PS: The word "paiol" as indicating a "bunker" in English appears to also mean a "magazine"  and this prompted my voluble search online to find "zhurnal" instead of "bunkernyy" in Russian. Probably "paiol" in Portuguese is an adequate choice for "barn". My original query may be altered thus: did VN's word "barn" in Russian also admit the interpretation of "bunker" or, unlike it happens in Portuguese, the different shapes and meanings may be clearly demarcated according to the author's choice?  

Thanks, JM

In "Spring in Fialta" a red barn is mentioned and, as part of the narrator's desdription of his first meeting Nina ( at a curiously vague date: "around 1917" in Winter, i.e., a little before the "Russian Revolution" took place) there's also "a sullen red glow in the sky, portent of nearing arson."*

While I was following a friend's translation of this short-story I stopped short at her choice of the word for "barn" in Portuguese ("paiol"). In my opinion, the term that would more adequately correspond to the wooden space inside which big crops are stored is "celeiro", whereas "paiol" is more commonly applied to constructions in which armaments and explosives are kept.

My friend explained to me that she wanted a shorter word  to apply to monosyllabic "barn." Besides, she added, this barn is certainly connected to the impending fires caused by arson and an approaching Revolution.  

(btw: Is the "burning barn" episode in ADA equally indicative of events related to the Russian Revolution?)**

Internet dictionaries (not elaborate ones) led me to a single word in Russian that would correspond to "paiol" in Portuguese: zhurnal ( журнал ).

Other searches informed me the existing words for "barn"*** in Russian do not include "zhurnal". What was the word for it that V. employed in "Spring in Fialta"? -  and is it the same word as the one we find in the Russian translation of ADA?   Does he mean "granaries"?

Thank you,

Jansy Mello

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*"My introductory scene with Nina had been laid in Russia quite a long time ago, around 1917 I should say, judging by certain left-wing theater rumblings backstage. It was at some birthday party at my aunt's on her country estate, near Luga, in the deepest folds of winter (how well I remember the first sign of nearing the place: a red barn in a white wilderness). [   ] I cannot recall why we had all wandered out of the sonorous hall into the still darkness, peopled only with firs, snow-swollen to twice their size; did the watchmen invite us to look at a sullen red glow in the sky, portent of nearing arson? Possibly."

**A first quick (too quick) check in AdaOnline informs: 114.02-03: Burning Barn: The Burning Barn provides a naturalistic occasion for Van and Ada’s first making love, parodies the literary use of fire as a symbol of passion (already parodied in Lolita, Pt. 1 Ch. 10: “a distraught McCoo in wet clothes turned up at the only hotel of green-and-pink Ramsdale with the news that his house had just burned down—possibly, owing to the synchronous conflagration that had been raging all night in my veins” as Humbert envisaged his installation in the McCoo house and the chance it would give him to fondle the twelve-year-old daughter of McCoos, and later in Ada, 334.08-09: “The fire you rubbed left its brand on the most vulnerable, most vicious and tender point of my body”), and may pay wry homage to such famous burning barns in literature as those in Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), by Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), and As I Lay Dying (1930), by William Faulkner (1897-1962).

In 1971 Nabokov told Andrew Field of a barn fire that occurred overnight while he was a farm laborer at Domaine-Beaulieu, Solliès-Pont, in the Var: he gradually woke to what he realized were cries of “Fire!” and rushed outside towards a pandemonium of buckets being passed. When Field connected the incident with the Burning Barn in Ada, Nabokov insisted: “It has nothing to do with the Burning Barn (in ADA) - which is not even shown burning – and anyway my fictions do not work that way. Without that handle the incident is too trivial (and too badly described) to keep” (VN notes to Field, February 20, 1973, p. 121, Berg Collection, NYPL; cf. Field, Nabokov: His Life in Part [New York: Viking, 1977], 203.) MOTIF: burn; Burning Barn.

***"BARN" RUSSIAN TRANSLATION

Results: 1-9 of 9

barn {noun}

 barn {noun} (also: mews, stabling, stable)

 конюшня [коню́шня] {f}

 barn {noun} (also: granary, grange, garner, storehouse)

 амбар [амба́р] {m}

 barn {noun} (also: hangar, shed)

 сарай [сара́й] {m}

 barn {noun} (also: stockyard, barnyard)

 скотный двор {m}