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Tobak: afterthought
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As I pointed out earlier, Ada's Tobak reminds one of Fima Sobak, a character in Ilf and Petrov's "The Twelve Chairs". Sobak = skoba (cramp-iron; in one of his poems Mandelshtam compares letters of Armenian alphabet to cramp-irons). There is Koba (Stalin's nickname, after the hero of Kazbeghi's novel "The Patricide") in skoba.
I was misled by the mention of the Mediterranian resorts in one of the fragments and therefore failed to recognize Pasternak. Like all Soviet literature, "Doctor Zhivago" has something provincial about it. Anyway, Bunin deserved the Nobel prize much more than Pasternak or Sholokhov did, not to speak of Nabokov (who never received it).
Alexey Sklyarenko
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I was misled by the mention of the Mediterranian resorts in one of the fragments and therefore failed to recognize Pasternak. Like all Soviet literature, "Doctor Zhivago" has something provincial about it. Anyway, Bunin deserved the Nobel prize much more than Pasternak or Sholokhov did, not to speak of Nabokov (who never received it).
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/