Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0009214, Sun, 25 Jan 2004 16:39:04 -0800

Subject
Fw: query about Alexis Avenue from Alexey. Boyd responds
Date
Body
----- Original Message -----
From: "Brian Boyd (FOA ENG)" <b.boyd@auckland.ac.nz>
To: "'D. Barton Johnson '" <chtodel@cox.net>
Sent: Sunday, January 25, 2004 2:57 PM
Subject: RE: query about Alexis Avenue from Alexey


> Alexis Avenue
>
> Cordula's and then Van's penthouse apartment "on Alexis Avenue" (I.43,
> 322.01-02) "between Manhattan's Library and Park" (II.5, 366.01-02) puns
on
> Manhattan's Lexington Avenue. In central and uptown Manhattan's grid
system,
> crosstown (east-west) streets are numbered from 1 northwards to 220, and
the
> up-and-downtown avenues (north-south) are mostly numbered westwards from
> First Avenue in the east to Twelfth Avenue on the west. But after Third
> Avenue, through most of Manhattan, comes not Fourth Avenue (which runs
from
> only 6th to 14th Streets) but instead, close together, Lexington Avenue,
> Park Avenue, and Madison Avenue, followed again by Fifth Avenue, the
actual
> Terranean location of the New York Public Library (and itself commemorated
> in I.17, 103.29-30: "Memory is a photo-studio de luxe on an infinite Fifth
> Power Avenue").
>
> Nabokov therefore puns on "Lexington" and on "Park" (Park Avenue as one
> high-class Avenue, Fifth Avenue as another, and the New York Public
> Library's location between Fifth Avenue and Bryant Park, three narrow
blocks
> west of Lexington), but also, via the Greek lexis, "word," in "a lexis" as
> "a word" avenue. The first of these named rather than numbered avenues is
> Lexington, the last, also beginning with "a," Avenue of the Americas (also
> known as Sixth Avenue), on the other side of Bryant Park.
>
> Readers of Nabok-vL will recall from a couple of weeks ago Humbert's
> identifying, as one place where he and Lolita argued, "the corner of
Seventh
> Street and Central Avenue in Phoenix, Arizona" (II.2) which, to someone
> familiar with New York's crossing numbered streets and named central
> avenues, sounds entirely plausible, but in fact denotes the impossible
> intersection of two parallel roads.
>
> Brian Boyd
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: D. Barton Johnson
> To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
> Sent: 1/25/2004 2:56 PM
> Subject: Fw: query about Alexis Avenue from Alexey
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: alex <mailto:sklyarenko@users.mns.ru>
> To: Vladimir Nabokov Forum <mailto:NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU>
> Sent: Saturday, January 24, 2004 1:22 PM
> Subject: query about Alexis Avenue from Alexey
>
> Dear List members and especially the New York residents among you,
>
> Could you tell me, what real avenue, or street, is meant by Ada's
> "Alexis Avenue" (on which Van has his wing a terre, "between Manhattan's
> Library and Park")? I have some ideas about possible origins of the
> avenue's fictional name, but I know little about New York's real streets
> and avenues.
>
> Thank you,
> Alexey