92.31-33: “I guess it’s your father under that oak, isn’t it? “No, it’s an elm”: “isn’t it?” corrected from 1969, “isn’t?”
Ada’s evasion of Greg’s helpless advances echoes Act I of Chekhov’s The Seagull (Chayka, 1896), where Treplyov manages to kiss Nina, only for her to change the subject immediately: “What kind of tree is that?” “It’s an elm.” (“Eto kakoe derevo?” “Vyaz.”) Greg is not the only one to mistake the tree: earlier, Ada, in a much more interested mood, notes for Van: “We can squirm from here into the front hall by a secret passage, but I think we are supposed to go and look at the grand chêne which is really an elm” (53-54).
Nabokov, who had once lived with his family at 6 Elm Park Gardens in London, installs Sebastian Knight at the London address of 36 Oak Park Gardens and plays with the common confusion (“a couple of elms, not oaks, in spite of the street-name’s promise,” RLSK 37). He would later recall: “Among fifty college students whom I once happened to ask (in planned illustration of the incredible ignorance concerning natural objects that characterizes young Americans of today) the name of a tree, an American elm, that they could see through the classroom window, none was able to identify it: some hesitantly suggested it might be an oak, others were silent” (EO 3.9).
[ ]The “oak”-“elm” confusion, so soon after Ada’s mistranslation of Shakespeare into French, recalls her mistranslation of Marvell into French, where “the palm, the oak or bays” of Marvell’s “The Garden” become lost in Ada’s version (65.06-13). MOTIF: Ada’s taxonomy; under tree; wrong tree.
And I cannot wait to read all the notes on the item wrong tree: 50.06; 53.34-54.01; 92.31-33; 522.15-16;
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* 398.28-29: “and the big chain around the trunk of the rare oak, Quercus ruslan Chat.”