Subject
ADA's Dr Froid and Dr Froit
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Date
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"A Dr Froid, one of the administerial centaures [at Aqua's last hospital in Centaur, Arizona], who may have been an emigre brother with a passport-changed name of the Dr Froit of Signy-Mondieu-Mondieu in the Ardennes or, more likely, the same man..." (1.3)
The split of Sigmund Freud's personality on Antiterra is matched by the reduplication in the name of the village from which Dr Froit hails. Interestingly, the repetition of the same exclamation (but in two languages: French and German) can be found in Ilf and Petrov's "The Golden Calf." To Vasisualiy Lokhankin's protests that he has hired out the room not to three men (Bender, Panikovsky and Balaganov) but to one cultured bachelor Ostap Bender replies: "Mon Dieu, Vasisualiy Andreevich... don't torment yourself. Of the three of us I alone am cultured, so the clause has been observed." To his landlord's further complaints Bender says: "Mein Gott, dear Vasisualiy! Perhaps there is a great plain truth (velikaya sermyazhnaya pravda, the phrase in which the failure Lokhankin used to find some consolation) in this" (chapter XV: "Antlers and hooves").*
On the other hand, Bender tells the monarchist Khvorob'yev who can not escape from the Soviet reality even in his dreams and suffers from everynight nightmares that he happened to treat his friends and acquaintances using Freudean method. "The dream is nothing. The main thing is to eliminate the dream's cause. The chief cause [of your bad dreams] is the existence of the Soviet regime. But at the present moment I can not eliminate it. I simply have no time. You see, I am a sportsman-tourist, who has to make some repairs in his car... And as to the cause, do not worry about it. I will eliminate it on the return journey. Only let me finish the motor-race" ("The Golden Calf," chapter VIII: "The Crisis of the Genre").
I think that more or less similar things (a sportsman, who has no time for politics) could be said to characterize some of VN heroes (Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, for example), if not Nabokov himself. By the way, the duality of worlds in Ada, the existence of one of them (Terra) being questioned, also goes back to "The Golden** Calf." After he has received his million from Koreiko, the frustrated Ostap (he doesn't know what to do with his money) tells Balaganov: "All this is an invention. There is no Rio-de-Janeiro, and no America, and no Europe, nothing. Earth's terminal city is Shepetovka against which the waves of the Atlantic are breaking... One doctor has explained to me everything. Foreign countries are a myth about the afterlife. Those who get there, never come back." "That's simply a circus!" exclaims Balaganov, who didn't understand anything (chapter XXXII: "The Gates of Great Possibilities"). Cf. Van Veen and his circus stunt: Van dances on his hands while his partner, Rita, sings the tango tune, "Pod znoinym nebom Argentiny" (1.30), to which in "The Golden Calf" Ostap dances solo before visiting Koreiko.
Below are a few anagrams that may amuse you:
DEMON = MONDE = OMEN + D (dobro) = NEMO (Jule Verne's hero, "Mr. Nobody") + D
DEMON + MONDE = DEMI-MONDE + NO - I
MON DIEU = MONDE + OUI (yes) - O
SIGNY-MONDIEU-MONDIEU = SIGMUND*** + INEY (hoar-frost) + MONDE + OUI
SIGNY-MONDIEU-MONDIEU + C + LOLITA + L + OR + DR FROID + VINUM = CYGNUS OLOR + DEMI-MONDE + DU (you) + I + DR FROIT + LUNA + ILI (or) + VINO (wine) + M
(I = 1, L = 50, C = 100, M = 1000)
ARDENNES + AVRORA (Aurora, the name of the ship the canon shot from which was a signal to the 1917 coup d'etat) = ARDOR + VARENNES (cf. King's Loui XVI terminated flight to Varennes) + A
* Also, cf. Chekhov's story Pervyi lyobovnik ("Jean premier," 1886), Podzharov's words: "And women! Mon dieu [French in the original], what women!" Note that Lokhankin's favorite book, the only thing that he saves from the fire when "The Raven's Nest" burns down, is the heavy volume "Man and Woman."
**cf. the "Golden Veil" separating the Antiterran Tartary from the rest of the world.
***In the Icelandic Volsunga Saga, Sigmund is brother and lover of Signy, daughter of Volsung (grandson of Odin); in the German Niebelungenlied, Sigmund is a king of the Netherlands, father of Sigfried.
Alexey Sklyarenko
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The split of Sigmund Freud's personality on Antiterra is matched by the reduplication in the name of the village from which Dr Froit hails. Interestingly, the repetition of the same exclamation (but in two languages: French and German) can be found in Ilf and Petrov's "The Golden Calf." To Vasisualiy Lokhankin's protests that he has hired out the room not to three men (Bender, Panikovsky and Balaganov) but to one cultured bachelor Ostap Bender replies: "Mon Dieu, Vasisualiy Andreevich... don't torment yourself. Of the three of us I alone am cultured, so the clause has been observed." To his landlord's further complaints Bender says: "Mein Gott, dear Vasisualiy! Perhaps there is a great plain truth (velikaya sermyazhnaya pravda, the phrase in which the failure Lokhankin used to find some consolation) in this" (chapter XV: "Antlers and hooves").*
On the other hand, Bender tells the monarchist Khvorob'yev who can not escape from the Soviet reality even in his dreams and suffers from everynight nightmares that he happened to treat his friends and acquaintances using Freudean method. "The dream is nothing. The main thing is to eliminate the dream's cause. The chief cause [of your bad dreams] is the existence of the Soviet regime. But at the present moment I can not eliminate it. I simply have no time. You see, I am a sportsman-tourist, who has to make some repairs in his car... And as to the cause, do not worry about it. I will eliminate it on the return journey. Only let me finish the motor-race" ("The Golden Calf," chapter VIII: "The Crisis of the Genre").
I think that more or less similar things (a sportsman, who has no time for politics) could be said to characterize some of VN heroes (Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, for example), if not Nabokov himself. By the way, the duality of worlds in Ada, the existence of one of them (Terra) being questioned, also goes back to "The Golden** Calf." After he has received his million from Koreiko, the frustrated Ostap (he doesn't know what to do with his money) tells Balaganov: "All this is an invention. There is no Rio-de-Janeiro, and no America, and no Europe, nothing. Earth's terminal city is Shepetovka against which the waves of the Atlantic are breaking... One doctor has explained to me everything. Foreign countries are a myth about the afterlife. Those who get there, never come back." "That's simply a circus!" exclaims Balaganov, who didn't understand anything (chapter XXXII: "The Gates of Great Possibilities"). Cf. Van Veen and his circus stunt: Van dances on his hands while his partner, Rita, sings the tango tune, "Pod znoinym nebom Argentiny" (1.30), to which in "The Golden Calf" Ostap dances solo before visiting Koreiko.
Below are a few anagrams that may amuse you:
DEMON = MONDE = OMEN + D (dobro) = NEMO (Jule Verne's hero, "Mr. Nobody") + D
DEMON + MONDE = DEMI-MONDE + NO - I
MON DIEU = MONDE + OUI (yes) - O
SIGNY-MONDIEU-MONDIEU = SIGMUND*** + INEY (hoar-frost) + MONDE + OUI
SIGNY-MONDIEU-MONDIEU + C + LOLITA + L + OR + DR FROID + VINUM = CYGNUS OLOR + DEMI-MONDE + DU (you) + I + DR FROIT + LUNA + ILI (or) + VINO (wine) + M
(I = 1, L = 50, C = 100, M = 1000)
ARDENNES + AVRORA (Aurora, the name of the ship the canon shot from which was a signal to the 1917 coup d'etat) = ARDOR + VARENNES (cf. King's Loui XVI terminated flight to Varennes) + A
* Also, cf. Chekhov's story Pervyi lyobovnik ("Jean premier," 1886), Podzharov's words: "And women! Mon dieu [French in the original], what women!" Note that Lokhankin's favorite book, the only thing that he saves from the fire when "The Raven's Nest" burns down, is the heavy volume "Man and Woman."
**cf. the "Golden Veil" separating the Antiterran Tartary from the rest of the world.
***In the Icelandic Volsunga Saga, Sigmund is brother and lover of Signy, daughter of Volsung (grandson of Odin); in the German Niebelungenlied, Sigmund is a king of the Netherlands, father of Sigfried.
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/