Subject
Letters from Terra
From
Date
Body
Ada's letters breathed, writhed, lived; Van's Letters from Terra, 'a philosophical novel,' showed no sign of life whatsoever...
Poor Van! In his struggle to keep the writer of the letters from Terra strictly separate from the image of Ada, he gilt and carmined Theresa until she became a paragon of banality. This Theresa maddened with her messages a scientist on our easily maddened planet; his anagram-looking name, Sig Leymanksi, had been partly derived by Van from that of Aqua's last doctor.
...After beaming to Sig a dozen communications from her planet, Theresa flies over to him, and he, in his laboratory, has to place her on a slide under a powerful microscope in order to make out the tiny, though otherwise perfect, shape of his minikin sweetheart, a graceful microorganism extending transparent appendages toward his huge humid eye. Alas, the testibulus (test tube - never to be confused with testiculus, orchid), with Theresa swimming inside like a micromermaid, is 'accidentally' thrown away by Professor Leyman's (he had trimmed his name by that time) assistant, Flora, initially an ivory-pale, dark-haired funest beauty, whom the author transformed just in time into a third bromidic dummy with a dun bun. (Ada, 2.2)
From the opening chapter of Merezhkovski's last unfinished book Malen'kaya Tereza (Little Theresa, 1941):
Если бы великий учёный оказался на другой планете, то делал бы на каждом шагу удивительные открытия, а Маленькая Тереза делает их на нашей старой, бедной и скучной земле. Ни Канта, ни Эйнштейна, ни Лобачевского не знает она, но есть у неё тончайшие познавательные приборы и точнейший химический анализ, чем у них.
Had a great scholar found himself on another planet, he would make amazing discoveries at every turn, and Little Theresa [Saint Therese of Lisieux] makes them on our old, poor and dull Earth. She knows neither Kant, nor Einstein, nor Lobachevski, but she has more sofisticated cognitive instruments and more precise chemical analysis than they have.
Saint Therese of Lisieux (1873-97) is also known as "The Little Flower of Jesus" or simply, "The Little Flower".
Merezhkovski is also the author of Sv. Tereza Iisusa (St. Teresa de Jesu, another Carmelite), the first part of the trilogy Ispanskie mistiki (The Spanish Mystics).
Poor Aqua [Van's aunt, Marina's twin sister who believed in the existence of Terra, Antiterra's mysterious twin planet], whose fancies were apt to fall for all the fangles of cranks and Christians, envisaged vividly a minor hymnist's paradise... (1.3)
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/
Poor Van! In his struggle to keep the writer of the letters from Terra strictly separate from the image of Ada, he gilt and carmined Theresa until she became a paragon of banality. This Theresa maddened with her messages a scientist on our easily maddened planet; his anagram-looking name, Sig Leymanksi, had been partly derived by Van from that of Aqua's last doctor.
...After beaming to Sig a dozen communications from her planet, Theresa flies over to him, and he, in his laboratory, has to place her on a slide under a powerful microscope in order to make out the tiny, though otherwise perfect, shape of his minikin sweetheart, a graceful microorganism extending transparent appendages toward his huge humid eye. Alas, the testibulus (test tube - never to be confused with testiculus, orchid), with Theresa swimming inside like a micromermaid, is 'accidentally' thrown away by Professor Leyman's (he had trimmed his name by that time) assistant, Flora, initially an ivory-pale, dark-haired funest beauty, whom the author transformed just in time into a third bromidic dummy with a dun bun. (Ada, 2.2)
From the opening chapter of Merezhkovski's last unfinished book Malen'kaya Tereza (Little Theresa, 1941):
Если бы великий учёный оказался на другой планете, то делал бы на каждом шагу удивительные открытия, а Маленькая Тереза делает их на нашей старой, бедной и скучной земле. Ни Канта, ни Эйнштейна, ни Лобачевского не знает она, но есть у неё тончайшие познавательные приборы и точнейший химический анализ, чем у них.
Had a great scholar found himself on another planet, he would make amazing discoveries at every turn, and Little Theresa [Saint Therese of Lisieux] makes them on our old, poor and dull Earth. She knows neither Kant, nor Einstein, nor Lobachevski, but she has more sofisticated cognitive instruments and more precise chemical analysis than they have.
Saint Therese of Lisieux (1873-97) is also known as "The Little Flower of Jesus" or simply, "The Little Flower".
Merezhkovski is also the author of Sv. Tereza Iisusa (St. Teresa de Jesu, another Carmelite), the first part of the trilogy Ispanskie mistiki (The Spanish Mystics).
Poor Aqua [Van's aunt, Marina's twin sister who believed in the existence of Terra, Antiterra's mysterious twin planet], whose fancies were apt to fall for all the fangles of cranks and Christians, envisaged vividly a minor hymnist's paradise... (1.3)
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/