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Re: THOUGHTS re: stranger-danger; midges-midgets
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Matthew Evans: Speaking of "comic" and "cosmic"[...] "sunset midges" are actually rendered as "sunset midgets"? I don't want to believe that this is a typo, because I am utterly charmed by the idea of a golden twilight dwarf. The image conjures an almost Lorelei-like figure, palisade-side, standing in tiny silhouette against the setting sun.
SB: Webster's Second gives as definition 3 of midget "the biting midge, punkie"...Robert Grossmith: "Shaking the Kaleidoscope: Physics and Metaphysics in Nabokov's Bend Sinister," Russian Literature TriQuarterly 24 (1991): 151-162, mentions:"In Nikolay Gogol (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), p. 81, there is a reference to "sunset midgets," and in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (New York: New Directions, 1977), p. 138, to "midgets ... per forming a primitive native dance in a sunbeam" (in the 1982 Penguin edition this is altered to "midges"). One suspects some minor Nabokovian wordplay, punning on the midges' small size, a possibility borne out-at least in relation to the Nikolay Gogol "midgets"-by the fact that the latter work deliberately exploits the comic potential of misspelling."
JM: Even with the Webster's Second definition approaching midget to midge, I think that the wonder remains: both in the suggested image that charmed M.Evans and its biting correlate.
I couldn't understand why Evans linked the dwarf to a Lorelei-like figure: a poem by H. Heine, Die Lorelei, describes a youth that is plagued by nostalgia about a vaguely remembered old-tale describing a mermaid combing her golden hair with a golden comb. And yet, I remembered an indirect reference, through Cahrles II and Fleur, to the Lorelei, in PF [ " the wistful mermaid from an old tale] and, lo and behold, we find "sunbeam dust" two paragraphs before her emergence [He would sweep her out of his chair, his eyes still on his writing pad, and stretching herself she would move over to the window seat and its dusty sunbeam]
Heine had a peculiar position, among the Romantics (from his exile in Paris, he wrote a critical book to introduce the French to German Romanticism and their pantheistic, non-classical lust for elves and fairies...).
Perhaps VN was, distantly, referring to Heine through the midgets? You remember that in Ada the mosquitoes are, and similarly "entomologically", linked to Chateaubriand...). Kinbote's "Lorelei" appears "in the vestibule of sleep" when nymphets are substituted by heaps of putti cherubs...
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SB: Webster's Second gives as definition 3 of midget "the biting midge, punkie"...Robert Grossmith: "Shaking the Kaleidoscope: Physics and Metaphysics in Nabokov's Bend Sinister," Russian Literature TriQuarterly 24 (1991): 151-162, mentions:"In Nikolay Gogol (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), p. 81, there is a reference to "sunset midgets," and in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (New York: New Directions, 1977), p. 138, to "midgets ... per forming a primitive native dance in a sunbeam" (in the 1982 Penguin edition this is altered to "midges"). One suspects some minor Nabokovian wordplay, punning on the midges' small size, a possibility borne out-at least in relation to the Nikolay Gogol "midgets"-by the fact that the latter work deliberately exploits the comic potential of misspelling."
JM: Even with the Webster's Second definition approaching midget to midge, I think that the wonder remains: both in the suggested image that charmed M.Evans and its biting correlate.
I couldn't understand why Evans linked the dwarf to a Lorelei-like figure: a poem by H. Heine, Die Lorelei, describes a youth that is plagued by nostalgia about a vaguely remembered old-tale describing a mermaid combing her golden hair with a golden comb. And yet, I remembered an indirect reference, through Cahrles II and Fleur, to the Lorelei, in PF [ " the wistful mermaid from an old tale] and, lo and behold, we find "sunbeam dust" two paragraphs before her emergence [He would sweep her out of his chair, his eyes still on his writing pad, and stretching herself she would move over to the window seat and its dusty sunbeam]
Heine had a peculiar position, among the Romantics (from his exile in Paris, he wrote a critical book to introduce the French to German Romanticism and their pantheistic, non-classical lust for elves and fairies...).
Perhaps VN was, distantly, referring to Heine through the midgets? You remember that in Ada the mosquitoes are, and similarly "entomologically", linked to Chateaubriand...). Kinbote's "Lorelei" appears "in the vestibule of sleep" when nymphets are substituted by heaps of putti cherubs...
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Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
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