ADA: "Demon’s wild flow of
fancy and fantastic fact" led him to a complimentary
exclamation: "what a balagur (wag) you are!" and
additional: "Nu i balagur-zhe vï, Dementiy Labirintovich"
(pag.419, part 3, ch 8)
Knowing no Russian, I must accept Van's
explanation that balagur means "wag." I searched through Boyd's
notes (Library of America edition) and the Nabokovian, but found no
clarification.
I do realize that it
is foolish to depart
from transposed verbal shapes in a completely foreign language to
me, and metamorphose them from, say "balagur" into "balagan"
- a word that might be pertinent in relation to Van's harlequinesque act as
Mascodagama*.
The French "balayer" (sweep clean) also comes to
my mind for Nabokov, in Ada, was also addressing a non-Russian readership with
his mercurial "labyrinths"...Can
anyone help here?
* J.Douglas Clayton designates the Russian version of the commedia dell'arte as
the "commedia/balagan", Clayton mentions Meyerhold's "Balaganchik" and
that's as close as I can get to "balagan" (never to "balagur" but
still close to a mischievous "wag") -"redefined as a 'theatre about theatre, theatre that
self-consciously or parodistically draws attention to its conventions and plays
with them.' Its antirealism, fragmentation, and self-referential approach
are the main components."*