Reading Brian’s annotations in print in “The Nabokovian” has been a source of detailed information and surprise since my early acquaintance with the magazine and the VN-L. These experiences are, for me, quite diferent from the equally instigating ones obtained by reading AdaOnline and, of course, some of the separate articles and the thematic book “Nabokov’s Ada, the Place of Consciousness” - but I cannot explain why, except by a sort of “lack of immediacy”.
This time, while I was going through BB’s Annotations (284.31;284.31-32 in particular) a word, quite accidentally, got stuck in my consciousness. As Brian observes: “Note the pun on flash-back (and lightning flash)” [ ] “ the word ‘flashback’ itself offers a clue to how the lightning will strike: it occurs four times in an earlier scene” (201.04-11). Therefore, I obediently checked VN’s uses of the word “flash” and noticed that he employs it in the sense of: a quick glance, a warning look, speed, a sudden illumination, sheet lightning, flash-bulbs and flash-back/flash-forward.
Because of relation of the flash-bulb to photography I selected a few references in ADA to this theme, moving from young Kim’s “flashes” to Lettrocalamity. I came across several anachronistic details related to photography itself (there are a couple of references to an imaginary predecessor and to the Lumičre Brothers - & what an apposite name they have...) * How can the “unmentionable lammer”, the “antiamberians” and “Lettrocalamity prohibitions” connect with a photographer’s flash in the early days in Ardis?
Such flashes were originally produced by chemical reactions (magnesium, cobalt) but, in one way or another, they are related to man-controlled electricity. How did a humble kitchen-boy get hold of such efficient technology to obtain clear and compromising photographs?
“…technologists (the so-called Eggheads) all over the world were trying to make publicly utile and commercially rewarding the extremely elaborate and still very expensive, hydrodynamic telephones and other miserable gadgets that were to replace those that had gone k chertyam sobach’im (Russian ‘to the devil’) with the banning of an unmentionable ‘lammer.’.” (Ada - 1,3) // “Note p.25. lammer: amber (Fr: l’ambre), allusion to electricity.(Darkbloom)”
[…] “There he sprawled, curled up, uncurled, turned off and turned on the bedside light (a gurgling new surrogate — real lammer having been forbidden again by 1930), and physical despair pervaded his unresolvable being.”(5,2)
“Van regretted that because Lettrocalamity (Vanvitelli’s old joke!**) was banned all over the world, its very name having become a ‘dirty word’ among upper-upper-class families […] and had been replaced by elaborate surrogates only in those very important ‘utilities’ — telephones, motors — what else? — well a number of gadgets for which plain folks hanker […] such trifles as tape recorders, the favorite toys of his and Ada’s grandsires […] were not manufactured any more, except in Tartary where they had evolved ‘minirechi’ (‘talking minarets’) of a secret make. Had our erudite lovers been allowed by common propriety and common law to knock into working order the mysterious box they had once discovered in their magic attic, they might have recorded (so as to replay, eight decades later) Giorgio Vanvitelli’s arias as well as Van Veen’s conversations with his sweetheart.[ ]ADA 1,24 // Note p.118. Lettrocalamity: a play on Ital. elettrocalamita, electromagnet. (Darkbloom).
‘What was that?’ exclaimed Marina, whom certicle storms terrified even more than they did the Antiamberians of Ladore County.
‘Sheet lightning,’ suggested Van.
‘If you ask me,’ said Demon, turning on his chair to consider the billowing drapery, ‘I’d guess it was a photographer’s flash. After all, we have here a famous actress and a sensational acrobat.’ (1,38)
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* “…‘Sumerechnikov! He took sumerographs of Uncle Vanya years ago.’ / ‘The Twilight before the Lumičres.” (2,7);
“ … nicely brailled books on new processes in chromophotography.’/ There are other possible forkings and continuations that occur to the dream-mind, but these will do.” (2,11).
**-Vanvitelli was an architect, an engineer with a special interest in hydraulics, book collector, musician, printer…Cf https://www.academia.edu/1209903/From_the_Library_to_the_Printimg_Press_Luigi_Vanvitellis_Life_with_Books.
Calamita in Italian indicates magnets and magnetism, as Darkbloom points out. It is also related to “calamity” (would this double meaning be seen as Vanvitelli’s “joke”?).
Cf. also Pale Fire’s commentaries by Kinbote: “Science tells us, by the way, that the Earth would not merely fall apart, but vanish like a ghost, if Electricity were suddenly removed from the world.” (line 347). In “ADA”, the fictional removal of electric devices (“electricity”) is distinct from those that arise after the abolishment of “electromagnetism”, I suppose. Does VN intend to put them together?