
I think he described this quiver as something typically Russian).
Anyway, he quit smoking while
he was still living in America. He wrote, to Vera: "Heavenly paradise, probably, is rather boring, and there's so much
fluffy Seraphic eiderdown there that smoking is banned," "... mind you, sometimes the angels smoke, hiding
it with their sleeves, and when the archangel comes, they throw the cigarettes
away: that's when you get shooting stars."*
.........................................................................................:
* Vladimir Nabokov's unpublished love letters are released, article by
Shaun Walker, Moscow, 28 November 2010 (Cf. Vladimir Nabokov's unpublished love
letters are released - News ...
www.independent.co.uk › ... › Books › News
)
"Over half a century's worth of love letters from the novelist Vladimir
Nabokov to his wife, Vera, reveal a new side to one of the 20th century's
best-loved authors. More than 300 letters have been collected by the Nabokovs'
son, Dmitry, and are to be published in English next year. A selection of the
letters appeared last week, in their original Russian, in the Russian magazine
Snob.The letters span the romance between Nabokov and Vera Slonim, later Vera
Nabokov, from their meeting in Berlin in 1923, up until just before the author's
death in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.'The letters are very recognisably
written in Nabokov's style,' says Sergey Nikolayevich, deputy editor-in-chief of
Snob magazine.'They can't be compared to anything else in the culture of
letters; they are part of the heritage of a great poet and
writer'."