Subject
Lenin and Ada's L Disaster
From
Date
Body
The details of the L disaster (and I do not mean Elevated) in the beau milieu of last century, which had the singular effect of both causing and cursing the notion of 'Terra,' are too well-known historically, and too obscene spiritually, to be treated at length in a book addressed to young laymen and lemans - and not to grave men or gravemen.
...Ved' ('it is, isn't it') sidesplitting to imagine that 'Russia,' instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today's Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles! (1.3)
Like many Russian liberals, VN viewed the Soviet regime of Lenin and Stalin as a new Tatar yoke. Colonel St. Alin, a scoundrel (one of the seconds in Demon's duel with Baron d'Onsky, 1.2), Khan Sosso (on Antiterra, the ruler of the ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate, also known as Tartary, 2.2) and Uncle Joe (a politician in forgotten comics, 5.5), all of them are Joseph Stalin's representatives on Antiterra (Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set). But we would vainly look for Stalin's predecessor, Lenin, in Ada. Although V. I. Ul'yanov (Lenin's real name) was born in 1870 and came to power in 1917, it seems to me that L in the name of a mysterious catastrophe that happenned on Antiterra in the middle of the 19th century hints - among other names - at Lenin.
Demon's rival and adversary in a sword duel, Baron d'Onsky brings to mind Dmitry Donskoy (1350-89), the Prince of Moscow and Grand Prince of Vladimir. His nickname alludes to his great victory against the Tatars in the Battle of Kulikovo (1380) which took place on the Don River. But on Demonia (Antiterra's name before the L disaster) the Russians must have lost this battle to the victorious Khan Mamay and migrated, crossing the ha-ha of a doubled ocean, to America. Interestingly, in his poem O pravitelyakh ("On Rulers", 1944) VN compares Lenin and Stalin to Khan Mamay ("a particularly evil Tartar prince of the fourteenth century"):
людоеды, любовники, ломовики,
Иоанны, Людовики, Ленины,
всё это сидело, кряхтя на эх и на ых,
упираясь локтями в колени,
на престолах своих матерых.
Умирает со скуки историк:
за Мамаем все тот же Мамай.
cannibals, loverboys, lumbermen,
Johns, Lewises, Lenins
emitting stool grunts of strain and release,
propping elbows on knees,
sat on their massive old thrones.
The historian dies of sheer boredom:
On the heels of Mamay comes another Mamay.
Note that, except Ioanny (Johns), all words in the first two lines of the original begin with an L. As to Ioanny, they remind one of Ioann III, the Grand Prince of Moscow, and his much more cruel grandson Ioann IV (known as "Ivan the Terrible"), the first Russian tsar. Nurse Joan the Terrible is mentioned by Aqua in her suicide note: Aujourd'hui (heute-toity!) I, this eye-rolling toy, have earned the psykitsch right to enjoy a landparty with Herr Doktor Sig, Nurse Joan the Terrible, and several 'patients,' in the neighboring bor (piney wood) where I noticed exactly the same skunk-like squirrels, Van, that your Darkblue ancestor imported to Ardis Park, where you will ramble one day, no doubt. (1.3)
Unlike Lenin, Stalin is not mentioned by name in "On Rulers". But he is repeatedly alluded to in VN's poem that ends as follows:
Покойный мой тёзка,
писавший стихи и в полоску,
и в клетку, на самом восходе
всесоюзно-мещанского класса,
кабы дожил до полдня,
нынче бы рифмы натягивал
на "монументален",
на "переперчил"
и так далее.
If my late namesake
who used to write verse, in rank
and in files, at the very dawn
of the Soviet Small-Bourgeois order,
had lived till its noon,
he would be now finding taut rhymes
such as "praline"
or "air chill",
and others of the same kind.
VN's footnote: "praline"... "air chill." In the original, monumentalen, meaning "[he is] monumental" rhymes pretty closely with Stalin; and pereperchil, meaning "[he] put in too much pepper" offers an ingenuouse correspondence with the name of the British plitician in slovenly Russian pronunciation ("chair-chill").
Sir Winston Churchill is known on Antiterra as Richard Leonard Churchill: But then 'everyone has his own taste,' as the British writer Richard Leonard Churchill mistranslates a trite French phrase (chacun a son gout) twice in the course of his novel about a certain Crimean Khan once popular with reporters and politicians, 'A Great Good Man' - according, of course, to the cattish and prejudiced Guillaume Monparnasse about whose new celebrity Ada, while dipping the reversed corolla of one hand in a bowl, was now telling Demon, who was performing the same rite in the same graceful fashion. (1.38) Guillaume de Monparnasse is a penname of Lucette's governess, Mlle Lariviere (who is referred to by Ada as "poor Mlle L.": Hm! Kveree-kveree, as poor Mlle L. used to say to Gavronsky. In Ada's hand. 1.3) Mlle Lariviere's penname hints at Guy de Maupassant who was born (in our world, for he did not exist on Antiterra) in 1850, in the beau milieu of the 19th century.
VN's "late namesake" is Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovski (1893-1930), "minor Soviet poet, endowed with a certain brilliance and bite, but fatally corrupted by the regime he faithfully served." One of Mayakovski's poems is entitled "Vladimir Il'yich Lenin" (1925). In Yubileynoe (The Anniversary Poem, 1924) Mayakovski, whose name begins with an M, addresses Pushkin, whose name begins with a P, asking the poet "who is between us [in the alphabet]: Nekrasov? We'll ask him to move toward the end of the alphabet, to the letter shch." Alphabetically, Mayakovski (and Mamay, and Marx, and Maupassant, and Maykov, the author of Mashen'ka, and Merezhkovski) is between Lenin and Nabokov: L, M, N.
After Lenin's death, Petrograd (St. Petersburg's name in 1914-24) was renamed Leningrad. In November of 1917 VN's family flew from Petrograd to Crimea and one and a half year later they left Russia forever on a small Greek ship Nadezhda (Hope). Not sure that VN knew this, but after Mayakovski's death the Nadezhdinskaya street in Leningrad was renamed Mayakovski Street. In Chelovek ("Man", 1917) Mayakovski confesses that he had suicidal thoughts and wanted to shoot himself when living in Petrograd, in the Nadezhdinskaya street.
Lenin and the Bolshevist coup were predicted by Lermontov, the author of prophetic Predskazanie ("Prediction," 1830) whose name also begins with an L.
L + Arbenin = rab + Lenin (Arbenin is the hero of Lermontov's drama in verse Masquerade who poisons his wife and goes mad; rab - Russ., slave)
Ada calls muzhiks in Tartary "poor slaves": 'Now the Russian word for marsh marigold is Kuroslep (which muzhiks in Tartary misapply, poor slaves, to the buttercup) or else Kaluzhnitsa, as used quite properly in Kaluga, U.S.A.' (1.10)
Nemoe rabstvo (silent servitude) is mentioned in another Russian poem written by VN after he had moved to America:
Каким бы полотном батальным ни являлась
советская сусальнейшая Русь,
какой бы жалостью душа ни наполнялась,
не поклонюсь, не примирюсь
со всею мерзостью, жестокостью и скукой
немого рабства -- нет, о, нет,
еще я духом жив, еще не сыт разлукой,
увольте, я еще поэт.
No matter how Soviet tinsel glitters
Upon the canvas of a battle-piece,
No matter how the soul dissolves in pity,
I will not bend, I will not cease
Loathing the filth, brutality and boredom
Of silent servitude. No, no, I shout,
My spirit is still quick, still exile-hungry,
I’m still a poet, count me out!
Sovetskaya susal'neyshaya Rus' (the Soviet Sugary Rus) on Terra is known (according to Theresa, the heroine of Van's novel Letters from Terra) as a Sovereign Society of Solicitous Republics (SSSR):
Eastward, instead of Khan Sosso and his ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate, a super Russia, dominating the Volga region and similar watersheds, was governed by a Sovereign Society of Solicitous Republics (or so it came through) which had superseded the Tsars, conquerors of Tartary and Trst. (2.2)
Alexey Sklyarenko
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...Ved' ('it is, isn't it') sidesplitting to imagine that 'Russia,' instead of being a quaint synonym of Estoty, the American province extending from the Arctic no longer vicious Circle to the United States proper, was on Terra the name of a country, transferred as if by some sleight of land across the ha-ha of a doubled ocean to the opposite hemisphere where it sprawled over all of today's Tartary, from Kurland to the Kuriles! (1.3)
Like many Russian liberals, VN viewed the Soviet regime of Lenin and Stalin as a new Tatar yoke. Colonel St. Alin, a scoundrel (one of the seconds in Demon's duel with Baron d'Onsky, 1.2), Khan Sosso (on Antiterra, the ruler of the ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate, also known as Tartary, 2.2) and Uncle Joe (a politician in forgotten comics, 5.5), all of them are Joseph Stalin's representatives on Antiterra (Earth's twin planet on which Ada is set). But we would vainly look for Stalin's predecessor, Lenin, in Ada. Although V. I. Ul'yanov (Lenin's real name) was born in 1870 and came to power in 1917, it seems to me that L in the name of a mysterious catastrophe that happenned on Antiterra in the middle of the 19th century hints - among other names - at Lenin.
Demon's rival and adversary in a sword duel, Baron d'Onsky brings to mind Dmitry Donskoy (1350-89), the Prince of Moscow and Grand Prince of Vladimir. His nickname alludes to his great victory against the Tatars in the Battle of Kulikovo (1380) which took place on the Don River. But on Demonia (Antiterra's name before the L disaster) the Russians must have lost this battle to the victorious Khan Mamay and migrated, crossing the ha-ha of a doubled ocean, to America. Interestingly, in his poem O pravitelyakh ("On Rulers", 1944) VN compares Lenin and Stalin to Khan Mamay ("a particularly evil Tartar prince of the fourteenth century"):
людоеды, любовники, ломовики,
Иоанны, Людовики, Ленины,
всё это сидело, кряхтя на эх и на ых,
упираясь локтями в колени,
на престолах своих матерых.
Умирает со скуки историк:
за Мамаем все тот же Мамай.
cannibals, loverboys, lumbermen,
Johns, Lewises, Lenins
emitting stool grunts of strain and release,
propping elbows on knees,
sat on their massive old thrones.
The historian dies of sheer boredom:
On the heels of Mamay comes another Mamay.
Note that, except Ioanny (Johns), all words in the first two lines of the original begin with an L. As to Ioanny, they remind one of Ioann III, the Grand Prince of Moscow, and his much more cruel grandson Ioann IV (known as "Ivan the Terrible"), the first Russian tsar. Nurse Joan the Terrible is mentioned by Aqua in her suicide note: Aujourd'hui (heute-toity!) I, this eye-rolling toy, have earned the psykitsch right to enjoy a landparty with Herr Doktor Sig, Nurse Joan the Terrible, and several 'patients,' in the neighboring bor (piney wood) where I noticed exactly the same skunk-like squirrels, Van, that your Darkblue ancestor imported to Ardis Park, where you will ramble one day, no doubt. (1.3)
Unlike Lenin, Stalin is not mentioned by name in "On Rulers". But he is repeatedly alluded to in VN's poem that ends as follows:
Покойный мой тёзка,
писавший стихи и в полоску,
и в клетку, на самом восходе
всесоюзно-мещанского класса,
кабы дожил до полдня,
нынче бы рифмы натягивал
на "монументален",
на "переперчил"
и так далее.
If my late namesake
who used to write verse, in rank
and in files, at the very dawn
of the Soviet Small-Bourgeois order,
had lived till its noon,
he would be now finding taut rhymes
such as "praline"
or "air chill",
and others of the same kind.
VN's footnote: "praline"... "air chill." In the original, monumentalen, meaning "[he is] monumental" rhymes pretty closely with Stalin; and pereperchil, meaning "[he] put in too much pepper" offers an ingenuouse correspondence with the name of the British plitician in slovenly Russian pronunciation ("chair-chill").
Sir Winston Churchill is known on Antiterra as Richard Leonard Churchill: But then 'everyone has his own taste,' as the British writer Richard Leonard Churchill mistranslates a trite French phrase (chacun a son gout) twice in the course of his novel about a certain Crimean Khan once popular with reporters and politicians, 'A Great Good Man' - according, of course, to the cattish and prejudiced Guillaume Monparnasse about whose new celebrity Ada, while dipping the reversed corolla of one hand in a bowl, was now telling Demon, who was performing the same rite in the same graceful fashion. (1.38) Guillaume de Monparnasse is a penname of Lucette's governess, Mlle Lariviere (who is referred to by Ada as "poor Mlle L.": Hm! Kveree-kveree, as poor Mlle L. used to say to Gavronsky. In Ada's hand. 1.3) Mlle Lariviere's penname hints at Guy de Maupassant who was born (in our world, for he did not exist on Antiterra) in 1850, in the beau milieu of the 19th century.
VN's "late namesake" is Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovski (1893-1930), "minor Soviet poet, endowed with a certain brilliance and bite, but fatally corrupted by the regime he faithfully served." One of Mayakovski's poems is entitled "Vladimir Il'yich Lenin" (1925). In Yubileynoe (The Anniversary Poem, 1924) Mayakovski, whose name begins with an M, addresses Pushkin, whose name begins with a P, asking the poet "who is between us [in the alphabet]: Nekrasov? We'll ask him to move toward the end of the alphabet, to the letter shch." Alphabetically, Mayakovski (and Mamay, and Marx, and Maupassant, and Maykov, the author of Mashen'ka, and Merezhkovski) is between Lenin and Nabokov: L, M, N.
After Lenin's death, Petrograd (St. Petersburg's name in 1914-24) was renamed Leningrad. In November of 1917 VN's family flew from Petrograd to Crimea and one and a half year later they left Russia forever on a small Greek ship Nadezhda (Hope). Not sure that VN knew this, but after Mayakovski's death the Nadezhdinskaya street in Leningrad was renamed Mayakovski Street. In Chelovek ("Man", 1917) Mayakovski confesses that he had suicidal thoughts and wanted to shoot himself when living in Petrograd, in the Nadezhdinskaya street.
Lenin and the Bolshevist coup were predicted by Lermontov, the author of prophetic Predskazanie ("Prediction," 1830) whose name also begins with an L.
L + Arbenin = rab + Lenin (Arbenin is the hero of Lermontov's drama in verse Masquerade who poisons his wife and goes mad; rab - Russ., slave)
Ada calls muzhiks in Tartary "poor slaves": 'Now the Russian word for marsh marigold is Kuroslep (which muzhiks in Tartary misapply, poor slaves, to the buttercup) or else Kaluzhnitsa, as used quite properly in Kaluga, U.S.A.' (1.10)
Nemoe rabstvo (silent servitude) is mentioned in another Russian poem written by VN after he had moved to America:
Каким бы полотном батальным ни являлась
советская сусальнейшая Русь,
какой бы жалостью душа ни наполнялась,
не поклонюсь, не примирюсь
со всею мерзостью, жестокостью и скукой
немого рабства -- нет, о, нет,
еще я духом жив, еще не сыт разлукой,
увольте, я еще поэт.
No matter how Soviet tinsel glitters
Upon the canvas of a battle-piece,
No matter how the soul dissolves in pity,
I will not bend, I will not cease
Loathing the filth, brutality and boredom
Of silent servitude. No, no, I shout,
My spirit is still quick, still exile-hungry,
I’m still a poet, count me out!
Sovetskaya susal'neyshaya Rus' (the Soviet Sugary Rus) on Terra is known (according to Theresa, the heroine of Van's novel Letters from Terra) as a Sovereign Society of Solicitous Republics (SSSR):
Eastward, instead of Khan Sosso and his ruthless Sovietnamur Khanate, a super Russia, dominating the Volga region and similar watersheds, was governed by a Sovereign Society of Solicitous Republics (or so it came through) which had superseded the Tsars, conquerors of Tartary and Trst. (2.2)
Alexey Sklyarenko
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/