Victor Fet: a very recognizable is Extremist coup in Zembla
supported by its big eastern neighbor (whatever our opinion of decadent
Zemblan monarchy).
Charles Nicol: [...] The most
important thing in Nabokov's imaginary view might be whether his first
love, Tamara, is still alive in Georgia after all those years[...]
I suspect that unfortunately
it would not be much more difficult to figure out how he would view
Bush's outrageous war on the sovereign state of Iraq, a view which
probably would have been far more benign and pro-Bush than my own,
but that's precisely the kind of question it's pointless for us to
raise...
JM: When
I read Fet's remark about the coup against King Charles supported by
a"big eastern neighbor", I noticed VN'd emphasis on "eastern".
One is thereby invited
away from considerations such as, for example, what happened with Reza
Pahlavi's tradicitional monarchy and "the sovereign state of Iraq".
Nevertheless in ADA there
are peculiar "tesselated" indications from plane and ocean-liner
voyages,Vinelander and ancient maps, train trips from the northern to
the southern hemispheres. There
is not only the ancient explorerer's east-west route (echoed in uncle
Dan's meridian anti-clockwise travels), but an indication of
skin-traders' search of a shorter link bt. Asia and Alaska and in Ada's
passionate message to Van from the very tip of Patagonia...Therefore I think we may be justified
in considering VN's more "global views".
Besides, a thread running through Bend
Sinister and Pale Fire brings up lost "Atlantis" and other
"lost lands", and I cannot avoid thinking about ADA's sunken city of
Kitezh and its valiant legend.
New geographies...And then,
rather unexpectedly a message about "Boriska—boy from Mars" [ a
specially gifted boy born on January 11, 1996 who livesin
Zhirinovsk,Volgograd, Russia.] reached me today. I found more
information about this child's "wonderful country Lemuria,
life of which he knew in details since he happened to descend there
from Mars", at online Pravda
[english.pravda.ru/science/19/94/377/12257_Martian.html].
Since I recently came across a reference to
Ada's anti-terran amber iris and the word "lemurian", I decided to
check further VN's novel.
The eyes. Ada’s dark brown eyes. What (Ada asks)
are eyes anyway? Two holes in the mask of life. What (she asks) would
they mean to a creature from another corpuscle or milk bubble whose
organ of sight was (say) an internal parasite resembling the written
word ‘deified’? What, indeed, would a pair of beautiful (human,
lemurian, owlish) eyes mean to anybody if found lying on the
seat of a taxi? Yet I have to describe yours. The iris: black brown
with amber specks or spokes placed around the serious pupil in a dial
arrangement of identical hours. The eyelids: sort of pleaty, v
skladochku (rhyming in Russian with the diminutive of her name in the
accusative case). Eye shape: languorous. The procuress in Wicklow, on
that satanic night of black sleet, at the most tragic and almost fatal
point of my life (Van, thank goodness, is ninety now — in Ada’s hand)
dwelt with peculiar force on the ‘long eyes’ of her pathetic and
adorable grandchild. How I used to seek, with what tenacious anguish,
traces and tokens of my unforgettable love in all the brothels of the
world!
An
amazing paragraph, apparently written by ninety year old Van, who
addresses Ada directly and in which she conspicuously is shown
to intervene. Internet
resources, mainly Wikipedia, made me travel from
Darwinism, tectonic plates to Madame Blavatsky's Lemuria and Sci-Fi
novels*, with a stop at Darkbloom's
notes about p.10. Lake Kitezh: allusion to the legendary town
of Kitezh
which shines at the bottom of a lake in a Russian fairy tale.
In ADA we find Lakeview
hospital, different lakeviews,swans and balconies and even a lake Van [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].
................................................................
*
Wiki Excerpts:
The acceptance of Darwinism
led scientists to seek to trace the diffusion of species from their
points of evolutionary origin[...]. After gaining some acceptance
within the scientific community, the concept of Lemuria began to appear
[...]. Ernst Haeckel, a German Darwinian taxonomist, proposed Lemuria
as an explanation for the absence of "missing link" fossil records.
According to another source, Haeckel put forward this thesis prior to
Sclater (but without using the name 'Lemuria')[...]Other scientists
hypothesized that Lemuria had extended across parts of the Pacific
oceans, seeking to explain distributions of species across Asia and the
Americas.The Lemuria theory disappeared completely from conventional
scientific consideration after the theories of plate tectonics and
continental drift were accepted by the larger scientific community
Lemuria entered the lexicon
of the Occult through the works of Madame Helena Blavatsky, who claimed
in the 1880s to have been shown an ancient, pre-Atlantean Book of Dzyan
by the Mahatmas. According to L. Sprague de Camp, Blavatsky was
influenced by other writers on the theme of Lost Continents, notably
Ignatius L. Donnelly, American cult leader Thomas Lake Harris and the
French writer Louis Jacolliot.[...]One of the most elaborate accounts
of lost continents was given by the later theosophical author William
Scott Elliott[...] In 1896, in "The Story of Atlantis & The Lost
Lemuria", he described the continent of Lemuria as stretching from the
east coast of Africa across the Indian and the Pacific Oceans.James
Bramwell described Lemuria in his book, Lost Atlantis, as “a continent
that occupied a large part of what is now the South Pacific Ocean.”.
Quoting Story of Atlantis, by William Scott-Elliott; “Atlantis,
according to Scott-Elliott’s first map, which shows it 1,000,000 years
ago, extended ‘from a point a few degrees east of Iceland to about the
site now occupied by Rio de Janeiro in South America. Embracing Texas
and the Gulf of Mexico, the Southern and Eastern states of America, up
to and including Labrador, it stretched across the ocean to our own
islands, - Scotland and Ireland… embraced Brazil and the whole stretch
of ocean across to the African Gold Coast.” [...] According to
Bramwell, Lemurians are the ascendants of the Altlanteans, who survived
the period “of the general racial decadence which affected the
Lemurians in the last stages of their evolution.” >From “a select
division of” the Atlanteans - after their promotion to decadence -
Bramwell claims the Aryan race arose. “Lemurians, Atlanteans, and
Aryans are root-races of humanity,” according to Bramwell.
[...] James Churchward,
another prolific writer on the theme of lost lands, identified Lemuria
with Mu.In 1894, Frederick Spencer Oliver published A Dweller on Two
Planets, which claimed that survivors from a sunken continent called
Lemuria were living in or on Mount Shasta in northern
California[...].This belief has been repeated by such individuals as
the cultist Guy Warren Ballard in the 1930s who formed the I AM
Foundation[...]Popular novels have also repeated the belief that
Lemurians inhabit Mount Shasta. Among such novels, Vin Smith's The
Outrageous Views of Professor Fogelman links Lemurians to Ancient
Egypt, UFOs and a method of travel called vortex portals--essentially a
pathway to sacred places on Earth as well as points unknown in the
universe.In Robert A. Heinlein's short story "Lost Legacy", three
ordinary people rediscover innate human psychic abilities[...] This
history includes the rise and fall of the lost empire Mu, due to
arrogance and the pursuit of power rather than enlightenment. The fall
of Mu is said to have doomed humanity to the current 'Dark Age', in
which the evil hidden elites forcefully maintain the ignorance of the
masses.