Mr. Babikov's rendering of Wikipedia articles on Amilcar cars is amusing and informative but he overlooks the most important thing that made me mention the Amilcar French company without going into details. VN's novel ends circa 1970, that is more than 30 years after the last Amilcar car had been produced and sold. Do we have any reason to believe that the Swiss lady with a dog would drive around in an antique car? I doubt it. In my view, Nabokov either recycled the name he remembered from 1920s and1930s or reinvented it for his own purpose.
Alexander Dolinin
Sent from my iPad
On Oct 17, 2014, at 21:33, Stephen Blackwell <sblackwe@UTK.EDU> wrote:
Andrei Babikov, translator of Lolita: A Screenplay and
Look at the Harlequins! into Russian, among many
other accomplishments, posted the following discovery in Russian
on his Facebook page on Sept. 23. He kindly allowed me to post
this translation to Nabokv-L. --SB
I
noticed a subtle detail in the last chapter of Transparent things (which the Nabokovs called Сквознякизпрошлогоin Russian [“A draft
from the past”], from a line of Nabokov’s poetry, as G.
Barabtarlo has pointed
out more than once).The
omniscient
incorporeal narrator mentions an automobile, hurriedly driving
away from the
hotel with a little dog in the back seat and a lady at the
wheel: “The little
spitz dog is asleep on the back seat of an Amilcar Driven by
the kennelman’s
wife back to Trux.”The
novel’s
translator, S. Ilyin, feels obliged to offer this
clarification: “Amilcar—also
Hamilcar.This was the
name of the
Carthaginian strategist, the father of Hannibal.”The question of why Nabokov needs to refer to the ancient
strategist in this
episode is left hanging.
Another
translation, by A. Dolinin and M. Meilakh, reissued this year
(“Просвечивающиепредметы”), also provides a commentary,
still more elaborate: “’Amilcar’ is the made-up name of an
automobile,
combining Fr. amical(friendly) and Eng.
‘car’; and also evoking
associations with Hamilcar (3rd century B.C.) – the
Cartheginian
commander and hero of Flaubert’s novel Salambo.A French automobile
company with that name
existed from 1921 to 1940” (p. 379).
Earlier,
Dolinin had rightly pointed to the Chekhovian motif of a “Lady
with a little
dog” in this episode, although the comment about the Amilcar
perplexes. Why,
yet again, this reference to the dead-end association with the
commander and Salambo?
“Amilcar” is at first
identified as a made-up name, and subsequently turns out to
refer to an auto
company with that name.So,
is Amilcar
invented or not?
As it
turns out, Amilcar is both the name of the French auto firm,
and the name of
the car models the firm put out.For
example, there was the Amilcar CC, the Amilcar C4, the Amilcar
E, etc. The name
was formed not by combining amical
and car, as Dolinin
suggests (though such
an explanation is not categorically excluded), but represents
a partial anagram
of the combined names of the two founders of the firm, Emile
Akar and Joseph
Lamy.
Finally,
why did Nabokov, in his novel about the unfortunate Hugh or
You Person, need a
reference to precisely this brand of car, which, moreover, had
been out of
production for so long?
The
Amilcar became tragically famous all over the world after the
long scarf of
Isadora Duncan, seated in the back seat, got caught up in the
axle of the
open-topped sports model of the Amilcar (the model was
identified by Peter Kurth,
and even the doomed car’s registration number has been
established—see Peter
Kurth. ISADORA: A
Sensational Life.
Little, Brown, 2001) and she was immediately strangled, and
her accidental
death was reported in hundreds of articles, raised up as a
symbol of fate’s
persecution of creative personalities, etc.
Just
like Nabokov’s character, Isadora was driving away from a
hotel in the Amilcar.
So now,
it seems, the reason for Nabokov’s recollection of the old and
sad famous
Amilcar becomes clear, and likewise the reason for the lady
with the little dog
at the wheel: in this short episode, Nabokov combines two
sources: a literary
one—the tansparent hint at Chekhov’s “Lady with a Little Dog,”
echoing the
theme of Transparent
Things’s
unfaithful heroine; and a historical one—the accidental death
by strangling of
Isadora Duncan, echoing the theme of the accidental death of
the heroine of TT,
strangled by her own husband.
And that
is the “trick” (“trux”—трюк-с) and the unexpected “draft
from
the past” (сквознякизпрошлого”).
Afternote:
And
of course Yuri Leving, in his
excellent book Train
Station—Garage—Hangar
(2004), is right that in this “Amilcar” VN liked
the cloaked mythological
Icarus (Икар, И-кар,
I-kar), but Leving too appears to consider the
automobile to be invented: “In
the English version of the story ‘Spring in Fialta,’
Nina perishes in a yellow ‘Icarus,’
while in the Russian version of Lolita,
Humbert’s dream-blue car acquires a name that it
lacked in the English original—and
of course, it is ‘Icarus.’ An anagram of this name
is hidden in the auto brand ‘Amilcar’
in Transparent
Things, in whose back
seat sleeps the spitz from “The Lady with a Little
Dog.”
Perhaps
VN invented his Icarus as a
dissection of the real Amilcar’s name.