Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0025088, Sat, 15 Feb 2014 22:42:41 +0300

Subject
Van's cabochon in Ada
Date
Body
Lucette to Van: 'I don't care for your cabochon. I mean it's all right on your dear hairy hand, but Papa wore one like that on his hateful pink paw. He belonged to the silent-explorer type. Once he took me to a girls' hockey match and I had to warn him I'd yell for help if he didn't call off the search.'
'Das auch noch,' sighed Van, and pocketed the heavy dark-sapphire ring. He would have put it into the ashtray had it not been Marina's last present. (3.3)

Van's cabochon (a precious stone of convex hemispherical or oval form, polished but not cut into facets) must have belonged to Daniel Veen, Lucette's father who left the ring to Marina (Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother).

In Maximilian Voloshin's poem Matros (The Sailor, 1919) from the cycle Lichiny ("The Masks") of the book Neopalimaya kupina (The Burning Bush) the red sailor has a cabochon in his ring:

Браслеты. В перстне кабошон,
И красный бант с алмазной пряжкой.

The crew of Tobakoff consists of Russian sailors:

As they crossed landings where velvet ropes were hastily stretched by Russian sailors (who glanced with sympathy at the handsome pair speaking their incomparable tongue) or walked this or that deck, Lucette made him [Van] think of some acrobatic creature immune to the rough seas. (3.5)

Acrobatic creature immune to the rough seas brings to mind an aquatic peacock seen by Van in a dream on the eve:

A tempest went into convulsions around midnight, but despite the lunging and creaking (Tobakoff was an embittered old vessel) Van managed to sleep soundly, the only reaction on the part of his dormant mind being the dream image of an aquatic peacock, slowly sinking before somersaulting like a diving grebe, near the shore of the lake bearing his name in the ancient kingdom of Arrowroot. Upon reviewing that bright dream he traced its source to his recent visit to Armenia where he had gone fowling with Armborough and that gentleman's extremely compliant and accomplished niece. (ibid.)

Van mentions his visit to Armenia in the chapter dealing with Marina's death:

He went shooting with the British Governor of Armenia, and his niece, on Lake Van. (3.1)

Leaving the Tobakoff cinema hall, Van murmurs a humorous bad-sailor excuse:

They [the Robinsons] were craning already across her [Lucette], with radiant wrinkles and twittery fingers toward Van when he pounced upon their intrusion to murmur a humorous bad-sailor excuse and leave the cinema hall to its dark lurching. (3.5)

Speaking of Revolution: according to Voloshin, Revolution is a paroxysm of the sense of justice (see the chapter on Voloshin from Evgenia Gertsyk's Memoirs).

And how sad, how significant that the picture projected upon the screen of his paroxysm, while the unlockable door swung open again with the movement of a deaf man cupping his ear, was not the recent and pertinent image of Lucette, but the indelible vision of a bent bare neck and a divided flow of black hair and a purple-tipped paint brush. (3.5)

Alexey Sklyarenko

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